ViziApps makes it Easy to add Social Logins to your mobile apps. Quickly enable your mobile app users to register and/or login with their Facebook, Google or LinkedIn user credentials!

Social Logins are an easy way for end users to register and login to mobile apps. Instead of adding a username and password fields to your app, just add a button with the action of social login and you can get the name, email and profile picture of the end user to use in your app. Then, you can store the credentials for future logins.

To add Social Login to an app's Button, just open the Button Property sheet and enter the properties for your choice of Facebook, Google or LinkedIn. That's it! Social Logins in your mobile app in about a minute!

ViziApps now supports direct integration of RSS Feeds from your app with no coding. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web standard for publishing frequently updated information in a standardized format using links. For example, you can use RSS to display a list of news items with links to web pages.

RSS is now a new ViziApps field that you can add to any page. In the property sheet, give it a name, RSS title, the feed URL and one of two ways to display the RSS items:

RSS Display with Title and Date

RSS Display with Image, Title, Date

Then, when your app runs and the RSS feed is displayed, the user can tap on one of the rows, and the associated link in the RSS feed is used to popup a web page.

AT&T M2X (https://m2x.att.com/) provides time-series data storage, device management, message brokering, event triggering, alarming, geo-fencing, and data visualization for Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) products and services. ViziApps has worked with AT&T to integrate ViziApps with M2X to provide Visual Rapid Mobile App Development (RMAD) for industrial IoT.

Hybrid mobile apps provide the advantages of native and web technologies in a single application. And now, with ViziApps, you can build a hybrid mobile business app with robust data access using a drag-and-drop approach, without coding.

To users, hybrid apps are like native apps, in that they can take advantage of device features, such as the camera and GPS. And they are distributed through an app market, like the Apple App Store or Google Play, for installation on a mobile device.

But unlike native apps, hybrid apps also seamlessly integrate web content and add web features where needed with coded extensions. As a result, hybrid apps provide the flexibility for mobile business apps to access web content and integrate advanced functionality, such as that needed for mobile games and complex app logic.

Key advantages of ViziApps hybrid mobile apps include:

Standard drag-and-drop WYSIWYG design, plus advanced functionality that allows you to use JavaScript for apps that require more complex operations. Most mobile business apps only need ViziApps’ standard functionality, which can be used without coding. For those apps that need to include more complex features, adding “glue logic” with JavaScript enables more complex data operations. For example, glue logic could be used to get GPS data and then transform it into a URL for a map on another page.

The power of HTML5 across devices. Now, you can easily integrate rich HTML content with native feature access and control. Because HTML5 is supported on all major device browsers, ViziApps hybrid apps look the same on all supported devices. For instance, the picker function, which allows a user to select among different options, like times and dates, looks different using the native controls for Android and iOS. On Android the picker is a drop-down while on iOS the picker is a large spinner. With ViziApps hybrid apps, the picker works the same way on iOS and Android devices. On both tablets and smartphones, the picker functionality is provided in a drop-down menu. HTML5 also offers a wide range of design options and enables third-party web plug-ins, expanding the ways you can distinguish your apps’ appearance.

Faster Page Transitions. For very complex apps, with 10+ pages and 50+ fields, hybrid apps provide faster page transitions. Greater responsiveness means an enhanced user experience.

As with native apps and web apps, designing and building a hybrid mobile app with ViziApps is free. You can publish a ViziApps hybrid app for the same low pricing as a native app.

ViziApps is pleased that the need and value of Rapid Mobile App Development (RMAD) platforms like the ViziApps Visual RMAD have been recognized in the fast paced mobile industry.

Chris Nerney is a technology writer who covers mobile technology, big data and analytics, Android, data centers and cloud computing. Here’s an excerpt from one of his posts in CSC Blogs:

Even the best of the best mobile apps development best practices may not be enough to enable enterprises to meet the expected demand for serious business apps, according to a new report by technology research and consulting firm Gartner:

By the end of 2017, market demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations’ capacity to deliver them. Gartner forecasts mobile phone sales will reach 2.1 billion units by 2019, which will fuel demand for apps in the enterprise that meet the high performance and usability of consumer apps.

The driving force behind the growing demand for mobile apps by enterprise users is the increasing number of devices employees are expected to use in the workplace, including smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and other wearables. The Internet of Things also will generate more demand for mobile apps.

Gartner recommends four specific steps enterprises can take to offset mobile apps development challenges:

1. Prioritize app development

Rather than develop apps for whomever asks first or the loudest, “mobile development teams need to formulate a process of mobile app prioritization that involves understanding the needs of business stakeholders,” Gartner says.

2. Adopt a bimodal IT model

Gartner urges the scrapping of the “traditional IT development approach” with a bimodal approach that delivers apps more efficiently and quickly. Bimodal approaches consist of two modes: “Mode 1 drives the creation of stable infrastructure and APIs to allow apps to retrieve and deliver data to back-end systems without impacting those enterprise applications, while Mode 2 uses high-productivity, agile approaches to quickly deliver front-end app features required by the business.”

3. Deploy RMAD tools

Rapid mobile app development (RMAD) tools enable enterprises to turn out apps much faster. Examples include drag-and-drop codeless tools, model-driven development and other approaches that allow non-developers and people in business units to get involved in creating mobile apps.

4. Used a mixed-sourcing approach

While Gartner says enterprises eventually will upgrade their in-house mobile development, only 26% of organizations now use in-house-only development, while more than half (55%) are “successfully delivering apps using mixed sourcing.”

The bottom line, if Gartner’s forecast is accurate, is that enterprises need to ramp up mobile apps development in a strategic way. If they don’t, they may cede market opportunities to their competitors.

Highcharts is now integrated into ViziApps. It enables a huge variety of data-rich and responsive charts and graphs with many display options. Used by tens of thousands of developers and 61 out of the world’s 100 largest companies, Highcharts provides the simplest yet most flexible charting solution on the market.

Using ViziApps Studio, IT teams, business users, and their IT suppliers can now quickly build mobile apps with robust interactive charts without coding.

Here’s an example chart.

Numerous Chart Types and Powerful Options

ViziApps with Highcharts now supports easy integration in your mobile apps charts that include the following types: line, spline, area, area spline, column, bar, pie, scatter, angular gauges, area range, area spline range, column range and polar. Many of these can be combined in one chart.

Adding charts to your ViziApps mobile apps is easy and fast. Just select the Chart field in the ViziApps Studio, set the name for your chart, and enter the chart options. Chart data can be statically stored in your app or dynamically set from your backend data sources using the Manage Data Dialog.

Here are just a few examples of the powerful mobile charting options now available with ViziApps:

Pinch-Zooming Your users can zoom in on a chart to more closely examine especially interesting data.

Tooltip Labels Tapping on a chart can display tooltip text with information on each point and series.

Angular gauges Ideal for dashboards, angular gauges provide speedometer-like charts, easy to read at a glance.

Polar charts Cartesian chart types like line, area, spline or area spline can be converted to polar or radial charts with one simple option.

Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research just posted a great article in Tech Target outlining four ways a mobility project can transform your business. Here’s a quick summary of her key points:

To truly embrace mobility, rethink the way organizations do business. A well-planned mobility project can help companies increase revenue and make employees more productive. Virtually all business leaders recognize that change is important and necessary. That's why a successful mobile project transforms business processes.

The camera and GPS are two features of mobile devices that users particularly enjoy using. GPS receivers use the information from several of the satellites to calculate a user's location. Along with the ability to use the camera, this helps businesses use ViziApps to create hybrid mobile apps with those features.

In addition to the camera, the GPS is another powerful function that many app creators want to make available to their users. The video shows how to insert a GPS field anywhere in an app and use the latitude and longitude variables to load a map. It also explains how to save location data to a web data source for address detection or distance calculations. The GPS field is particularly useful for displaying a list of nearby stores or other businesses, for example, or to store a user’s location for other purposes.

To learn more about these features, this video shows how users can take pictures within the app you’re creating with ViziApps. The video also demonstrates how to easily save photos for use in a mobile business app

For help using other ViziApps features to create mobile apps, check out the full set of tutorial videos here.

You can use ViziApps to create mobile apps that can push the right messages to your employees, partners, and customers at the right time, in the right context, based on the stage of work flow they are in and/or the category they are in.

Our new Push Notifications, using QuickBlox, enables multiple kinds of notifications. These include notifying a sub-group of users based on their category defined by your app. QuickBlox pushes over 2.5 Billion messages per month.

Here’s all you need to do to include Push Notifications in your mobile app:

1. Create your QuickBlox account and create a messaging app there. You can get a free account with up to 1 Million Push messages per month.
2. Then, login to your ViziApps account, select the app feature for push notification and configure a few QuickBlox keys and set the JavaScript function you want to handle the messages when they come in.

Now you’re ready to start sending messages to your test ViziApps app on your mobile device and include sending Push messages in your app.

Check out the latest ViziApps video for step-by-step instructions on how to set up, access, and manage Google spreadsheet data as an easy to use a database when you design and build a mobile business app. Using ViziApps, you have the advantage of being able to connect your app to a full-fledged database across the Internet while avoiding many of the hassles of managing a dedicated database system. You can follow the instructions the video provides when building iPhone, iPad, and Android apps.

In the 4-minute video, you will see how to use the ViziApps drag and drop tool to create a database for your mobile business app, then build and test a query that enables your app to interact with that database. The video demonstrates a step-by-step approach for integrating Google spreadsheet data using Google Docs. Alternatively, you could follow the same approach using Google Apps for Business to integrate Google spreadsheet data in your app.

For guidance on using other ViziApps’ capabilities to create data-rich mobile business apps, see the full portfolio of ViziApps tutorial videos here. They cover topics such as creating your mobile business app layout; designing tables; using the camera, picker, and GPS field; and adding JavaScript to further enhance your app.

In his April 13th article, Martin Heller wrote, “While the great debate rages on between the various mobile development camps -- businesses still have to create and maintain mobile applications for their employees, business partners, and customers.”

Around the world, people of all ages are learning to build mobile apps. Some are self-taught and others take classes, at universities, technical schools, high schools or after-school programs.

To comprehend the extent of the world’s fascination with mobile apps, consider some recent data on the mobile app market.

At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June, CEO Tim Cook revealed some impressive facts about the company’s App Store, which can now claim: 400M accounts, 650,000 apps (including 225,000 specifically created for the iPad) and 30B downloads to date.

Cook also told the WWDC gathering that the Apple has paid mobile app developers more than $5B for apps sold in the App Store – so far.

And just last week, at the Google I/O Developer Conference, it was revealed that Google Play can now boast 20B downloads and that is has surpassed the 600,000 mark for mobile apps and games.

So, now the two largest markets combined offer 1.25M mobile apps. And if that number isn’t sufficiently stunning, mobile app revenue forecasts may be.

ABI Research predicts that “total mobile app revenues from pay-per-download, in-app purchase, subscriptions, and in-app advertising will soar over the next five years, growing from $8.5 billion in 2011 to $46 billion in 2016.”

That may explain why interest in building mobile apps is burgeoning, and even middle schoolers are getting into the act.

“This year, Apple opened up its developers event for the first time to 13- to 17-year-olds,” wrote Jessica E. Vascellaro in an article published on the All Things Digital site. “The Cupertino, Calif., company supplied 150 teens with scholarships to cover the event’s $1,599 entrance fee, arranged a student lounge with beanbag chairs and Skittles, and invited their parents to chaperone. The teens, or their parents, still had to sign Apple’s customary nondisclosure agreements.”

Budding app developers have a lot of options available to them and one of the most fundamental is deciding how they will create their app. They can learn programming and code their mobile apps, becoming proficient in iOS or Android or whichever platform they choose. Alternatively, they can employ a do-it-yourself mobile app development tool like ViziApps.

With the right DIY tool, anyone with basic desktop computing capabilities can build a mobile business app for use on iOS or Android devices in just hours or days. But not all DIY tools are the same. App creators planning to build a business app should look for a tool like ViziApps that provides the ability to produce apps that access business data; build hybrid, as well as native and web mobile apps; and allow customization that supports their business brand – all with no coding.

Taking part in conferences and trade shows can be overwhelming. Participants find themselves in an unfamiliar, often hectic environment, and typically put in long hours on their feet.

A well-designed mobile conference app can improve that experience significantly. Serving as a useful event guide, it can provide an easy way to consult session and special event schedules, find a good restaurant, and navigate the conference venue. By placing all the information participants need right in their hands, a mobile app eliminates confusion, simplifies scheduling and allows both attendees and exhibitors to focus on business.

ViziApps lets conference and convention center management, as well as show sponsors, build custom mobile apps for use on the iPhone, iPad or Android smartphones or tablets. Using a drag-and-drop approach and without coding, they use ViziApps to design and make a mobile app like the sample shown here.

Or, if they prefer, a ViziApps mobile app design professional will build one, tailored to their business requirements.

And now, with newly integrated in-app payment processing capability from ROAM Data, a conference app built with ViziApps can be used for on-the-go payments on a conference show floor.

By offering access to rich data sources, like Google Docs spreadsheets, SQL databases, and web content, a mobile conference app can also provide an easy, convenient way to keep internal users, like convention center staff, informed and productive.

To understand your options for building a hybrid, native, or web conference app, contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Or check out a sampling of the types of app you can build with ViziApps here.

ViziApps enables creation of enterprise mobile apps without coding. However, it also lets app builders enrich their mobile apps and user experience using JavaScript.

Now, a new video provides users a step-by-step tutorial on how to use the ViziApps drag and drop designer and JavaScript to create visually appealing, data-rich, robust mobile apps.

The video demonstrates how to build a mobile app for business use in the ViziApps Studio and incorporate custom scripts, libraries, and plug-ins to provide functionality beyond what can be done without coding. Some examples of enhanced functionality that use of JavaScript can provide include:

• Using the accelerometer
• Enhanced media capture (media files)
• Managing connections (checking network state and cellular network information)
• Enhancing camera operations
• Using the compass
• Accessing on-device contacts (work with the contact database)
• Managing file transfers
• Integrating geo-location mapping
• Playing media (record and play back audio files)
• Sending notifications
• Accessing storage (hook into native storage options)

For help with other ViziApps capabilities, consult a complete listing of tutorial videos for app builders here.

Geoff Bock just posted interesting insights on Mobile First Strategy at TechTarget.

Here’s an summary

• Websites that perform well across multiple devices are the hallmark of a strong mobile-first strategy, but custom-built mobile apps can improve productivity by expediting specific activities.
• If your Web Content Management System supports Responsive Web Design and dynamic templates, you can create the content once and adapt the presentations to the form factors and navigation links of different device types.
• But there is more to Mobile First than consistent content presentation. Beyond keeping tabs on the latest weather reports or sharing immediate thoughts on Twitter, consider how mobile apps can engage users and simplify work-related tasks. With smart devices in our pockets and handbags, content in the palms of our hands can expedite user engagement.
• A mobile-first strategy can spawn a new generation of apps designed to support the micro-moments, when getting access to just the right information at the right time assists decision making. These are task-oriented apps that connect to multiple information sources and diverse content collections running in the cloud, and that provides the tools to mobilize moments of engagement.

In short, content presentation is only the initial step in the mobile journey. A mobile-first strategy can evolve to support task-oriented mobile apps that transform business processes, remove communication barriers and increase productivity.

ViziApps is the first mobile app creation without coding service to introduce a revolutionary new capability for mobile apps: Offline Data Access & Remote Sync.

Mobile users worldwide have become dependent on their smartphones and apps to provide them with capabilities and data wherever and whenever they want. And now companies using ViziApps are enabling more and more corporate data to be available from our mobile devices.

But the reality is that mobile data connections are often unreliable, very low bandwidth, too expensive to use, or completely unavailable in needed work sites. Yet these issues can hit at exactly the time and place we need to get our jobs done. A mobile device without a data connection suddenly becomes frustrating and useless.

Offline Data Access & Remote Sync

ViziApp’s approach to Offline Data Access & Remote Sync, like the rest of our no-coding platform for mobile app creation, couldn’t be simpler for the user and even for the app creator. In fact it’s practically transparent.

Data Access While Offline

For a user, the synchronization between a remote database and their mobile device happens automatically as a background process. There is no action the user needs to take. When a user makes a data query, their app will use a local copy of the synchronized data which not only gives them access to their data while offline, but also allows the app to perform much faster than normal online operation.

Data Updates While Offline

Mobile users without a network connection can now continue working and updating their data sets, such as filing reports and even submitting photos. The next time that the user runs their app with a network connection, the new data will be automatically synchronized back to the remote database in both directions.

Simple To Enable

For the app creator, in ViziApps Studio just go to the App Properties selection for “Setup Offline Operations”, then select “Use offline operation.” That’s it – the rest is automatically handled for you. There is no difficult middleware to install or configure or worry about for scalability.

Offline Data Access & Remote Sync is now available for Intuit QuickBase and Android devices. ViziApps will soon be releasing Offline Data Access & Remote Sync for iPhone and iPad users, and then expanding to other remote data sources.

If you’ve been thinking about creating a mobile app for your business but haven’t made much progress, consider two approaches that could help you reach your goal.

#1 Make a do-it-yourself mobile app.

New, disruptive technologies are making it possible for business people with basic office software skills to develop effective, visually appealing mobile apps. And with a robust DIY mobile app platform like ViziApps, enterprise business units, as well as small and medium sized businesses, can create mobile applications without skilled engineering resources. This approach does not require a sizable mobile app development budget or the technical expertise of an internal IT group or an outside programmer.

Mobile application development platforms that provide a drag-and-drop process for designing and creating mobile apps offer a way to meet the mobile app gap many businesses are experiencing. In significantly less time that it can take to design and develop an enterprise-quality application, a business can design and build a custom mobile app and publish it in the Apple App Store or in Google Play.

At a time when businesses are looking at ways to provide better customer service, the DIY approach offers significant cost and time savings, putting affordable mobile business apps within reach of organizations of all sizes.

#2 Enlist Expert Services to Build A DIY Mobile App

Producing a sophisticated mobile business app that incorporates business data from a Google Docs spreadsheet or SQL server can be accomplished in days on a platform like ViziApps. But for some people, even a day or two is more than they can spare to build a mobile app.

Those businesses can still take advantage of the cost and time savings the ViziApps “no coding” mobile app platform offers. ViziApps app development professionals work with business owners and enterprise managers to design and create mobile apps for a tenth the cost (or even less) than the cost of a traditional enterprise application. Now, those businesses can get a branded web, native, or hybrid app to meet their functional and aesthetic specifications built for them at very low cost.

Depending on their preferences, we can utilize the features of an iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone or tablet and provide access to whatever data our customers require. For example, we work on apps designed to expand revenue-generating channels, incorporating features such as geo-location marketing, mobile payments and mobile social media integration, as well as apps for internal use.

Whichever approach a business takes to creating a mobile app, the DIY path or the route leveraging ViziApps professional app design services, the result is an attractive, low-cost mobile app tailored to meet current business needs and be updated easily whenever those needs change.

During April, we will have a series of blog posts focusing the increasing importance of Mobile apps in Rapid Application Development - what does it mean to have mobile apps power the way your organization works. This will include Showcasing different companies leveraging Mobile Rapid App Development, aka MRAD, to improve their business results.

What we have seen are some incredible productivity enhancing stories that provide competitive differentiation. In some cases, companies have prioritized their operations focus on the back of mobile app platform. We are in very interesting times where mobile is changing the way we do business.

But you might be wondering, why are employees still tethered to their desk and not out in the field selling or servicing customers, at the customer’s office or at a Starbucks.

The reasons are many fold.

• First, it is important to understand what are the deficiencies of SaaS applications being provided in the marketplace. There is no doubt that you as a customer leveraging a RAD platform has seen the increase in number of productivity apps. DIY users are quickly able to make some pretty nifty apps. But the SaaS providers have not optimized their RAD platform for creating mobile apps. Yes, you can get a mobile app but it lacks the functionality that is required in a mobile oriented workplace. A report or task workflow on a mobile device needs to be different than a report in a desktop browser. RAD platforms are still playing catch up to the mobile space and will probably never catch up as mobile devices keep rapidly evolving.
• Second, creating a mobile app is not the same as creating a browser app. You might want to take advantage of some native capability of a mobile device in your app and you want that information stored on desktop app. Two sets of requirements which further leads to – can your org have the capacity to take on two unique approaches to solve the problem.
• Third, mobile apps need to have simple task navigation, as the screen real estate on the device is limited. Trying to jam too much information only leaves a bad taste in the app’s user experience, resulting in low-adoption.

Companies need to be innovative in their thinking to adopt mobile apps as they choose a RAD platform. Companies that have embarked on DIY mobile apps with the right MRAD platform are seeing the business results impact in a just a matter of days, As they mobilize workflow by bringing mobile business processes to the palm of their mobile workers hands, wherever they are, and whenever needed.

Next, we’ll some unique use cases where different companies have solved key business needs with rapidly developed mobile apps.