Sneak preview: mobile web app on the way!

by Wes Hooper

2nd February 2010

Published in: Moobiz

We've been wanting to provide a way to access your Moobiz account from mobile devices for a while now - most of us here have and spent far too much time on our iPhones!

To start with we considered a native iPhone app as we love the simplicity of these when done well. However, we're all web developers here without any knowledge of programming with Cocoa on a Mac. So last year we decided to go for a web app instead, seems to be a popular choice at the moment.

Initially we tried out a few sections using the excellent iui, which makes a web app look and feel much like a native app. This looked ok but we found some of the information we wanted in there looked a bit squeezed or out of place with the iPhone app style.

At this point, we decided to leave the problem for a month or so while we worked on the recent Awesome Update of the non-mobile based app. We're really pleased with how that went, but a lot of changes that made Moobiz awesome in a desktop browser didn't carry over to mobile so well.

So a couple of weeks ago, we went back to the mobile app and drawing inspiration from the mobile Google Reader web app plus the Facebook and LinkedIn native apps (with their wonderfully simple home screens) we abandoned the native iPhone look altogether and went for something simple but familiar looking...

We've got a bit more polishing to do over the next couple of weeks, but as with everything we do, we're dogfooding the app ourselves daily and should have something to make generally available fairly soon!