DXTREME Courier App - Free iOS App helps you deploy and test mobile apps

Update: An Android version of the Courier App is available now in Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.devexpress.dxtreme.courier

Download the new DXTREME Courier App from the Apple App Store to easily deploy and test your mobile apps for the iPhone or iPad.

DXTREME

DXTREME is our new set of tools to help you build multi-channel apps. Or a set of client-side libraries that provide widgets, framework and more to build hybrid mobile apps and desktop web apps using one HTML 5, JavaScript, Knockout, and jQuery. Learn more here: DXTREME announcement page.

Problem: Testing mobile web apps

It can be difficult to test mobile web apps because of deployment. Typically in Visual Studio, a developer can just hit F5 and have Visual Studio launch an instance of their app locally. This provides the benefits of debugging and seeing a near perfect preview of the final deployed app.

For mobile web apps, testing is a challenge because mobile browsers do not behave the same on desktop browsers. Some desktop emulators are good but the best way to test a mobile web app would be on the actual mobile device.

Solution: DXTREME Courier delivers

Our new Apple approved DXTREME Courier app allows you to test your hybrid mobile web app using your iOS device (iPhone, iPad, etc.). It's called Courier because it helps you deliver web apps.

The Courier app hosts your DXTREME web app and gives you the ability to experience how your mobile web app will behave on the mobile device, once you deploy it.

And we make it easy to add your web apps to Courier by just scanning a QR Code, which we provide. To get started:

1. Download the app here.

2. Launch the app. After loading, you'll see one entry for an app that is already added to the Courier list.

That entry is for the sample app, DXTravel, which was coded using DXTREME.

Learn more by visiting the DXTravel demo page.

3. Click 'Add' on the App Toolbar to add a new web app to test. This will bring up the camera which allows you to scan a QR Code. It looks like this:

Once you scan this code, it will add and load your web app. Btw, the QR Code above links to the Wikipedia article about QR Codes so I don't actually recommend scanning that particular code, even though the Courier App will load it.

Where does this QR Code come from?

DevExpress provides the QR Code and ability test from your local machine for you! And this is one of my favorite features of DXTREME.

When you create an app using DXTREME inside of Visual Studio 2012, we provide this functionality automatically.

So a typical scenario would like:

1. Create DXTREME web app inside of Visual Studio 2012.

2. Add some views. Hit F5 to run the solution and you'll be presented with the following screen on your desktop web browser:

3. From the Courier app, scan the QR Code on the bottom left side of your browser and it will load the web app that is running on your local machine on your phone! Yes, you'll be able to see a live preview and debug on your mobile device, while the app is running on your local machine.

Amazing, right!?! We've created a special cloud service using Windows Azure to give you this special ability.

PhoneGap Built-In

Our DXTREME Courier app has PhoneGap built in.

This means that your DXTREME web app, running inside of the Courier app, is able to call native functions that are supported by PhoneGap. For example, you can access the camera, GPS, etc.

Secure & Restricted Access

We have also implemented security features into the Courier app. We have restricted the file system and contact list access as potentially dangerous. This means you can't enter or scan ANY url because it is not safe to let it run any app. Currently, you can only display apps from our site or those published through our DXProxy service.

User App Registry

In final release version of the Courier app, you will have your own "App Registry". This registry will list the "official" URLs for the user's apps and those apps will be listed in Courier after login. In the current beta version, this feature is not published yet and which is why the "Login" feature does not work.

Download the free Courier app from the Apple App Store and easily test your DXTREME mobile web apps.

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