The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The upstairs bathroom sink faucet is the most incredible thing in my house. I am 100% serious.
The other faucets don’t measure up: the kitchen doesn’t have the right pressure, the downstairs bathroom has H and C knobs that don’t mix the temperatures right, and the outside hose faucet has no position between off and Old Faithful. But the upstairs bathroom sink is perfect. I never think about the mechanics of operating it; I just get water the way I want.
The feel is smooth. I know right where to turn it to get a crisp, cold, toothbrush-rinsing stream. It resists my effort just enough to stay exactly where I leave it, but moves easily to another temp/pressure spot. The aeration: perfect for washing my hands. I swear – without any scientific proof – that the water tastes better than other faucets in the house. I am a truly lazy person, but I’ll get a glass from the kitchen and walk all the way to the bathroom sink to fill it.
It’s also incredible because it hides vast infrastructure. Think of the thousands of tons of machinery and human effort that go into getting water from some mountain spring to my faucet. Treatment plants, towers, miles of pipe, my water heater and the infrastructure to power it…it is no small feat to get water out of the faucet exactly when and how I want it.
Precise control. Simple, elegant design. Abstraction of powerful infrastructure. These things make using that faucet a truly tranquil machine experience. I’m inspired to write the follow-on novel to the above source: Zen and the Art of Washing Your Hands.
Using Apple devices with the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS produces the same tranquility. You can now create beautiful mobile experiences on iOS that breathe life into powerful SAP business application processing.
Precise Control
Anyone who has used an iPad or iPhone knows: there’s the web app experience, and then there’s native. A web application is responsive, flexible, and runs anywhere. It’s the right choice for lots of use cases, and provides developers a platform that people all over the world can access.
But native! Native apps take pixel-perfect UI control and marry it with pure low-level speed. Creating a native app takes a different type of design and engineering effort, and users reap the rewards with smartly-designed power. The Fiori for iOS UI kit provides native controls that slide right into Xcode, so that you can drag and drop them into your application design.
For developers, this means no more compromise on what the UI is asked to do. JavaScript, as fast as it is today in web applications, still makes your mobile device stutter and pause. With Swift code running against standardized controls, your interface flows quickly to the right answer for your users.
Elegant Design
We know the extreme lengths that the Apple goes to in producing superb experiences. Why do you think that the Google Pixel looks so much like an iPhone? The designers of Fiori for iOS understand this, and have published a set of design guidelines. Look at the UI elements section on that page. They tell a story of user focus, care, and graphic beauty.
For developers, this means the consumer experience of great visual design can be done for the enterprise. Instead of hating to open their work apps, your users can focus in on what they need to do and come away from the experience more engaged. Imagine if enterprise apps were not simply endured, but enjoyed. Available to help is the SAP Fiori for iOS Mentor, letting you scope out and generate custom code for any project.
Powerful Infrastructure
Under the hood of the SDK is a set of incredibly useful tools to make your iOS native application integrate seamlessly with SAP Cloud Platform. They’re geared to making cloud platform capabilities quickly available. This is where the smooth feel of the UI meets the power of your SAP business applications. Dive right into making offline-enabled apps. Give your users push notifications for important business events. These utilities – and others – run in the cloud platform in a way that just works.
Developers get a huge win: your OData APIs for Fiori (and other uses) can be quickly leveraged to make the backend of your iOS application. The SDK makes handy iOS-side libraries that leverage your OData entities, and SAP Cloud Platform wraps those APIs in safe, secure access protocols.
Go
Leverage the SDK’s precision, elegance, and power. Design for people to do exactly what they want. Match smooth response to vast infrastructure.
Put this in people’s hands, and watch tranquility happen.
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