mrc goes responsive with a new website and m-Power applications

October 2014 · Oak Brook, IL

Today, software tool developer mrc announces the launch of new, responsive design capabilities for m-Power users. m-Power is a web application development platform that businesses use across their organizations. It creates web applications such as report-writing, Business Intelligence, executive dashboards, customer portals, and mobile applications to name a few.

What is responsive design?

Responsive design is a web design approach that lets web sites/apps adapt to the device on which they're viewed. As illustrated in figure 1, a responsively-designed website will adjust itself to fit the dimensions of the user's device.

Why use responsive design?

As smartphone and tablet adoption rates climb, the idea of a "typical user" is vanishing. Businesses can no longer build web apps/sites for PC users, as they did in the past. These days, users access web applications on a variety of devices (PCs/tablets/smartphones) using many different browsers. Responsive design helps businesses adapt to this new reality.

With these new enhancements, mrc brings responsive design to m-Power users. Now, m-Power users can:

Automatically generate responsive web apps

mrc rebuilt m-Power's most popular templates using responsive design. Web applications created with these templates:

• Will adapt to any device: m-Power users can now instantly generate responsive web applications that adapt to smartphones, tablets, and PCs, without any extra development effort on their part. It's all built right into m-Power.
• Are optimized for touch-based interfaces: Using larger buttons and input fields, these templates are optimized for use both on touch-based and mouse-based interfaces.
• Will load quickly on mobile devices: Often relying on a slower web connection, web pages typically load slower on a mobile browser. With this in mind, m-Power's new templates use scalable vector graphic (SVG) icons, a lightweight, scalable alternative to traditional image-based icons. SVG icons require less bandwidth than images, resulting in smaller applications that load easily on slower web connections.

Access a fully responsive website

Redesigned from the ground up, mrc's new website is fully responsive. This helps m-Power users easily access the site from any device and perform necessary tasks, such as submit help tickets via the customer portal, register for new training classes, learn about new enhancements, and more.

In addition to the new responsive capabilities, m-Power still offers an adaptive design option for building mobile web apps. This approach automatically generates multiple presentation layers during the build process, one for PCs, one for tablets, and another for smartphones. Logic placed in the application identifies the user's device and displays the correct layer. The optional, adaptive approach provides more control than the responsive option, and is better suited for more complex applications.

"We're seeing a fundamental shift in the world of web application development," says Tyler Wassell, mrc's Manager of Software Development. "This move to responsive design positions our customers for the new, mobile-focused world of the future."

###