New App Bridges Communication Gap Between Devs and Small Biz

Small businesses today have many useful sites and products to help them get started with mobile app development, but this information might still feel useless if you don't understand JavaScript or HTML5.

Tiggzi is a new app that hopes to level the playing field between highly experienced developers and tech-savvy business owners — and save companies tons of money in the process.

Exadel, the creative force behind Tiggzi, is a mobile software application development company that counts Fortune 500 companies among its list of clients. What started as a resource for major corporate companies has provided Exadel with the knowledge to create software for like-minded developers and small business owners.

Tiggzi is an app-builder that has the sophistication to meet developers' needs while maintaining enough simplicity to increase efficiency for small business owners. The company asserts that visual editing is the most resourceful and rapid method of app development.

"Developers are always looking for the most efficient environment for the work they want to do," says David Schoenbach, VP of product management at Exadel. "This has broad usage and this is the sort of thing that can enhance the base of people who can develop a product."

Tiggzi sees small business as a key piece of the growing eco-system for apps. The company hopes to contribute to that growth by providing a better way for developers to communicate with their clients.

"Developers are the way small businesses will solve their app dilemmas," says Schoenbach. "So we've designed a tool that strongly meets the needs of professional developers who will come in and work much more rapidly than they could with other tools."

For developers, choosing the right operating system to host an app has been a common issue for app-building, but Tiggzi lets you create apps for iOS, Android — and in the very near future, Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

You can export an APK file for Android, a binary file for iOS and various other source codes, as well as grab raw HTML to upload it as a web app.

Tiggzi is cloud-based, so there's nothing to download — you can access a project from whatever machine you're on. The platform is part of a collaboration server that allows multiple developers to work on the same project simultaneously. This is useful for small businesses because it simplifies the editing process.

One of the most important parts of mobile development, whether you're building the app or the client, is prototyping. You can test your app in real time along the way with Tiggzi, but it's a complete app-builder, not just a prototyping tool. You can create the whole thing from beginning to end rather than just a mock-up that would need to be implemented by a developer.

The platform also makes it very simple to access REST APIs, a plug-in architecture which enables re-use of data-driven components, as well as combinations of REST APIs coupled with pre-mapped UI components. For example, The Twitter REST API methods allow developers to access core Twitter data, including update timelines, status data and user information. The company will soon begin rolling out a services catalog of pre-packaged API plug-ins.

"A company might have images, media resources, video, text data resources or databases that it wants out to the public," says Schoenbach. "If they do it through the website, they'll get some traction, but if they do it through an API, they'll be crowd-sourcing all of the developers who then want to build apps with their data."

What do you think about companies providing better forms of communication between developers and small business owners? Do you hope to see more cloud-based app builders? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL