Mobile is eating the world - smartphones outsold PC's for the first time in 2011 and it is estimated that a quarter of the world's population will have a smartphone by 2016. With the proliferation of smartphones comes the demand for new mobile applications. As a developer building custom applications on ServiceNow mobile shouldn't be an afterthought. The capabilities of smartphones - location, camera, touch ID to name just a few can open up a whole world of possibilities on the types of apps you can build and the user experience you can deliver. The good news is that you have multiple options to build mobile apps with ServiceNow

1) Take advantage of the smartphone interface in the platform - The smartphone interface provides functionality to make your application functionality accessible in a mobile friendly fashion. The form designer additionally allows you to define mobile specific views. This may be sufficient for many custom applications where the focus is on enabling users of the applications to access a subset of the functionality easily through their mobile devices.

2) Build a native mobile application - These are applications that are custom built for a specific platform - iOS, Android etc. and access ServiceNow through APIs. This approach has the advantage that the user experience and application functionality can be highly optimized by taking advantage of the capabilities of the device. The disadvantage of this approach is the cost and complexity - developers will have to code to native APIs of these platforms and if multiple platforms need to be supported, it would mean building the application on each of the platform.

3) Build once on a container using HTML5, deploy to any OS - this approach is sometimes also called the hybrid approach. Essentially, developers build on top of a container that abstracts away the differences in mobile OS and makes device capabilities available in an uniform manner. Developers can write standard HTML5 code (JavaScript, CSS etc.) and call ServiceNow APIs to build the application. Apache Cordova is a popular open source container that supports this style of development.

This year at #CreatorCon, Nabil Enayet a senior solutions consultant with Evergreen Systems is leading a hands on workshop to build a Conference Companion app using Apache Cordova and ServiceNow. In teaching you how to build this app, you will learn how to access the device camera, location and contact list with simple javascript commands, and synchronize data to and from a ServiceNow instance. He will also be covering general mobile design principles.

If you are interested in attending, please sign up for this workshop at CreatorCon using the session builder. If you have additional questions for Nabil Enayet please post them below.