Development of an iPhone business application

The smartphones of today more and more have all the abilities of mobile computers. In fact they are small computers with powerful processors, abundant memory and ubiquitous internet access. Nonetheless they are restricted in terms of display resolution and size, battery life and input options. This raises the discussion whether smartphones could be used for business applications in the real world. The advantages and possibilities seam obvious. Smartphones with their ubiquitous network connections can easily be carried around and could be used as clients in distributed systems or might even run their own applications independently anywhere. Nowadays the iPhone is one of the most advanced smartphones on the market. It is equipped with a 600MHz processor, up to 512Mb embedded RAM and a flash drive with a maximum volume of 32Gb to maintain applications and data. In this diploma thesis we want to analyse if the iPhone with its abilities and restrictions can provide enough resources and input options for business applications. Therefore we will port Harzing' s Publish or Perish, a desktop application which parses google scholar data for author impact analysis, to the iPhone. Different issues like parsing techniques, data processing and storing shall be compared and discussed. Furthermore the multi-touch screen as an input device and the restricted screen size should be studied. The aim of this diploma thesis is to gain knowledge about how to design iPhone applications for business use in terms of architecture and user interface design.