I’m proud to present our SAP Mentors Outreach iOS app, which is based on the Android version developed by Thorsten Franz. The iOS version is available in the Apple AppStore now.
A short introduction of the team behind this app:
Björn Weigand (@weigo) was responsible for the main framework, navigation, filtering and the UI layout for the app. John Moy (@jhmoy) concentrated on the CoreData persistence sync layer and the iPad details view and John Astill (@JohnA69) contributed the River connectivity. Furthermore Thorsten Franz (@thorstenster) helped us with information about his Android version and Richard Hirsch (@rhirsch) supported us with River information.
Let me start with a few words about our app:
You can get in touch with SAP Mentors very easily, especially at SAP conferences and events. The app provides you features like browse a list of SAP Mentors, full text search or take notes of individual Mentors. Version 2.0 of the app will change the iPhone version to an universal app, so that it can also be used on iPad natively.
Look-up a Mentor and browse their profiles:
You can either search all profiles or you can use the search bar to find a Mentor based on any available information (e.g. Mentor name, expertise, squad number or twitter handle). This is very useful on SAP events, because every Mentor has on his jersey his squad number and twitter handle visible, so that you can find the right person very easily.
This picture has been copied from Thorsten’s SDN blog (see above).
The detail view presents all necessary information about a Mentor like a short bio, their main and industry expertise and their Twitter handle (if they use it). The information is maintained by them self via River goes mobile: The SAP Mentors Outreach Mobile App as a prototype for a new type of Edge Innovat... and the app will download all changes after launching automatically. But we provide a snapshot of the River database, so that you don’t need to download all information after the first start.
Favorite Mentor for quick access:
For the time being only the iPhone version supports filtering of favorites, but we will supply it for the iPad later. You can favorite a mentor by clicking on the star symbol in the detail view:
The favorite list can be selected via the tab bar, so that you can access your favorites quickly:
Take notes:
If you want to add personal notes to a Mentor, you can use the comment function. The notes are stored on your device directly.
View Mentor Twitter timelines:
Most Mentors using Twitter and provide their Twitter handle via SAP River. So you can view their timeline directly in our app. Moreover you can also start to follow or get in touch with them.
Technical background:
The app has been written in Objective-C and we used XCode as IDE. We worked with three developers on this app, so we used a SVN repository provided by John Astill in order to share our work. As mentioned earlier the backend is a database application which has been created by Thorsten Franz, Richard Hirsch and Nigel James. River is cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offered by SAP. Our development team is spread over three continents, so we used SAP Streamwork to communicate and discuss during our development process. It is an amazing tool for distributed teams. John Moy indents to write a blog about how we collaborated with it.
A personal note:
I’m really glad that I could realize this project, because it is my first iOS app and the first time I collaborated with the SAP Community. So it is a honor to provide you our app and to help the community find and connect with the SAP Mentors.
I will not be able to attend the next SAP TechEd session in Las Vegas, but I’m sure that John Moy and John Astill will represent the app at this event and I hope that you give it a try. I’d appreciate any feedback. You can also see our latest changes on our support page.
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