There's an App for that!
By DOK
June 25 2013
There was a posting on the message board the other day pointing out that Harlequins has no mobile app, indeed not even a mobile version of their website.
By a strange piece of serendipity, I was reading a newpaper article about some software that would let complete know-nothings build mobile apps. "That's me!" I thought. So I decided to give it a try. The software is called "Infinite Monkeys" and can be found here http://www.infinitemonkeys.mobi/
Funnily enough, their boast of turning out a complete app in 20 minutes is probably technically possible, but not very real world. I guess it took me about a day to turn out this first version of the app.
First of all, I spent a little time trying to do the analysis of requirements. For this I find mind mapping is a particularly useful tool. There's any number of bits of software on the internet will help with this, but I use Freemind, available for free from http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
This resulted in this mind map http://dok.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/mindmap1.jpg.
I more or less had that complete before I started trying to put the app together. Actually building the app is both as simple as the infinite monkeys website says and very frustrating. In the end a lot of the utilities supplied couldn't quite do what I wanted, so it's back to straight forward Internet links.
Anyway, you probably want to see what this look like. Now this is downloadable as an android app, but frankly I don't see that offers anymore than the website.
To see the Harlequin Portal, point your browser to http://h.fanapp.mobi/harlequins_portal
This should work for any mobile phone, tablet or desktop device provided your browser can handle HTML5.
If you really need to download the android app, then you'll need to fix your phone to allow installation from unkown sources. Then go to http://fanapp.mobi/harlequins_portal and knock yourself out!
Yes, I am aware a lot of the websites are not optimised for mobile viewing, e.g. this one. There's not much I can do about that. There are tools that reformat websites, but instead of a lot of side to side scrolling you get a lot of up and down scrolling!
Anyway, let me know what you think. This is only Version 1.0 of the app, if you've ideas/suggestions for improvements then let me know.
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One option regarding CAW could be to talk to RugbyNetwork to see if the RSS feed could be modified to include forum posts? Not sure if this is possible, or if it has been discussed before, but that seems like the most logical course of action to me.
Have you got any favourites you'd like to see in the app? It can deal with RSS content.
