mBook and mPage experience

I've been working for a local college here at Sofia as consultant for a while. The project focuses on utilizing an exisiting Moodle installation with better focus on mobile experience. Initially we will focus on iDevices, (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) because the college plans to deliver iPod Touch devices to some students attending some specific classes. Since Moodle does not have an official add on for mobile experience organizations have to figure out how to provide this functionality to the students. There are limited options

• Create mobile appearance through CSS and tweak Moodle to load that CSS when mobile browser is detected.
• Wait moodle4iphones project to be released.
  
• Install mPage/mBook add on and announce your students to get the app from the AppStore
• Buy custom branding from mTouch and deliver the app to your students free of charge with no server side tweaking

When we first started to investigate the options, that was 4 months ago, our initial intention was to keep an eye on  the progress of moodle4iphones project. The college I'm consulting for does not have technical stuff to support in house development of a mobile CSS and this option seemed fairly effective. moodle4iphones project was announced to be production ready during 2010 but as months passed by the project was extended to provide support for all mobile devices,not just iDevices. But since then there is no release and no sign of progress, so we dropped that option and headed towards other options.

We have been playing with native iOS apps, namely mTouch and mPage and for a while and in this post I will try to share our mPage and mBook experience with you.

When availability of mPage was first announced we felt excited that a free iOS app for Moodle was a great idea and the possibility of solving our problem for free was fantastic. Before mPage was released,  mTouch was the only option and was a paid app. We just installed mPage service on our test server and deployed mPage app to some iPhone and iPod Touch devices. We tested mPage from a students point of view and this experience was a total disappointment. mPage is not a real Moodle application which will help institutions to provide value added service to the students, shortly mPage is a bookmark app with no iDevice optimization. mPage just displays Moodle pages (module pages) in an internal Web Browser (UIWebView) control, no mobile styling or optimization is implemented. You just see what you would see from mobile Safari. mPage just displays list of module headings but the detail pages are rendered in plain format. In the AppStore page of mPage it is written that mPage  supports some file formats, this is not a plus for mPage if you, programatically, load iDevice supported file format in a UIWebView control by definition you can view the file with no extra effort and get zooming for free too.

Recently mPage 1.1 was released and I was suprised that mPage is not a free app any more. You have to pay 0.99 USD for full forum support, by the way forum support is not a big deal worth of 0,99 USD, because the design and layout is mediocre  and is not well organized.

mBook, iPad version of mPage, is also a big disappointment. If you read this post on MoodleNews you can think that mBook is a big innovation and proposes new ways for Moodle on mobiles. That is not also true, we paid 3.99 USD and downloaded that app too, and I can say that mBook provides nothing for 3.99 USD.

In the post it is written that "mBook provides a fully immersive Moodle experience for the iPad". That is not true, mBook just has a split view composed of two parts a list on the left side and details on the right side. List on the left side is simple list and content on the right side is just what is displayed on mobile Safari.

Here is another false sentence "... the app provides a fresh approach to displaying Moodle on an iPad and supports the most Moodle activities and resources compared to any app for iOS in the iTunes app store." That is just wrong I can not see anything fresh and no real support for modules, mBook just displays module pages in an internal UIWebView control, no styling no screen size optimization.

All in all mPage/mBook experience was a total disaster with no positive results. If you want to save money and time I would recommend you to stay away from these two apps. At this time I think I would recommend to the college to stick with mTouch custom branding option because it has lots of advantages compared to mPage/mBook, by the way I watched their mTouch for iPad video which seems to promise really fresh approach for displaying Moodle on iPad.