The app works on the majority of phones with modern browsers: it has been tested on iPhone, Blackberry, Android and larger Nokia phones. We believe we're OK on Palm webOS after some initial teething problems.
Here are some of the features:
- The app works very fast. Clever encoding of the data makes the app work OK even when the mobile network is running slow.
- You get the usual Bachtrack ability to search by composer, work, choreographer, performer, country, city, venue or any combination of these.
- If you have a phone with GPS and browser support for it, the app will also let you search for events within a given distance of your present location.
- The design is clean and simple, specially adapted to a small screen. The text is a size you can read, even when there are a lot of events on a page. The buttons are a size you can press, even with large fingers.
- It's exceptionally easy to pick what to search for using the "What, When, Where and Who" buttons: you get an immediate list of performances which you can narrow down using the "Refine" button.
- Clicking on an event brings up the most important facts: date, venue, performers and what they're playing. You also get a link to the Maps application and, where possible, direct links to booking pages.
The Bachtrack for mobile app is faster, more flexible and easier to use than any other mobile event finder - and it's the first application to bring such super fast, high quality search of classical music events to a broad variety of mobile platforms. The app is designed to work on any phone with a modern, CSS/Javascript capable browser and a screen width of 240 pixels or above.
To use the app, simply point your phone's browser at m.bachtrack.com. You can use the same link to try the app out from your desktop browser, although (obviously) it only uses a fraction of the available screen width.
Bachtrack will also be releasing special editions of the app to run as packaged applications for the most common mobile platforms, eliminating the need to wait while your browser loads the app. The first of these, Bachtrack for iPhone is available as a free download on the iTunes App Store. A version for the Google Android operating system is currently in development.
Note for Blackberry users: to avoid nasty error messages, you need to turn on Javascript in your browser (Browser->Options->Browser Configuration->Scroll down->Enable "Support JavaScript"->Save Option). An alternative, warmly recommended by one of our users who uses it for everything, is to use the Opera Mini browser, which is a free download. This is essential if you have Blackberry Device Software older than version 4.6, which does not support the xmlHttpRequest function that we use to get fast communication with the web server.
2nd December 2009 (updated 9th December)
