News

Atimi clients enjoy the benefit of Orchard - a development framework that provides a quick way to implement some of the most commonly used features of iPhone and iPod Touch apps. Using this platform as a base expedites development and gives you an opportunity to add some great features to enhance your app and get to market faster with a competitive edge.

Orchard is currently focused on iPhone and iTouch, but we will evolve the framework across other mobile platforms as demand warrants. We provide regular updates to our clients on the Orchard road map. Current functionality includes the following features:

Send to a Friend

• Exiting your app to send an email is a sure-fire way to lose your user, so Orchard’s Send to a Friend feature is designed to keep your users inside your app when sending emails. It provides users with slick access to email and SMS messaging that simultaneously promotes your company and your new product.
• The architecture supports sending rich HTML emails including attachments from your own email marketing system. Users have the familiar access to the Contacts application on the phone for choosing recipients. This configuration has a Queue Manager for managing messages in the send queue, listing the send status, and providing user notification of message success or failure.

Photo Gallery

• Almost every app can use a powerful photo component, and Orchard provides a similar experience to the Photo application resident on the device. You can use the gallery as an application feature, or just to add more depth to your application.
• Photos can be stored locally, or downloaded remotely from a web server or feed. All photo views are supported, including list view, thumbnail view, full image view, and photo details view. Every image you provide has a full photo credit and description.
• Orchard also has all the user controls and gesture capabilities people expect from a polished iPhone application, and the added ability to save an image as iPhone wallpaper if you desire.

State Management

• Orchard is designed to overcome some of the current limitations of the iPhone SDK, such as applications being forced to quit when there’s an incoming call that is accepted, an SMS is received, or the battery dies. Ideally, you would want to have your app handle interruptions gracefully and we have worked to accommodate that as well as possible within the confines of the SDK.
• The State Management feature equips your application with the ability to remember where the user was when the application quit, so when they re-launch your application they resume where they left off thereby providing the most seamless experience possible.

Ad Support

• Free applications generate income through ads. To cost-justify the ads to advertisers, you need to know how popular your app is, and who is using it.
• Orchard is integrated with an ad package that includes usage data collection, and can quickly provide your app with revenue from day one of launch

Metrics

• All applications need metrics to prove the value of the app, and Apple only provides you with the bare minimum – the number of times your app has been downloaded.
• Atimi can integrate with many metrics packages, or roll your own – however the quickest way is to use one that Orchard has already been integrated with. The Atimi Orchard framework includes Medialets, a powerful metrics and Ad package, as well as Omniture, the leading enterprise analytics engine.

“About” Window

• You need somewhere put your terms of use, copyright, and any other information you need your users to be able to refer to. Orchard provides a clean interface for your users to flip over the splash screen to see what your lawyers require.