NMBS are proud to announce that their latest development, the merchant locator is now available on all 3 main smart phone platforms - iPhone, Android and Blackberry.
The merchant locators allow the user to find merchants close to their current location or entered postcode. Based on chosen criteria it then displays a list of merchants and allows the user to view their contact details and even location on the map.
The apps were created as 'launcher' style apps. What this means is that you have an app that sits on your phone, however when you launch the app it creates a gateway to the NMBS website and then launches web rich content in the app. The major benefit of designing the app in this way was it allows us to make changes quickly and easily without having to send a new version live every time. Due to updates to merchant details and new additions had we not done it this way it would have meant regular updates for the user, which in turn would mean if the user didnt update they would not have the latest data on the app. The second benefit is that because we launched on all 3 platforms, it meant that the main back end coding is the same for all 3 versions, this mean that when we make a change for the iPhone version we can easily make the same change for the Android and Blackberry. Therefore the majority of the coding is in HTML, had we developed all 3 apps to run locally then it would mean maintaining 3 different types of code and a lot of it, this way means maintaining 3 different sections of code but all written in the same way with the same style. The obvious requirement for the apps however is that to work there needs to be a data connection present, this however doesn't appear to be too much of an issue as most smartphone packages come with data downloads included as standard.
With regards to development of the apps, NMBS are continually looking to improve, with the next development allowing the user to search by town as well as postcode. If you have any questions about the NMBS apps or questions about smartphone app development then please contact us on it.department@nmbs.co.uk.
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