Basic Development Questions

[Gerto]

Hi all,

I'm very new to development for iPad and am a bit stuck here:
For a company event, they want to allow people to fill in a questionnaire on an iPad. There will be 20 iPads and they will not have internet access.

I've done something similar on netbooks a while back and there I just installed a local server and did it with HTML / PHP / MySQL , but seems like such a thing will definitely be not possible for iPad.

Can someone give me some tips on the best way to do this?

From what I've already found it seems like it's best to just develop a new application alltogether:
1)It's not an option to jailbreak all the iPads, so I assume I will need a $99 license and then encode to Xcodes of the 20 iPads so that they can all run the program. is this correct?

2)Can all of this be done using Adobe Flash CS5? The application will obviously need to store the results and it should be relatively easy to get all the results afterwards.


I know questions are very basic, but I'm hoping someone will give me some hints here. Thanks in advance!

 

[thewitt]

Flash is not an option

I would not bother to create a custom application for this using Xcode.

Look at the existing database applications available and find one with a decent front end that also allows exporting of the resulting data.

You can do this project in a day this way rather than in weeks...

-t

 

[Gerto]

Thanks for the reply!

Could you please explain why Flash isn't an option? Flash CS5 seems to support developing for iOS.

Will look into the app suggestion, but the questionnaire is first coming from designers, so every pixel needs to be exactly like the designers want it, so would have to be extremely customizable.

 

[thewitt]

Maybe they have addressed this, but CS5 did not support the iPad screen size last I looked at it.

In my experience of software development - over 25 years - I've found very few success stories when you let a graphics designer work independently of the software developer.

You should be sitting with them now, with your toolset selected, for the best chance of success.

-t

 

[Lizzy and proud]

There are many poll maker apps but you need wifi to connect all of them maybe you can use a mobile hot spot or mifi

 

[twerppoet]

Non-developer ideas (sorry).

Numbers can create and use a form page for data entry.

Bento, if you also have a Mac with the OS X version of Bento. It would be easy to create and enter the data on the iPad, but you can only get it back off the iPad if you have the OS X version to sync with (its biggest weakness). Oh, and will only sync with two devices at a time. That would probably be a deal buster.

Or one of the other database apps like HanDBase. I haven't used it, so no idea, but it might be worth checking out. No syncing that I know of, but I think it will export to csv.

You'd probably have to export to csv and reimport to a new database to merge the results for all these (possible) solutions.

If you create a PDF form with editable fields PDF Expert may work for you. You can save the files locally, then save them to Dropbox later. Though trying to keep tabs on umpteen individual files is probably not a good solution, now that I think on it.

 

[Acap]

Ipad Programmer Miami

Better to seek the help of Ipad Programmer or app developer to make changes and installation with out making any error in your Ipad.

 

[DrHouse]

Quick and easy solution: install a wifi router, a PC computer with a web server and some web apps that can compile the information. Then simply make the iPads join the wifi network and use the web apps. And it will be a lot faster to do since you already got the experience with the net books.

And all the info will be kept on the server, not the individual iPads...

VicoPad addict!