Geo Coded Address Support in Fashion Mobile

One of the biggest lessons learned over the many years of software development is that if you aren't listening to your customers about what they want, you are completely missing the mark.  This is a rather simple point that so many times gets missed.  That's why I am proud to work on the Fashion Mobile  team at Syndicated Methods (stepping back for readers that are not familiar with Fashion Mobile, it is a specially tailored instance of MobilePipes for the fashion industry).  From inception, this product has incorporated features that have helped our customers solve problems.  We take in feedback, survey our users, and try to pick a couple of the most sought after features.  Doing so ensures that we are adding valuable additions that our customers want.

Recently, one of our sales representatives was visiting a client talking through a recent Fashion Mobile installation.  The topic of conversation was along the lines of how are things going, what would you change, is the product satisfying your needs.  This particular client used Fashion Mobile to fulfill their own sales process.   We designed an application that allowed their sales representatives to demonstrate their clothing lines using their iPhone.  The tool was very well received by the client, with one major exception.  Along with client information the sales representatives found it rather cumbersome to have to switch out of their application while on the road to find directions to the client site.  They wanted some way of staying within Fashion Mobile to find their customers on a map.

This sounded similar to feedback that we had received from other customers.  So, keeping true to the content in this article, we rolled it into Fashion Mobile.  Customers of Fashion Mobile now have a way to work with mass Geo Coded locations within the product.  There are two pieces that we have rolled in.  The first piece is the ability to load Geo Coded locations into the Fashion Mobile Control Panel.  With the latest release of Fashion Mobile, customers can now locate and save Geo Coded addresses for consumption on the iPhone client.  The second piece is a new Module in Fashion Mobile for retrieving those Geo Coded locations.  With this new Module, iPhone developers can retrieve multiple pairs of Latitude / Longitude pairs that allow for any development pattern that the iPhone supports.  Examples of this are dropping a point on the map, providing driving directions, finding distances between points, for example.   As just a little taste, the following screen shot shows you what the Control Panel looks like for this new feature: