There’s an app for that

Good news Wednesday when we got the word the Engineering Exchange App was approved to the Apple Store this morning.

For members of the Engineering Exchange, the App allows for direct status updates, blog post additions and picture upload to the Engineering Exchange site. You can also watch engineering video, participate in forums, get relevant engineering news and renewable energy updates from both Windpower Engineering and Solar Power Engineering sites. The Engineering Exchange mobile app allows members to easily connect to the Exchange and access other engineering news, updates and tools.

In addition we piped in all the latest video from Design World Engineering Watch, EX Video and the Design World YouTube Channel. Also included is all the latest editorial, news and posts from Design World, Windpower Engineering, Solar Power Engineering and MakePartsFast. We even included forum posts from MCAD Central.

The approval process with Apple took a few more cycles than I anticipated, but in the end version 1.3 is a big improvement over the original version first submitted. The standards they impose may cause some heartburn, but ultimately in Apple fashion, the user experience is held to higher standards.

Work continues on our native iPad +App, and we’re on the final approach. I was testing out our Ad Hoc version 2, and real pleased with the capabilities the iPad brings with touch navigation with the larger screen area. As with most all software, web and mobile development this is only the very beginning. But one thing is certain – our goal is to provide hourly / daily updated content, make browsing simple, provide a great user experience and avoid the notion of trying to just dup the print magazine every month. There is way too much daily good content to include: video, forums, blogs, editorial, pr, etc. And the EX app is a great blend of User Generated Content and our own.

A Wired post back in September about the death of the web resonates when you consider the amount of concentrated information you can retrieve, browse and interact with via smart mobile devices via apps takes the web right out of the equation – sort of. The EX uses an API key to connect through the App so users can update none other than their custom web page on the EX site. And RSS is a key peice to the rest of the news delivery along with some combined web resources.

Mobile advertising options are available and the first in here was National Instruments. On this front, NI provided some mobile resources and the blend of their creative with our handling technique provides a pretty cool way to view the mobile links directly in the application. The app uses the common Safari engine to display web content pretty seamlessly. The key for advertisers here is to provide mobile friendly content as the click through to online content. And no, Flash is not supported.

The App requires iOS 3.0 and higher and runs in iPhones – iPod Touch and iPads.

If your not running iTunes – info can be found here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/engineering-exchange/id401827198?mt=8