We often get clients who want to create mobile applications such as walking tours, location-sensitive audio tours, or the like.

We’re going to, in this post, show you how you can do this, and help you ensure you have the skills to be successful in the endeavor.

The first thing that clients typically forget is that the data has to come from somewhere. If you want to make a walking tour of a city, there has to be some data about that city for you to give the mobile user. Often, that data has rights attached to it, by the author or publisher, so you can’t just go out and take it. This is one of the most overlooked facets of creating an app – the data does not just magically appear. All of that content about what restaurants to go to, or what monuments to see, etc., was created by someone, and if you use it, they’re going to want you to get their permission first. Maybe you want to take content from your website and put it into an iPhone app.

Assuming you can get access to the data, the next step is to transfer the data to the phone in some manner. RSS is a great way to do this. If you’ve never heard of RSS, you can learn about it here. Think of RSS as the “telephone line” that’s going to transport your data from a computer server to the phone. It keeps you from having to cram your whole site into a tiny mobile browser by letting us extract all the relevant information.

Next, you have to create an RSS feed. If you’re a little more advanced and you want to manually create an RSS feed, here’s a good tutorial for doing it (you’ll at the very least need HTML skills to do this). However, the absolute easiest way to create an RSS feed is just to use WordPress.com to get a free blog. When you write blog posts, WordPress will automatically create the RSS feed for you. Then you can pull that information into a cohesive application that is neatly packaged.

Next, you’ll need to display the RSS feed on the phone. Luckily, PointAbout can help you here. We’ve developed an RSS reader template that we can customize to taste. We can even make the RSS feed location aware. If you’re building your own RSS feed you’ll want to make sure you format it correctly for us. You should end up with a simple-to-use app!

Here, each relevant section or article on your site is listed as an item of content which the user can browse at their own leisure. When you select one of the listed items, you’ll get more in-depth content, like a complete article. This will most closely resemble articles as viewed on your site when using a computer.

It’s that easy to translate a well-organized webpage to a fast, useful, versatile application. And, with AppMakr, you can build an app just like this one, on your own, in 27 seconds. From there, we can meet with you on a consulting basis to customize your application with fonts, colors, icons, and unique functions that extend and reinforce your brand identity.

And if RSS is still too confusing, just contact us at right and we’ll set up a consulting project to take care of the details for you!