Creating a Mobile App for Android Devices

Robo­Help (2015 release) makes it easy for tech­ni­cal writ­ers to gen­er­ate a mobile app for smart­phones and tablets run­ning iOS and Android.

You may con­sid­er cre­at­ing a mobile app for the fol­low­ing reasons:

• Your users have an inter­mit­tent con­nec­tion to the Inter­net: Once the mobile app is installed on a smart­phone or tablet, it no longer requires a wire­less or mobile con­nec­tion to view the con­tent. In con­trast, HTML5 help sys­tems require a brows­er, which usu­al­ly needs an Inter­net con­nec­tion to view the con­tent (although some browsers, such as Google Chrome, can run in offline mode).
• Speed: Users will get the answers they need faster using a mobile app ver­sus launch­ing a brows­er, nav­i­gat­ing to your help page, and wait­ing for the con­tent to appear.
• High­er vis­i­bil­i­ty: A mobile app is installed on a user’s smart­phone or tablet, mak­ing it easy to locate and launch. In con­trast, an online help sys­tem is typ­i­cal­ly includ­ed in a soft­ware pack­age and may not be easy to find or open.

This pro­ce­dure explains how to use Robo­Help (2015 release) to cre­ate a mobile app for an Android phone or tablet. It also assumes you have some famil­iar­i­ty with cre­at­ing online help sys­tems and under­stand the basics of down­load­ing and installing mobile apps on Android smart­phones and tablets.

Creating a Mobile App

1. In Robo­Help (2015 release), open a project that you want to con­vert to a mobile app.
2. From the Out­put menu, click Mobile App.

3. In the MobileApp Set­tings dia­log box, click Appli­ca­tion Details.
4. In the Mobile App Details sec­tion, fill out the fol­low­ing fields:

a) Pack­age: A name that will unique­ly iden­ti­fy the mobile app such as “com.adobe.myapp.” This name is used by Phone­Gap to iden­ti­fy the appli­ca­tion. Phone­Gap is a mobile devel­op­ment frame­work to cre­ate mobile apps on iOS, Android, and Win­dows Phone. Phone­Gap’s web site is https://build.phonegap.com/

b) Ver­sion: The Phone­Gap ver­sion num­ber for the mobile app (for exam­ple, ver­sion 0.01).

c) Ver­sion­Code (Android): The Android ver­sion num­ber for the mobile app. If you upload your app to Android’s Google Play (the offi­cial app store for Android smart­phones and tablets), a user will be noti­fied of updates to your app every time you update the ver­sion number.

d) Title: The title of the appli­ca­tion that will dis­play on a mobile device.

e) Icon: The icon of the appli­ca­tion that will dis­play on a mobile device. For more infor­ma­tion about the rec­om­mend­ed icon sizes, see GitHub’s web page.

f) Splash Screen: The splash screen that will dis­play when the mobile app is opened on a mobile device. For more infor­ma­tion about the rec­om­mend­ed splash screen sizes, see GitHub’s web page.

5. In the PhoneGap/Adobe Cre­den­tial sec­tion, type your Adobe User Name and Pass­word. As Phone­Gap is owned by Adobe, you can use the same web site cre­den­tials that you use when down­load­ing any Adobe prod­uct. After typ­ing your cre­den­tials, click Test Con­nec­tion to con­firm the Phone­Gap con­nec­tion. I found that this dia­log box didn’t rec­og­nize my cre­den­tials until I first logged on to PhoneGap’s web site.
6. In the Plat­form sec­tion, select the Android check box.

7. In the Mobile App Set­tings dia­log box, click Con­tent.

a) In the Table of Con­tents drop­down list, select the table of con­tents you want to use for the mobile app.

b) If you cre­at­ed an index, in the Index drop­down list, select the index you want to use.

c) If you cre­at­ed a glos­sary, in the Glos­sary drop­down list, select the glos­sary you want to use.

d) Click Save and Gen­er­ate.

Robo­Help (2015 release) gen­er­ates the mobile app.

8. Click View Result in the Result: Mobile App out­put has been gen­er­at­ed suc­cess­ful­ly dia­log box.

Downloading the Mobile App

The next step explains how to get the mobile app loaded onto your Android tablet or smartphone.

To down­load the mobile app to your Android phone:

1. In your phone’s or tablet’s brows­er, type the URL that appears in the Mobile App Out­put dia­log box.
   
2. Alter­na­tive­ly, you can down­load the mobile app using a QR Reader.

a) Down­load a QR read­er to your Android phone. I down­loaded the QR Code Read­er from Google Play.

b) Using the QR read­er, scan the QR code in the Mobile App Out­put dia­log box.

The mobile app down­loads to your tablet or smartphone.

Viewing the Mobile App

Once the mobile app has been down­loaded and installed on your com­put­er, tap the mobile app you cre­at­ed. I haven’t attempt­ed to doc­u­ment down­load­ing and installing the app, due to the dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Android.

I cre­at­ed a sim­ple help app for a fic­ti­tious prod­uct called InfoPath. I cre­at­ed the icon in Snag­it and then import­ed the image into Robo­Help (2015 release). Here’s a screen shot of the down­loaded app on my phone:

Here is an exam­ple of how the mobile app dis­plays when I open it.

As an expe­ri­enced tech­ni­cal writer, I found cre­at­ing and down­load­ing a mobile app to be fast and straightforward.