We developed a mobile app for Ant1 Radio. The iOS and Android applications were built using the Appcelerator framework. Appcelerator is an open source mobile application development platform that allows you to create native applications using web technologies that are well-known to most developers. It provides a very user-friendly environment for building the application, is cross-platform and supported by a rapidly growing community.
Additionally, Appcelerator provides very smooth web service communication that allows us to have excellent interaction between mobile application and web service. In our case, this helped us achieve a very efficient connection between the Ant1 Radio mobile applications and website. The mobile applications retrieve their content from the website, thanks to Drupal Services.
A vital functionality that was built for Ant1 Radio was the interaction between the website and the mobile applications. Drupal is used as a data source for both the website and mobile applications. Web services were built using Drupal that send data to the mobile applications. This, we achieved 2 major things:
1) We ensured that all content for the mobile applications was fully dynamic. Our client has full access and control of the content through the Drupal CMS. This means we can avoid unnecessary mobile updates after changing the content on the apps—no need to re-submit the apps to the stores after modifying the content!
2) The client can edit the content of both the website and the mobile applications using only one CMS, since the content is common for all platforms and is hosted on Drupal.
Much like the desktop site, the mobile applications include a Play button at the bottom of the screen, with information regarding the current track, as well as the previous Last Played song. The interface is neat, uncomplicated to use, and preserves the Ant1 Radio look and identity.