With every start to the New Year a host of resolutions are made: take up a new hobby, spend less time at work, get fit…… the list goes on and on. One of the resolutions that we are able to help with is to get rid of that ever expanding waistline.

MMT recently worked with Orion Books to develop the Anna Richardson Body Blitz app. Anna’s Richardson’s Body Blitz app contains a range of information including:

• The Five Rules for guaranteed weight loss
• The two week Body Blitz plan- a 3 meals a day plan
• Step by step recipes to accompany the plan
• The Panic Button- to keep you on the path to weight loss. This is customizable so that the user can select their own motivational picture to appear when this is selected, to keep them on the diet. Anna also provides practical solutions on the dieting issue that the user is panicking about, to help keep them calm.
• Weight Tracker visual graph
• Photo Diary – An area where you can keep track of how you look as you follow the diet.
• Exclusive intro film from Anna
• Ideas for snacks, drinks and eating out.

As you can see from the list above the content for the app is a combination of flat content as well as several interactive elements; such as the weight tracker charting functionality, photo diary and panic button. We therefore had to find a tool to develop this that allowed for this functionality, within the timeframe that we had for development.

We decided to develop the app in ELIPS studio. Whilst this app has been developed specifically for iphone use, ELIPS studio is a plug-in for Flex that allows us to create native applications for multiple mobile platforms (Apple, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian). Therefore, because the app was built in ELIPS it is possible to repurpose the app at a later date for use on another platform, should this be required.

ELIPS was an early forerunner for a solution for building apps across multiple platforms, however it wasn’t until Apple changed their developer terms in September 2010 that apps developed within ELIPS studio would be approved for use on the app store- therefore it is only in the last couple of months that this has become a viable development option for iphone apps.

There are two Anna Richardson Body Blitz apps that we have developed which are available on the app store; the first is the free lite version which gives you a taste of the content within the full version, whilst the full Anna Richardson Body Blitz app is available for purchase.

Bio: Rana Sezgin is one of our Account Managers based in the London office. She works with a range of clients and projects from design agencies through to major publishing companies.