When business leaders and employees think about the bring-your-own-device trend, more often than not, they envision a worker leveraging the mobility and access offered by a smartphone. While it's safe to say that the majority of today's professionals utilize their smartphone for work, there is also an increasing number of individuals benefiting from tablet use within BYOD initiatives.
Tablets bring all the advantages of a smartphone in a bigger, more usable platform - especially when it comes to completing projects. Checking one's email on a 4-inch screen is one thing, but when an employee needs to input data into a spreadsheet, or type up a proposal, a tablet is simply the tool for the job.
In this way, increasing tablet use is furthering BYOD initiatives in offices everywhere, while also boosting staff members' mobile capabilities.
USA Today contributor Jim Dillon noted that as tablet use rises, the days of being confined to a cubicle could be numbered.
"Work is an activity, not a place," Phil Go, Woolpert Inc. CIO, told Dillon. "We're eliminating the barrier of having to be in a physical office to be productive."
However, in order to best harness the benefits tablet utilization can offer, administrators must provide the right tools for the job, including mobile apps geared specifically for tablet users.
Tablet app development trend: Responsive design through HTML5
Designing for the tablet platform presents new advantages and challenges versus creating a program for a smartphone. Tablet users operate their devices differently and increasingly expect a richer, fuller experience when utilizing software on their devices in comparison to the same app on their smartphone.
When organizations seek to develop an app for their company's tablet users, some of the best approaches involve current development trends. CMSWire contributor Scott Mendenhall noted that one of the main changes - and top trends - with tablet app development is the larger screen which allows for the inclusion of more content. Developers are increasingly creating more responsive, well-supplied designs for tablet programs, especially with the use of HTML5 form.
"Responsive design is being widely adopted and has been made possible by specialized JavaScript libraries, HTML5 and CSS frameworks that optimize the user experience around the resolution of the user's device and viewport," Mendenhall wrote.
Mendenhall stated that many developers will start with the framework of a smartphone app and add content to fill out the available screen space, providing a more lush end-user experience. In this way, using HTML5 form - which functions across different devices and operating systems - makes the most sense. By leveraging this component suite, developers can speed their time to market and avoid having to recode programs to operate on different platforms.
"When it comes to mobile, if they're not using HTML5, people are missing the greater point," Marshall Saffer, MIK Fund Solutions COO, told Waters Technology. "The only way to survive is to rewrite this stuff and that requires time and money."
In fact, Saffer said HTML5 is utilized for his company's internal apps, allowing developers to easily migrate functionalities from smartphones to tablets. This better arms all BYOD users and provides a unified experience and easy access to mission-critical content across all devices employees use.
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