In case you hadn’t noticed, the world is going mobile. If we want to take part in the wired world, we are no longer tied to a desktop machine and a broadband connection.
With 70 million iPhones, 4 million iPads and counting, building an app to share your wisdom and interact with potential clients, is now one of the best marketing investments you will make. Unlike other marketing spends, you can also make this one back and turn it into a revenue stream.
If you have a message you would like to share with the planet, get in touch for an exploratory consultation.
Here’s just some examples of what’s possible and what my team have built so far this year.
Apps of Cards
This iPhone card app built for the Kryon School in Germany is available in four languages – namely German, Russian, Spanish and English.
It took a physical deck of cards called the Crystals of the Divine Reality and merged it with its explanatory booklet.
It’s been an interesting exercise in project management across six countries. As a result, we now have a code framework and methodology to build any app in any number of languages.
From a user perspective, operation is transparent. The app picks up the language setting of the iPhone, iPod or iPad and display the correct version of the app automatically.
A free sample of this app is also available here …
This app includes a built in viral marketing tool to send emails and Tweets out of sample Crystal cards.
You can also select spreads of three, five and nine cards to shed light on any situation.
Also see the Cards of Blessings app that gives you a random card for the day based on a tap or shake of the iPhone. When the user gets a blessing that inspires them, they can email it to a friend or Tweet it to the world.
This feature embeds the viral sales mechanism for the app and the printed Blessings Books into the app itself.
Calendars
Gems of Wisdom written by Eileen Caddy is a great example of a perpetual calendar built for Findhorn Press.
For each day of the year, you get a gem of thought to lift your day with a beautiful photograph and inspirational meditative background music.
Again, you can share any day from the calendar with a friend via email or with the world with Twitter.
Multimedia Books
Train in the Night is the winning entry of the 2010 Guildford Book Festival Short story competition
It’s a captivating tale of childhood lost and adulthood found that will keep you hooked to the very last sentence – just the thing you want from a short story.
As the winning entry, it is now converted into an iPhone application you can either read or listen to – it’s ideal to while away a commute and it will leave you thinking about life and how we take so much for granted.
100 Years of Ermintrude is a wonderful example of how an author’s work can be re-purposed for different platforms.
It started life as a PDF download which raised a nice amount of money for breast cancer charity … and ended up with me walking around London in a bra with 15,000 women.
It then morphed into an MP3 and then I wrote two sequels and the printed version of the book appeared a year later.
And now a few years after it was originally conceived, it is available for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
Before you contact me about your app, you may like read these blogs to understand which platform is best for your content:
New devices and new way of working merit coining of a new word.
Appivity [noun] : the process of being creative and reaching new levels of productivity by building, using and marketing an app for you or your business
There is much talk about apps and it’s become trendy to have one and build one – with over 250,ooo apps already on the iTunes store (and that’s just Apple), there are some good ones, some not so good one and some downright bad ones.
Nowadays also, you have to think about what devices you want your app to run on – iPhone, iPad, iPad2, android and Kindle Fire. You can also use ePub3 and HTML5 to build device-agnostic apps too!!
Scoping
An app is limited by these parameters:
- The capability and functionality of the device’s operating system
- Your content and data
- User input
- The level of investment you are comfortable with
- Your imagination
IKIWISI
This stands for “I Know It When I See It” – in order to ensure the app meets your requirements and those of your user, it’s advisable to build a wireframe.
This also allows the generation of accurate development costings and timings.
Wireframes can be generated graphically or even functionally using HTML5.
They are an essential step in the app development process.
How to go about it
Building an app is a serious undertaking and costs start in the thousands of pounds or dollars. If this is beyond your budget, then you can look at other solutions such as Enhanced Edition books.
The advantage of an app is having your own icon on the device, your own page in the iTune, Android or Amazon app stores and, of course, the rich functionality you can get from interacting directly with the operating system.
See this blog on Do I App or Do iBook for more background on this …
The stages in building an app are as follows:
- Initial brainstorming
- Wire-frame generation
- Canvassing stakeholders
- Development costing and timescales
- Content production
- Screen and UI design
- Alpha development and internal testing
- Beta development and external testing
- Submission and approval on the App Store
- Marketing
If all of this hasn’t put you off but has intrigued you, get in touch for an exploratory chat here …
