Last week we ran an article about How to Create an iPhone or Android App Without Any Coding Skills, which is an introduction to a fairly easy-to-use online web application program called Buzztouch. It works sort of like putting together a website in which you use templates and plug-ins as a basis for your iPhone or Android app. With a little imagination and of course media content, you can create your own application using Buzztouch, and have it exported to the respective software development kit – Xcode for Mac or Android SDK – for final coding production. Buzztouch could also be used as the building block for learning more advanced coding.
In this follow-up article, I will share five model iPhone applications developed using Buzztouch. While these apps are not at the top of any iTunes Store List, you will see how they are useful for niche markets, organizations, clients, and the like. Imagine not only handing your clients your business card but also a portfolio mobile app of your work. Or what about turning your business PDF guide or ebook into an app? It’s really simple with Buzztouch.
All the following apps make use of over a dozen Buzztouch tools and templates for app creation. Let’s examine how these developers used these tools.
101 Keyboard Shortcuts For Mac
101 Keyboard Shortcuts makes creative use of nearly all the Buzztouch tools, including a quiz game, custom HTML pages for the shortcut instructions, and the sharing tool properties for the social networking menu items.The developer includes sub-menu properties that include a simple Email Us template that generates a pre-written email about the app that users can send and share with others.
Similar menus are built in for Twitter and Facebook sharing, with a pre-written message about the app for easy user sharing. Finally, there’s a handy little quiz – a fun review tool for what users learned about Mac shortcuts.
ERres
Josh Mularella created a basic information app for medical students. The homepage begins with a set of icons, each linking to medical review information first laid out in Microsoft Word or perhaps saved as a PDF. Buzztouch includes template properties for both Word and PDF content.Some menu items are links to webpages. Though this app was written specifically for students at the Albert Einstein Medical Center, it’s a useful model for creating similar information review applications for any organization or large business in which you may need to routinely update information and distribute it to users.
TOP10LV
Top 10 Best Places of Las Vegas is a great model app for travel destination businesses or tourist sites. This app opens with a location notification request followed by icons for each of the sub-menus in the app.Each club, casino, restaurant, and show icon links to a sub-menu of items, including Google map directions for specific places (using the Buzztouch location tool). The Call Us tool was used to include a pre-typed phone number to a specified place. When that menu item is tapped, a confirmation box pops up for users to okay the direct call. Finally, a custom RSS feed is used that links app users to an RSS feed of tweets posted about a designated place in Las Vegas.
Light Travel eBook
Light Travel eBook is an ebook about digital photography. The developer used the PDF Doc properties tool, which enables you to add up to 8MB of text document to your application.If you have already produced an ebook for downloading, it would probably take less than 20 minutes to create an app of it using Buzztouch.
Jim On Light
Finally, developer Jim Hutchison created an app, Jim On Light, that includes all the features of his website, which is about lighting, light and art, lighting devices, lighting fixtures, etc.It looks as if Jim used nearly all the Buzztouch tools, including custom webpages for articles, the YouTube tool which simply requires the URL of the video you want users to view, a quiz about lighting, a gallery of photos from his Flickr.com stream, using probably the RSS Reader properties tool, a Resource Map using the Map Location tool, and a RSS feed to Jim’s Twitter and Vimeo video feeds.
The app is very well designed and a great model for how the content of a website can be used for a mobile app.
Other Buzztouch model apps include a wedding information app, Best Man; a math tutorial program, The Christian Mathematician; Ohio Evidence, a law review app; RCEMS Field Guide, a menu app of medical treatment protocols; and a study guide app for web designers, Basics of Web Design Review.
Have you tried Buzztouch yet? If so, let us know what you think about it.
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