We’ve discussed how Viziapps is disrupting mobile app development with the power of visual rapid mobile app design, data connectivity, and publishing. Let’s recap the key factors ViziApps provides.

Visually Design your Mobile App User Experience. Viziapps is a Visual platform for IT Professionals and Citizen Developers to easily design, test, and publish mobile apps for iOS or Android OS devices. All this through the Visual Design studio that supports all of the cool features that you want in your mobile app’s User Experience.

ViziApps has pioneered fast creation of custom mobile apps without the need for coding. However, you may need a faster more controlled way to distribute your apps than available through the public app stores.

Now you can also publish your custom mobile apps directly into the hands of your iPhone, iPad, and Android users, literally in minutes, with ViziApps Instant Publisher.

The Need for Instant Publishing

There are a number of situations where you may not want your custom mobile app to be distributed through a public app store:

• Your app is only to be used by company insiders and channel/supply partners
• Your app contains ideas, concepts, or intellectual property you don’t want competitors to see
• You want to avoid the complexity, delays, and cost of publishing through public app markets
• You need fast distribution to a limited set of users
• Your user population is small
• You are conducting a Beta or Pilot test

How It Works

ViziApps Instant Publisher™ creates a special App Installation Web Page, unique for your app, that guides your users through a simple and fast installation process.

ViziApps also creates a unique App Invitation Card which contains a bit.ly short URL and QR code that will bring your users directly to the App Installation Web Page.

App Invitation Card

Your users open your installed app directly from your custom branded App Icon on their device home screen, and the same published app can run on both Apple and Android devices. ViziApps Instant Publisher is available to use with the latest version of ViziApps from the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Try installing the demo app shown in the Invitation Card above to see how Instant Publisher works.

Check out Gartner’s Jason Wong’s comments in Ramin Edmond’s article in the June issue of Tech Target’s Modern Mobility: Many organizations haven’t yet built their own apps because of the scarcity of developer talent and the extra expense it requires. Rapid mobile app development (RMAD) platforms low- and even no-code tools can help lighten that burden to build mobile applications. RMAD adoption is growing in the enterprise, because it has the potential to unleash app dev in a big way, says Jason Wong, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Check out the new video in the ViziApps Studio. It will help you get a jump on your mobile business app.

First, sign up for a free ViziApps account (or log into your account), then set aside about 90 seconds to watch our Quick Start video. In the time it will take you to read this blog post, you’ll see how easily you can create an eye-catching mobile app for your business.

ViziApps requires no programming skills and lets you use your own images or the ones we provide. You can use it to create business apps for iOS and Android devices.

If you’re a beginner, you might want to take advantage of one of the ViziApps templates. They let you base your design on one of ours while you customize it to meet your particular requirements. Other videos in the ViziApps Studio will help you brand your mobile app and understand your options for providing it with the data needed to make it an effective tool for your target users.

Many business transactions require a signature to seal the deal. With ViziApps businesses can build a mobile app that easily captures signatures on the iPhone, iPad, or Android smartphones or tablets. By providing a mobile app for digital signature capture, companies can help their users reduce the amount of documents they need to carry around with them and ease storage and retrieval of signed materials.

Like all the functionality that ViziApps provides, digital signature capture capability can be easily incorporated into a mobile business app – without any coding. And signatures captured can be stored safely in cloud data sources supported by ViziApps, such as Google Docs spreadsheets, web services and SQL databases.

SC Moatti has built mobile products for many of the greats — including running cross-platform notifications for Facebook. In her experience, whether an app succeeds depends on the culture of the company that makes it. “Mobile has an entirely different resonance and cadence for users, which makes the development of mobile apps fundamentally different too," she says.

President Barack Obama has ordered major U.S. agencies to make more services available through mobile apps. A recently released executive order directs each federal agency to make at least two of the services designed for public use available on mobile devices within the next 12 months.

The executive order states: “For far too long, the American people have been forced to navigate a labyrinth of information across different Government programs in order to find the services they need. In addition, at a time when Americans increasingly pay bills and buy tickets on mobile devices, Government services often are not optimized for smartphones or tablets, assuming the services are even available online.”

Some of the stated goals of this mobile app initiative are “to streamline their delivery of services to lower costs, decrease service delivery times, and improve the customer experience.”

In other words, the U.S. government is looking to experience the same benefits businesses have seen when they have made data accessible via mobile devices. Recognizing the value of mobile apps for users, as well as their potential to stimulate the economy, the administration is encouraging innovative companies and entrepreneurs to participate in the drive to build mobile apps. Providing access via smartphones and tablets will ease the public’s ability to track down and use government data.

According to a White House press release, the administration wants to “make large amounts of government data more easily accessible to the public to spur entrepreneurs to develop innovative new services and mobile applications that take advantage of this data, creating new opportunities, businesses and jobs in the process.”

If you have ever been frustrated trying to negotiate government websites, here is your chance to do something about it. With ViziApps you could create an elegant, intuitive mobile app, for iOS or Android devices, that offers busy citizens a better way to get the information they need.

Micello, Inc., the leading global provider of indoor maps and navigation data, announced its partnership with ViziApps. The new partnership will empower venue owners and ViziApps customers to quickly include and interact with Micello indoor maps in their mobile apps. In the last few years, Micello has generated indoor maps for over 25,000 venues around the world.

ViziApps provides app creators with a major advantage – the ability to quickly produce data-rich mobile business apps without coding.

And now, with a new online reference guide available in the ViziApps Studio, app makers have a handy reference to help them build apps using Google Docs spreadsheets for access to a wide range of data, including text, images, and maps. The searchable documentation speeds development of robust data-rich apps for the iPhone and iPad and Android smartphones and tablets.

ViziApps users tell us that delivering their business data into the hands of mobile users is driving new revenue and attracting new customers for their business. Providing mobile access to business data is what sets their apps apart from their competitors. So, make the most of your business data in your next mobile app. Check out the new data management documentation in ViziApps Studio to learn how to present and manage data in a way that gives your app users the information they need – wherever they are.

Simply click the “Spreadsheet User Guide” button in the Manage Data section for info and tips.

• Introduction to database commands
• Updating and deleting data
• Incorporating images and maps
• Using Google Docs spreadsheets
• Data Management best practices

This is just a sampling of the topics provided to help app creators select, create, and efficiently manage data for use in their mobile business apps. Check it out by clicking the “Spreadsheet User Guide” on the Manage Data page in your free ViziApps Studio account.

Easier Testing of Data Management Designs

Recent enhancements to the ViziApps mobile app creation platform allow testing of any spreadsheet query directly from the ViziApps Studio. In other words, it is no longer necessary to go out of ViziApps to your mobile device to test individual spreadsheet queries

Now mobile app creators can use this new graphical query tester early in the app design process to verify which queries are working and to identify issues that require attention. Every spreadsheet query in the ViziApps graphical query tree now has a green icon that represents this new testing tool for that particular query.

When a user clicks on it, a pop-up appears with that query for testing.

This new ViziApps capability speeds app development and eliminates the need for app creators to move in and out of the ViziApps Studio to test every query made to a database.

The tester works for all query types. For update, insert and where condition tests, the app creator enters test values in the empty device fields and clicks the “Test” button. That simple action submits the query and then displays the results in a second graphical response tree. Both single values and array values are displayed, as well as any query errors that may occur.

Companies worldwide use QuickBase to create cloud-based business process applications, without doing any coding.

Those businesses often require access privileges to company data at different levels of authorization.These QuickBase apps can run on iPhones, iPads, and Android smartphones and tablets.

For example, a Sales VP may have a higher level of authorization than regional sales people have. While the Sales VP may access sales results in all regions, an individual sales person might have access to sales results only in his/her region. When an end user logs into their QuickBase ViziApps app, their login credentials will automatically determine which data to select depending on their level of authorization.

Here's how it works. When you register QuickBase as a data source for your ViziApps app, you will see a dialog box like the figure below. Add the field names in your app that will be used for end users to login and access your QuickBase data. Then, when the app runs, your users just login and the data query you designed in ViziApps uses the authorization from their login.

Also, the ViziApps Studio now enables you to specifiy a limit to the number of responses for any data query, since large data sets may have much more data than is needed by a mobile user.

Companies worldwide use Quickbase to create cloud-based business process applications, without doing any coding.

Those businesses often require access privileges to company data at different levels of authorization. Using ViziApps Studio, enterprises and small businesses can design Quickbase apps that enable end users to access data at the appropriate level of authorization. These Quickbase apps can run on iPad, iPhone, and Android tablets and smartphones.

For example, a Sales VP may have a higher level of authorization than regional sales people have. While the Sales VP may access sales results in all regions, an individual sales person might have access to sales results only in his/her region. When an end user logs into their Quickbase ViziApps app, their login credentials will automatically determine which data to select depending on their level of authorization.

The Boston Business Journal named ViziApps as one of the Top 20 Largest Mobile Startups in Massachusetts. ViziApps joined the ranks of Mobiquity, uTest, Fiksu, Apperian, and Kinvey in this recognition of our growth by New England’s premier business journal.

ViziApps is first and foremost a platform that allows users to create robust, data-centric mobile apps without coding. But for app creators who want to use their programming skills to further customize their apps, new JavaScript support in ViziApps makes that possible. With the addition of custom JavaScript, a wide range of additional features can be included. For instance, by incorporating unique “glue logic”, ViziApps app builders can include more complex app operations in their mobile apps.

(If you haven’t tried ViziApps yet, start now by signing up for a free account.)

This new JavaScript capability opens up new ways of making mobile apps even more innovative. For example, a user could incorporate JavaScript as a way to record a message in a ViziApps hybrid app. Another use for JavaScript might be to populate maps using a mobile device’s GPS geo-location capabilities, then provide that information to Google Maps. In the ViziApps Studio, where our users build mobile business apps, we have provided the option of using custom JavaScript as a way to extend ViziApps functionality and distinguish our users’ mobile apps in a highly competitive marketplace.

Companies worldwide use Quickbase to create cloud-based business process applications, without doing any coding.

Now, using ViziApps Studio, enterprise and small business users can easily build mobile apps using Quickbase data to run on the iPad, iPhone, and Android tablets and smartphones, without coding. Taking advantage of the ViziApps drag and drop process for creating apps, Quickbase users can quickly and cost effectively build mobile apps that provide access to robust cloud-based data.

ViziApps® provides the features described below for creating Quickbase mobile apps.

What does Offline Data Sync mean in a mobile app?

Offline data allows a user of the mobile app to view, add, delete or modify data in the mobile app with no connection to the internet or network. All of the changes the user makes will be automatically synced with the main backend database, once the mobile app user comes back into online network connectivity.

So, why this is important?

The Mass Technology Leadership Council selected ViziApps to demo our Rapid Mobile App Platform at TechJam 2015. See us there Thursday May 11th in Boston: https://masstlc.proximate.com/btj2015#?p=np

If you’re not the most artistic designer or you’re trying to meet a tight deadline, or you want to share your mobile page design with your team or our community – you will love ViziApps new Smart PagesTM. As with any design activity, starting with a blank page can be intimidating and there are often aspects of building apps for Apple and Android devices that need to be repeated or reused in a new context. Why reinvent the wheel when you can leverage existing best practices for mobile app design?

Solving these issues is exactly what ViziApps is delivering with our new Smart Pages catalog of professionally designed Smart Pages. Use them for the fastest way yet to build full-featured mobile apps. Or create your own Smart Pages so that you can organize your designs and share components for team development or share with the ViziApps community.

A Catalog of Smart Pages

The ViziApps catalog offers a range of Smart Pages to perform functions like displaying data to a scrolling table or showing a place on a map. And the catalog will grow with more Smart Pages over time. Just find a Smart Page that meets your specific need, plug it into your app design, connect it to a live data source, when needed, and that page is done!

ViziApps offers a range of data connections so you can get business data into your users’ hands in real time, without coding. Our data sources include Intuit QuickBase, Salesforce.com, Google Spreadsheets, SQL databases and REST interfaces. As with the rest of ViziApps, hooking up your data to a Smart Page is a simple drag-and-drop process.

The process of building mobile apps with ViziApps is an easy visual experience without coding, and allows you to build complex apps from individual pages. Smart Pages makes this experience even faster because you can organize your app by selecting a series of Smart Pages, connect to live data sources, and put in the finishing touches.

Of course the best-designed components can’t anticipate all individual needs, so ViziApps lets you add our standard fields to the Smart Pages in your app, so you can customize them to achieve the perfect user experience. You can even mix Smart Pages with your own fully custom pages in the same app in any way you want.

Using the no-coding ViziApps mobile app development platform, enterprise and small business users can easily create QuickBase mobile apps.

Companies worldwide are using ViziApps, to build mobile apps from Quickbase to mobilize the processes vital to their business – for the iPhone and iPad, and Android smartphones and tablets.

ViziApps provides several key features for creating Quickbase mobile apps:

• Create Quickbase database operations with a drag and drop process for familiar database commands such as select, insert, update and delete. Adding QuickBase database operations to your mobile app takes just minutes.

• ViziApps enables your mobile apps to run without network access. When network access returns, it automatically syncs with your Quickbase account.
• Customize how users navigate your work flow in your app for the optimal user experience,

Because ViziApps provides a no-coding process for mobile app development, business and IT professionals can quickly and cost effectively use the ViziApps tool to build mobile business apps that empower employees, partners, and customers.

Join ViziApps at Intuit EMPOWER 2015, to be held at the Hyatt Regency Chicago from May 26-28, 2015.

For several years ViziApps has been enabling customers and partners of Intuit QuickBase to create custom mobile apps, with all of the non-coding ease-of-use that Quickbase users have come to expect. Yet ViziApps is powerful enough to incorporate native mobile device features and simultaneously connect with other data sources such as Google Sheets and SQL databases.

The EMPOWER conference will be a great opportunity to learn more about using QuickBase to create business apps that meet your exact needs without coding. And while you’re at it, stop by and visit with ViziApps to learn more about building custom mobile apps that use QuickBase.

Find out more about Intuit EMPOWER 2015 and save $100 on conference registration:

ViziApps at EMPOWER 2015.