[wilsoncortez]

Hi all

A client of mine is asking me to start planning an app to include all the content of a VERY big reference book containing thousands (no kiding) of laws. Along with this It must have some petitions models, contract models, etc…all files targeting the “lawyers” market and interest.

Some of those laws must be altered on a monthly basis, so every month we´ll have another version of the app.

Once i´ve made a cd rom of this with about 1200 pdf files (wow)
So i´d like to ask you much more experienced developers which one could be the best way to go, a really native app or get all that huge content through a dedicated/ optimized mobile remote site. using a CMS like WordPress or any other?

if going with the mobile site way i was thinking about doing a very simple app (just the url) with some kind of push notifications, and voilá 🙂

I´m a bit afraid of going native a get a VERY cluttered UI with thousand of menu links, search function,downloading of files, etc…

Any input will be VERY appreciated guys.

Thank you all

[wilsoncortez]

Hi
Anyone?

Thanks:-)

[boater]

Hello Wilson,

Here are my 2 cents.

We produce a weekly 12 page paper in our town that is distributed freely throughout the town sponsor supported. We have just introduced an app also sponsor supported. We display the same content in the app as we display on the paper. We chose a web app, which was produced and is updated weekly with mobione, for the following reasons.

1) First we wanted a framework the existing staff (3) could work with.
The paper has been produced for 16 years first with Adobe Pagemaker and now InDesign. The similarity to mobione allowed it to easily be adapted by us non technical production people.

2) It had to easily be updated weekly, and done inhouse.
We have unreliable/slow Internet in our area so people here are a bit behind at adopting the new hand-held technologies. If I had to push new content to them or send them to the app store every week etc. I feel our readership would be hampered greatly.

3) We could not use an on-line/cloud product that required an Internet connection to use.
If the Internet went out we could not be waiting around to do the work. I also would not want all of our information controlled by another entity.

We are dealing with a small amount of data compared to what you are talking about and I don’t know, for our area, if I would want to get too much bigger. I deal with 1.5 to 2.5 megs every week to the reader and that takes about 3 min average, up to 5 min, to download to the hand-held.

The financial times have the most popular webapp ever with over 350,000 downloads. They put 50 megs on your hand-held and I have yet to get it to download to anything here.

I’ll stop now.

On your hand-held you can look at the Financial Times app at ft.com and if you are interested you can see our app at CBNapp.com.

mobione is the best solution I have found for us to date but it does have some limitations that were expensive and time consuming for us to work around. It has been a 2 year struggle for us but I am not a programmer. If you would like further comments you can reach me via the contact info in the app.

Regards,

Ted

[wilsoncortez]

Thank you octavio and bloater for your comments here.

I´m a newbie on mobile apps world/market and your thoughts will really help me on take a direction to go.

One of the main aspects I´ve been thinking about is how comfortable people would feel to put something around 350MB (maybe a bit less as i´ll need to convert “n” pdf´s to text only) of data inside their phones or even tablets and be pushed to a monthly update.

The app on its essence is nothing more than a reader, you know?
Another aspect is that due to a rising sales of Apple´s devices here in my country the publisher is asking me to develop a compatible CD (not big deal cauz i´m using Adobe´s Director to develop )

So we must have an Android/ iOs / PC and Mac app….. what a huge task 🙂
That´s why i´m thinking to put all the content on web. I guess it´ll be easier, one source of data to feed all demands.

I´ve started some tests with some nice responsible designs and I must say that i´m impressed. They look great on every tested device tested so far (iPhone, ipad, Android phones/tablets).

So if some users need to access all the content offline on desktops they could use some website copier like httrack or sitesucker, for instance

Thinking about to put the apps on appStores would be a matter of just a push warning about an update. BTW: mobiOne will really support push messages on the coming version 2.0?

And that said i must say that still feeling a bit lost, lol

[Author]

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