“I have used numerous developers in the past and have had mixed experiences, but working with Michael has always been a positive one. Michael has always delivered above and beyond, I highly recommend him for your project.” 

Joe Riehl, CEO i-mobilize

Copyright © 2019 Rowdy Labs LLC. All rights reserved.

O2 Priority Moments is an app that offers discounts and items exclusively for sales/giveaway. It is geographically restricted to Britain. (Available here if you have a UK iOS account). 

For O2, the biggest priority was pushing out seasonal marketing campaigns alongside other offers. O2 is a large enterprise client, a division of one of the largest telecoms in the world. It has large goals, and a huge direct-to-consumer reach. 

There were several business units, technical teams, and stakeholders to satisfy. The first challenge was to implement a very attractive advent calendar that would have presents for every of December up until Christmas. This involved complex hand computed animation, shadows and detailed timing to emulate a real-life cardboard advent calendar.

Other work on the app included moving from Google Maps to Apple Maps. This required re-implementing a large number of features related to displaying map based data in a way existing users would still understand how to use it. 

We also made the entire app accessible to users of Apple's VoiceOver system. This allows those who have limited/no vision to use the app as well as a fully sighted person does.

eVestment collects and provides performance statistics on investments that sometimes no other firm monitors. This includes hedge funds and some venture funds. Money managers for pensions, 401k funds, and endowments can then make informed choices that meet their client's retirement or other investment goals.

The app for eVestment started out as a consultant’s assistant. It evolved into a showcase app usable by both consultants and customers alike to present every attribute of an investment vehicle.

This app features many interactive charts. Many of these custom charts featuring detailed zooming, panning, clustering, error bars and other advanced charting features. This forms a large subset of the most used parts of one of eVestment's web products. The app also displays large amounts tabular data arranged in a manner consistent with the types of decisions made with it. This allows decision makers and their advisors to quickly evaluate key information.

Part of this engagement was training their developers who had no prior mobile development experience to be fully-functioning members of a mobile development team. In addition to teaching people to code for the platform, this effort also focused on adjusting expectations to the realities of the Apple iOS platform, such as app approvals, constrained and different user interface standards in the mobile sphere, as well as accessibility issues. 

Other work included Apple Human Interface Guidelines training, finding midpoints between company branding guides and platform realities, the complexities of App Store approval for a company not selling their app via the App Store, and satisfying the necessities of mobile marketing in the age of an AppStore filled to the brim with apps.

Forcefield Online is a tool for the modern parent. Their platform provides a mechanism for enabling and shutting off access to the web based on the time of day or immeadiate need. They can disable and enable apps to carve out space for family time without interference from apps.

The team has an admirable commitment to privacy. They do not sell information to third parties. They are exceedingly up front to the children and teens that they're in the system, and that tracking is occurring. 

For this project, Rowdy Labs created an entirely separate browser for iOS. This works on both iPad and iPhone. We also created a separate parental tracking and control application. 

The parental control app, Forcefield Parent, allows the parent to set timelines for web access, permit certain web pages to be always accessible (such as a school homework site). It also allows parents to selectively grant requests from their kids to view certain pages, completely unlock the internet for time windows, and to alert them when the child is using the internet at night. This information is all collected and displayed as well in a dashboard to verify kids aren't getting into trouble with the amount of browsing they are doing. The app also monitors and reports facebook and instagram activity (again, with the kid's knowledge, and clear indications monitoring is occurring).

Kids use Forcefield Child. It is a fully featured browser. It replaces Safari on the phone and allows a child to get to their school websites or more while keeping a log of where the child goes. This list is emailed to parents every morning in addition to showing up in the parent app live. 

The app features bookmarks the child has added while using the app, a pre-vetted list of child friendly sites, a list of websites the parents have added/approved,  dialogs to request time unfettered (but still tracked) internet usage for situations like research for homework.

There was considerable asynchrony and caching of permissions in this app, as well as challenges of defeating the evasion attempts of ingenious 12 year olds everywhere.

Part of the challenge of this app was to move from an experimental, funding oriented product to a well architected, permenant engineering-oriented product. In addition, there was training sessions and reviews for the design staff on the Apple Human Interface guidelines as well as how the iOS ecosystem constructs screens. This allowed design staff to make more approachable designs that were familiar to iOS users. 

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Some of Our Work

Your success story could be described here as proudly as these other apps. Don't worry if you don't have the details worked out, the design ready, etc. Contact us, and let us know you're thinking about it, and we'll keep you on track. 

There are over a dozen steps required to create even the simplest app.

We guide you through each step of the complex process: You will become a skilled operator of your app's systems and will understand how to look and see that your app is working to achieve your goals.