Launch: FIU Mobile native iPhone, Android & BlackBerry app

UPDATE: The FIU Mobile app is now live for iPhone,  Android and BlackBerry.

Web Communications collaborated with PantherSoft and FIU Online for this project. The team leveraged the Blackboard Mobile platform, which is really great. It ties into many of the Enterprise systems that are used by most universities including: PeopleSoft, Blackboard, Moodle, iTunes U, YouTube, Google Maps and major athletics site CMS vendors.

Our Involvement

I felt more like a data wrangler, or curator, on this project because our main involvement was collecting data from several locations. It’s less technical than the development side, but an exhausting task nonetheless. We had to work with data from many groups across campus to coordinate XML feeds, API calls, data dumps, etc.

Had it not been for the Blackboard Mobile platform, I can assure you that no one would have taken a stab at creating a cross-platform mobile app. Prior to this, our plan was to create a mobile site – not a mobile app – using jQuery Mobile, which is cross-platform. Later, maybe using PhoneGap, we would deploy native apps. Blackboard Mobile made the cross-platform FIU Mobile App possible. Future plans now include building the native apps and a mobile site by using jQuery Mobile and leveraging more or less the same data across all the platforms.

As you can see the app currently includes Athletics, Events, Courses, Maps, Videos, News, Blackboard Learn, Emergency Contacts, MyFIU, links to other FIU mobile sites, iTunes U and Library.

Future Plans

Soon to follow will be more more updates on the mobile site in collaboration with the PantherSoft team.

Download the App

Feel free to download the FIU Mobile app in the iTunes App Store, Android Market and BlackBerry App World.

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