For the fun of it, I’ve decided to attempt to learn how to create an some apps for tablet devices. As it turns out, it’s not too difficult (well, for Android anyway. I haven’t been able to try for iOS yet).
OK, so it’s not entirely for my own fun. Like many schools, the use of tablet devices has risen dramatically in the past few years, and our school is planning on rolling out our own lot too. The main problem that I’ve found is that these devices are designed to be personal, but most of the time they will be shared between classes in schools. This leads to the difficulty of storing and accessing files.
While there are many questions about this, there doesn’t seem to be an easy or cheap way to get files to / from tablet devices to users home areas or shared network drives. However, we currently have Home Access Plus+ set up for our school, which is a fantastic piece of web software that allows access to your files from the Internet. If you need a cheap (read: free) way to allow access to student and staff files, you should seriously have a look at this.
Anyway, there is an API that HAP+ uses, which means that as long as you have a connection to the Internet, the files are available. This means that there is a way to create a native app for tablets that can connect to the HAP+ server and list, download and upload the network files.
How well this will work in the end, I have no idea. But, you can have a look at the codebase (Android, iOS), webpage and the relevant store pages (Android [soon], iOS [soon]).
Here goes…