Experience Sampler

Experience Sampler is an open-source smartphone app compatible with both Android and iOS devices. It was designed using Apache Cordova™. Cordova is an open-source library of device application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable developers to use functions native to devices, such as the camera and local notification system, using web technologies, like HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript, instead of native code (Java for Android apps and Objective-C for iOS apps). Thus, Cordova allows apps to be developed for multiple platforms with minimal changes to the code. In fact, there is only one difference between the Experience Sampler code for Android OS and iOS!

To implement the features of Experience Sampler, we used various plugins created by Cordova: console, dialogs, splashscreen, vibration, and device. For the signaling system, we used the local-notifications plugin created by katzer. Experience Sampler also uses the jQuery Mobile web framework, which is a Javascript library that makes mobile apps more accessible for all smartphone and tablet devices, and mustache, a template system used to create a survey question templates.