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.

So what databases can ViziApps mobile apps work with?

Databases including SQL Server, MySQL, 35 other SQL databases, Quickbase, and Google Sheets can all connect to your mobile apps built with ViziApps with no coding.

So, why this is important?

Databases are where all of your key business process information is updated and stored. But most databases (even SaaS databases) are not very mobile friendly. With mobile changing the way your workforce, partners, and customers do business, it is vital for you to connect to these databases in your business mobile apps.

ViziApps allows mobile app builders to incorporate graphics such as photos, logos and icons in their mobile applications without tailoring those images for different platform screen sizes. For example, a business manager could create a logo for use in an iPhone 5 app and use it in ViziApps to build apps for that Apple platform, as well as the iPhone 4 and iPad. That logo could also be used undistorted in select Android smartphones and tablets, as well.

As a result, mobile business app creators can use ViziApps to quickly and easily use graphics in their app designs to brand their mobile apps for different devices and incorporate images in a way that enhances the user experience on several platforms. This capability is just another way that ViziApps eases and streamlines the mobile business app development process.

For help building mobile applications for smartphones or tablets, see our tutorial videos. They include tips on topics such as designing tables; incorporating HTML panels; using the camera, picker, and GPS field; and adding JavaScript.

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.

Facing a highly competitive market, mobile app creators may welcome advice from successful entrepreneurs. Often the type of advice they hear is designed to help them navigate their way through complex business issues. But sound counsel can also suggest ways to eliminate unnecessary complexity.

Fierce Wireless attended Web Summit 2012 in Dublin earlier this month and summarized advice speakers and panelists offered to mobile app developers. That advice included ideas that go beyond the typical guidance conference attendees might have expected to hear.

In an article titled “Seven mobile developer success strategies from Web Summit 2012,” Shane Schick highlighted one strategy might surprise mobile app creators:

Don’t ignore the one-off apps.

That’s a very straightforward suggestion, but it might not be obvious to everyone planning to create a mobile business app.

From Schick’s article:

“Tomer Kagan, the co-founder and CEO of Quixey, focuses on a discovery service that helps users find other apps. He told the Web Summit crowd that not all developers need to wrack their brains thinking of ways to get users coming back to an app over and over again once they’ve installed it. He gave the example of a consumer app created by a grocery store chain, whose goal was to increase sales by 10 percent by offering information and discounts to customers that were already spending money in the store. It worked.”

Another recommendation from the same event: Leave room for non-social behavior.

For some other interesting ideas for mobile app developers, read the entire article.

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.

As the use of mobile apps in the enterprise grows, companies are implementing – or considering implementing – their own enterprise app stores. By adapting the highly successful app store model, companies can experience many benefits, including:

• A convenient way to make approved corporate mobile apps and upgrades available to employees, partners and others
• The ability to control mobile device users’ access to confidential corporate data
• The ability to manage the types of apps employees use for business

Marco Nielsen, VP, Services at < a href="http://www.enterprisemobile.com/" target="_blank">Enterprise Mobile, sees the growing use of corporate mobile apps driving the need to implement both mobile device management and mobile app management (MDM and MAM) on a large scale. Through professional and outsourcing services, Enterprise Mobile helps companies deploy and manage mobility initiatives across mobility platforms. Through work with global businesses, Nielsen sees enterprise app stores playing a significant role in how companies are managing both mobile devices and apps.

”Many of our global customers rely on an enterprise app store to rapidly deploy apps to iPads and other mobile devices,” Nielsen reports. “Their management solutions allow for deploying some apps worldwide but limit others to use in specific countries. That way, through carefully planned deployments, companies ensure that the mobile apps they have approved for use on their tablets and smartphones are used to their best advantage.”

Today it’s estimated that only 10 percent of enterprises have their own app stores, but that number is expected to jump. At last year’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of research, predicted that “by 2014, private app stores will be deployed by 60 percent of IT organizations.”

And in a recent article in Voice and Data, Gartner Research Vice President Brian Prentice wrote: “The dynamics that drive public app stores are consistent with those that will ultimately drive private app stores in the enterprises.” He recommends that enterprises provide access to more than their own mobile apps in their app stores. He also suggests including third-party apps, as well providing links to public app stores and enterprise content.

Wired magazine blogger Scott Schwarzhoff suggests that an enterprise app store can provide a wide range of services. In a post titled “How IT Can Better Equip the Mobile Workforce,” he writes that an enterprise app store can be a “unified store for all apps and data, app availability based on role, app request workflows, self-service subscriptions, native app delivery for mobile devices in use, and ‘follow-me’ access to information across devices.”

Managing mobile apps for the enterprise is challenging. An enterprise app store provides a proven means of controlling and managing them for a medium-sized business or a large global enterprise.

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.

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.”

In the busy holiday shopping season just around the corner, mobile apps for smartphones and tablets provide a good way to boost sales.

To help retailers prepare for the end of year rush, American Express Open Forum points out 10 common mistakes that can hurt holiday sales, and provides one piece of advice that recognizes the value of mobile business apps.

Avoid not being “findable” on the web or by mobile applications.

It only makes sense for retailers to go out of their way to be discovered at a time when consumers are doing some serious shopping. For that reason, American Express reminds them to make their brands searchable and memorable and “get involved in the conversations about shopping and gift giving that are happening over social media.”

New study data suggests that shoppers will be using mobile devices in unprecedented numbers this holiday season to conduct research before purchasing products, compare prices and buy gifts.

IDC Retail Insights, for example, predicts that 48 million U.S. consumers will use smartphones in stores, or “showroom” (use those devices to compare prices and features as shop for their holiday needs). That staggering figure represents a 134% increase since last year, when 20.5 million holiday shoppers showroomed.

In the report “Business Strategy: At Hand Versus In Hand — Will Consumers Have the Upper Hand in the 2012 Holiday Showroom Showdown?”, IDC Retail Insights forecasts that showrooming behaviors will influence $0.7 to $1.7 billion in holiday retail purchases this year.

The report also points out that across technologies about 70% of shoppers who plan to showroom this season indicated that they will be “more likely” to purchase from retailers that offer full-featured mobile websites and mobile apps for smartphones, among other amenities.

The 2012 edition of the Mojiva Holiday Mobility Advertising Guide, citing results of a survey of U.S. and U.K. consumers, also suggests a strong role for smartphones and tablets in the upcoming holiday season. In both countries, consumers indicated plans to use their mobile devices to collect information on products, compare prices, look for sale information and coupons, and make purchases.

In fact, nearly 80 percent of U.S. respondents stated they would feel comfortable spending more than $20 on a single item using their smartphone or tablet, while 42 percent of U.K. respondents imagining they could spend £25 pounds on one item using their smartphone or tablet. The Mojiva Holiday Mobility Advertising Guide also provides research data on the different types of products consumers would be comfortable buying using a mobile device.

There’s still time to create a retail mobile app for smartphones and tablets using ViziApps no-coding, drag and drop approach. Sign up for a free account here and get started building a mobile business app for your customers.

AODocs provides enterprise document management based on Google for Work. AODocs is now on Google for Work Domains serving more than 1,100,000 users across 75 countries. The unique combination of ViziApps with AODocs' Google Docs support and document management capabilities empowers users to create mobile business apps that are quick to build and easy to use.

Now, you can easily integrate AODocs Document Management into ViziApps custom cross-platform mobile business process apps with no coding. Use your existing office software skills to build your custom mobile app with enterprise document management quickly and inexpensively. And you can update your apps at any time, immediately pushing the new versions to your users.

You can get started today using AODocs with ViziApps two ways;

Use the new ViziApps AODocs Workflow App available in the iTunes App Store or Google Play

Or, Create your own custom workflow app with your ViziApps account

Use the ViziApps AODocs Workflow App

Download the app and immediately review and transition documents in your AODocs account. The app is built with ViziApps and also available as a template you can expand upon with your ViziApps account.

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.

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.