Greetings, ballroom dancing enthusiasts!

I am pleased to announce that we are in the beginning stages of developing an app that will bring ballroom dancing to your iPhone!

Imagine being able to learn a new dance step by watching an instructional video held in the palm of your hand! This will become the ultimate tool, bridging the gap between learning on the dance floor, watching videos in your living room or office, and reading the technique book.

Right now the app is in its infancy, starting out life as a tool for iPhone only. It's currently in a format known as a "web app", which means that you obtain it through your iPhone web browser rather than the App Store. And this very first version features only the Variation of the Week.

To view the app, launch Safari on your iPhone and navigate to:

https://mobile.ballroomdancers.com/

To turn it into a "Web App" with a shortcut icon right on your iPhone start screen, look for the "plus" symbol at the bottom of your Safari screen and click it. Then select "Add to Home Screen".

If it proves to be popular, we will invest more time and resources to upgrade it to an official iPhone app, port it to other platforms & phones (e.g. Android, Windows), and expand the contents to include the entire learning center, including Learn the Dances, the dance dictionary, online lessons, and more.

While we're in the beta testing stages, we will leave this domain open to all browsers. So for the time being, you can view the site with any browser on any phone or computer. However, results may vary. I am especially interested to hear about how it looks on other smartphones. Note: If you view the site on a desktop computer, you will get the best results by resizing your browser to emulate a smartphone.

I hope you enjoy the new app. Please send us your feedback here!

Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
www.ballroomdancers.com

I have an Itouch and it works great. It is handy having the video and the leader and follower's parts whereever I have WiFi.

We would like Android also.

Do me a favor... I don't have an Android-based phone to test it on. Tell me if it works at all on your phone as-is. Does it fit the page? Can you see everything? Do the man's and lady's parts switch to chart view when you rotate to landscape? And most of all, can you view the video?

Thanks for your help!

Regards,
Jonathan

Hi Jonathan,

I have a Droid 2 and it fits perfectly on the screen. It doesn't have video...I'm not sure if it is supposed to or not.

It looks good!

huh...some dummy (me) didn't for whatever reason didn't get that it was supposed to be running video...promise not to be this stupid all the time....duh

Most of it works except for not discovering the video and no change in content (only line wrapping) on rotation.

The android emulator you can get from google would work for testing both issues.

The emulator only plays the sound of video files it downloads but a real phone plays the iphone video if the direct url to it is manually entered.

Good to know the video format is compatible with Android. However, we can't post direct links to it, so I'll have to figure out how to work out the embedding. I tried using the Android emulator for another web app I wrote, but it didn't seem to work very well. I had a friend test the app on his Android phone, and it looked nothing like it did in the emulator. So I might have to just borrow someone's phone for a day.

After doing a bit of reading, I found a solution that *might* work for getting the video to play on your phone. The poster image won't show a play icon of any kind, but apparently if you tap on the image, the video should play. Let me know if it works.

Thanks!

Regards,
Jonathan

The emulator is no more different from the phones than the wide variety of android phones are from each other.
At the moment, the problem is the html5 video tag, which is not universally supported, meaning that there is no image at all showing.

"No image" meaning no poster image on the video container, or no video container at all?

I did discover one more thing about Android having to do with file extensions, which may have fixed the problem. If you don't mind, would you take one more look?

Thanks!

--J