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Mobile Ajax, Ruby on Rails and the RIM Blackberry
I was reading some great stuff about the Mobile Web over at Ajaxian. Designing for small screens presents some unique challenges and in his latest post, Dion Almaer does a great job of highlighting some of the key ones. I've been spending a great deal of time working on a Mobile Web app, so his post inspired me to share some of my experiences.
Disclaimer
I am a Software Engineer. The title on my business card reads 'Principal Software Architect'.
I am neither a sales guy nor a marketing guy, so chances are high that what you read here about my company's product will not be 100% in line with the message our Marketing Department has been working so hard to convey. So, let me apologize now to all the fine folks in the Marketing Department who have worked so hard to create a message which I may possibly screw up.
Engineering loves you. Honestly, we really do.
BoxTone on the BlackBerry
I'm proud to say that I helped create BoxTone, an incredibly unique system for monitoring and managing the service quality of an enterprise's BlackBerry users. (Wow, did I write that? It sounded alot like some marketing crap. Sorry, I'll try not to let it happen again.) We monitor tons of data in realtime to detect if a particular user is having problems. If we detect a problem, we pinpoint the exact user(s) having problems then alert a system admin. BoxTone tells you the 'who' and 'why' so you can fix it before the user notices the problem.
One of our target users is the over worked, under appreciated system administrator. This beaten down individual is typically a mobile user themselves, so I created a Rails web app designed specifically for use on the BlackBerry browser. This app allows the system administrator to see key information about the state of their BlackBerry environment and to quickly lookup the status of any mobile user.
Example Pages
Home Page
This is the starting point for the app and you can easily see just how small the screen really is. With real estate at such a premium, I decided to use images to represent
status. Using images in this way goes against BlackBerry's content design guidelines however, I feel it is more inline with Edward Tufte's principal of maximizing information per pixel.
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Unavailable |
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Critical |
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Warning |
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Normal |
Navigation
From the home page, you can either search for a user or follow drill down into various infrastructure pieces by following the links. At the top of each page, there is always a link to the Home Page and a search box.
User List
You can get to a list of users by anything of the following ways:
- Following the drill down links
- Entering a search where multiple users are returned
User Detail
Once you get down to a specific user, you can easily see key information about the overall status of the user. Plus, three links are available to the system administrator for quickly contacting the user.
Give it a try
If you have a BlackBerry, you can try the app yourself. Configure your BlackBerry browser with the settings displayed on the left. Then, open the following link in your BlackBerry browser: http://handheld.boxtone.com
4 Comments · Add a comment
Sin Jin · Thursday, 20 September 2007 1:19 PM
cool app but do you really need to commercialize something that only a couple of browbeaters would reap benefit from?
Michael Gaffney · Friday, 7 July 2006 5:40 PM
Thanks, Joe. The application is temporarily unavailable while we upgrade our systems. I'm hoping to have the application back up sometime in the next few days.
joe bloggs · Friday, 7 July 2006 5:36 AM
followed your guidelines and it didn't work my boy. Error : Application error (Rails)....!
Pancho · Monday, 2 November 2009 9:19 AM
Michael, I want today develop an application for blackberry in Rails, have you any tips that you can share me ?... Are you still developing in Rails for Blackberry? ... I will appreciate your help.
Best Regards Pancho