In conversations with clients, we continue to hear how important single sign-on is to their enterprise mobile application strategy. According to a study earlier this year by Kelton Research 250 IT Managers, 21% of respondents indicated that they plan to deploy 20, or more, enterprise applications to their organization this year.

In order for enterprises to realize the productivity gains factored into the investment decisions for those applications, IT Managers must explore options for enabling single sign-on for their users. In this post, we'll outline a mobile single sign-on (mSSO) pattern for enterprise iOS applications.

When Apple added cut/copy/paste support in iOS 3.0, it also provided developers the ability to customize the popover menu via UIMenuController. Unfortunately, that initial implementation required non-trivial preparations by developers just to change the menu:

JSON has taken the data-interchange world by storm with its' lightweight, easy to understand format. The explosion of mobile apps, and their consumption of network based data, helped fuel JSON's growth. CapTech's recommended approach for web services utilizes JSON as the interchange format.

While JSON has been around for several years - RFC4627 was published in July of 2006 - working with JSON in an iOS project required that you download one of the many frameworks and integrate it into your project. My personal choice has been SBJSON - https://github.com/stig/json-framework.

Every iOS app should be thoroughly tested in a variety of network conditions, from a high-bandwidth WiFi connection down to a data connection with a single measly bar of Edge or GPRS coverage. Finding a good connection is usually the easiest, you're almost guaranteed to have one at work or home, but reliably testing an intermittent or poor connection is much harder. The obvious way to do this is to take note of coverage dead spots as you go about your day and return to those locations to test the app, but that can be time consuming and unreliable. However, if you have Max OS X 10.7 you can simulate any network connection without even leaving your desk.

Problem statement 

Network communications from an iOS device are easy, but handling errors on those connections is not. As an app developer I like to see results quickly and leave the edge condition details till later so I quickly wire in network operations and plan on handling all of the error conditions later. For web applications I can usually get away with this approach because the network connectivity from a stationary laptop is mostly reliable.  In a mobile app this approach will get me in trouble. When I do get around to adding exception handling routines I end up in a situation where I need to refactor my network code significantly or hack in less than optimal approaches to handle exceptions. 

The hardware capabilities of iOS devices have improved dramatically in the two most recent generations, which has helped fuel the growth of increasingly complex apps featuring augmented reality and photorealistic gaming. While such advances are great for the iOS platform, it is important for developers to consider older generations of iPhones and iPod touches that are still a significant portion of the installed base. This post will cover some important perfomance tweaks to improve the user experience on these slower devices.

Gartner predicts that 30% of all BI will be consumed on mobile devices by 2013.  With the amount of interest in mobile BI and those kinds of bold predictions you would think it would be easy to understand the options available.  It is not.  There are a lot of things to consider when deciding what mobile BI tool and operating system fits for your organization: