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Jumpstart App Development with Alpha Anywhere's Mobile Templates

Richard Rabins

Alpha Anywhere's Mobile App Mission

Development of Alpha Anywhere is driven by a simple philosophy: Help app developers be as productive as possible. It is with this in mind that we are constantly looking for ways to help application developers maximize their productivity. So we are always looking for design patterns in mobile and web business applications, and then we go to work to figure out ways to to "pre-build" templates that can be invoked in Alpha Anywhere with to a single click so that developers can save precious development time and roll-out apps as quickly as possible. Templates can accelerate the process of building apps for mobile and web interfaces, enabling you to mobilize your workforce faster and keep up with the increasing demand for enterprise mobile applications. Check out these built-in templates in Alpha Anywhere 3.0 that serve as a jump start to building mobile and web apps with Alpha Anywhere:

Standard Split-View Mobile App Template

A typical mobile UI design pattern is the 'split-view' which shows a menu on the left and a work area on the right. On a smartphone, the menu is hidden and only shown on demand, but on a tablet, the menu is always shown. Now, with Alpha Anywhere, you can simply select a pre-defined split-view quick start template to automatically generate the outline—complete with CSS icons—of a stunning menu for your mobile applications! Check out the video below to learn more about the split-view template for building smartphone and tablet applications:

Button Bar Template for Mobile Apps

Another common design pattern when building mobile applications is to use a button bar in the footer of the screen to select the active 'page' in the application. The selected button is highlighted so the user knows which button corresponds with the current page. In the video below, we show how you can use the built-in button bar template to get a quick start on your custom mobile application and explain what's going on behind the scenes so that you understand how the component works and adapt it to your mobile needs. In this next video we show how the template above can be extended to allow for more navigation buttons that can been seen at once on a smartphone. The user can drag scroll horizontally on the button bar to see the other buttons, or have them all display at once when they are on being displayed a larger screen (tablet, laptop, etc.). Mobile UI design patterns simplified
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About Author

Richard Rabins
Richard Rabins

Co-founder of Alpha Software, Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, sales, and marketing. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.

The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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