Designing a mobile app with Appcelerator

In my previous post I mentioned a new business I was working with called UK Locate. The website is essentially a UK business search tool allowing users to 'locate' companies from all over the UK.

This to me seems like a perfect situation to develop a mobile app to enhance the user experience. It will involve the use of a lot of Appcelerator features and technologies.

• Geolocation : Know where the user is
• Map views : show the user their current location and show what's close by
• Read remote XML: read search results in XML format for rendering within the application

 Appcelerator is well up to the task, and I have experience of using each of these aspects of Appcelerator Titanium although not together.

One thing I do want to address is error handling. I don't want the app to be subject to the situation where if one aspect fails, all else fails as a result.

I intend to use this Appcelerator project as a learning experience involving redundancy, and enhanced error handling.

By redundancy I am referring to having the data the app needs available on more than one location. If one source fails the 2nd source will be used. Fall back procedures like this is something rarely focused on when it comes to mobile app development.

I will keep you posted during the development process, and let you know  when A beta is available. I will be primarily focused on Android, but I plan to roll out iOs, Android and Blackberry versions of the application after the beta stage is completed.

Mack.