Apps, WAP and All That

There seems to be an “app” for everything these days.  Among some of them you can find are apps for shopping, games and musical instruments.  And although these are fun for the user, the developer community is a different story.  The average e-Learning developer or instructional designer will stop dead in their tracks when asked to develop and app for their organization.  Unlike some of the rapid tool design tools for online training, apps are not easy to build and require a SDK (software developer kit) for each type of mobile device.  On top of this the development costs can range from $25-40,000. 

The alternative has been to develop mobile web content or WAP hosted content.  This is a great alternative but does pose some inconveniences in speed of content moving from one page to the next or downloading times. 

For the last 4 years we have been using the Hot Lava content creation tool LMA (learning mobile author) and a hosted WAP server.  The great thing about this tool is that it allowed us to create content and publish for any mobile device as well a JAVA application.  What this means is, we could create content that devices like Blackberrys could download and install like an app.  We’re not uber-programmers and would go running from anything that was too complicated.  So this has worked out very well.  The only real downside to this was that if you want to create a series of courses or special JAVA applications it required you to install multiple files on your hand-held device which sometimes causes anxiety attacks with IT departments.

But do not fear!  There is a new and improved way to deploy mobile content that really does combine the best of both worlds.  OutStart has just released a Blackberry viewer that installs directly onto the mobile device.  It allows you to create content in PowerPoint (easy) and then publish to a hosted server that will push the content directly to the Blackberry player on your mobile device.  It becomes and app w/ WAP hosted modules that are managed by the user.  All user activity and data collection is managed remotely but the content displays quickly and easily (see video below)  and it a great way to push content to your users that they may need access to on the fly regardless if they are connected to a mobile tower or not.  They will be releasing and iPhone and Android player as well so all of us that are somewhat programming challenged can brag about our abilities to create Apps, from WAP and all that!