RX 24 - Platform Keynote: Rock Mobile - Braden Cohen

Transcribed Content

Okay. So let's get to what the meat of this presentation, which is Rock Mobile. Braden Cohen is our lead developer when it comes to Rock Mobile and lots of things. You're gonna find out tomorrow during TV. Epsy does that too. He's been an amazing addition to our team over the last two years. He's come in and not only just learned Rock, but he's learned these very, very complex technologies of Rock Mobile and really expanded the capabilities of our team. And we're so, so happy he's a part of our team. And he's gonna have the honor of walking you through a deep dive in what's new with Rock Mobile. So please welcome Braden. Hello. Hello. Hello? Oh, that's better. Okay. So talking about Rock Mobile. And I really struggled with this caption, but I think it ended perfectly. Rock Mobile, what does it do? It brings rock to your fingertips. Its capabilities are limitless, much like rock on the web. You can have staff apps, front facing apps, digital platform, and it's just so powerful that I could talk for hours about it. It's so exciting. And so first and foremost, we want to get started with an interactive experience. And so if you head into your Rx control panel, there should be a mobile keynote button, and you can join the interactive experience there. I see some head shakes. Nope. Not on there. Okay. Well, let's skip. Oh, Okay, wait. Some see, but some don't? Okay. Oh, now you see it. Okay, it just had to reload? Okay, maybe we will do it then. Sweet. So once we get in there, we can go ahead and get the first question popped up, which basically is just asking, Does your ministry currently utilize Rock Mobile? Sweet. Oh, looks like it's going. It's pretty static. There we go. Got some yeses, got some nos. That's awesome. And for the nos, that's great. I'll try to break down really quickly what Rock Mobile actually is. It's a way for you to build these dynamic, powerful applications from within your Rock instance. Lava is fully supported. Dynamic content is fully supported. You can add new pages, new blocks, new things without actually having to update your application in the App Store. It's really powerful in that sense. And it has all of your Rock data right there. We recently migrated frameworks. Rock Mobile was initially built on Xamarin Forms. Sweet. And so we migrated frameworks. And Microsoft took in Xamarin Forms and basically killed it. They brought it to the slaughterhouse and said, hey, this is now dot net MAUI, and you guys need to upgrade to .net MAUI. Good news is most things stayed the same. Not a lot changed. But we get enhanced performance, so it's much faster in the next version, which is v six. There's new features. We get access to the latest iOS and Android things, so that's really cool. And most importantly, we get continued support from Microsoft. So we know that this is a safe platform to develop on, and we have a future in it. We also took this transition to Maui, and we took a step back and said, we want to restyle stuff. Apps really didn't look super professional right out of the box. And it took, like kind of John mentioned at the keynote, it took a lot of swimming to make apps look really good. So you'll see some new looks in your Styles tab, a lot of new colors and stuff to play with. And I'll kind of go into some before and afters of what does that look like. We had 55 blocks. We restyled every single block to follow this new style guide, and we restyled every single component within Rock Mobile to do that. So here's what a block used to look like. This is our group member list block. You know, it looks good. It looks Okay. After the style guide, it just looks more professional. It's not this drastic difference, but it's just more professional. Take our, for instance, our Connection Opportunity List block. Like, it looks Okay. It doesn't look bad. But once restyled, it just looks much more professional out of the box. We also got our Profile Details block. And we really, really, really worked on our forms and how those look and feel. I think that was a big point that was lacking. So they look so much better right out of the box. Our Prayer Request our Prayer Card View block looks much better. Our notes block looks much better. And I'm gonna stop there because I could keep going, and that could take up this whole presentation. So with this, we also wanted to tackle another issue, which John kind of spoiled. And let me paint a picture for you. It's 2AM. You're laying in bed. You're sleeping. Camp is the following weekend, and you're so anxious to see if you got any last minute registrations. You roll over in your bed, pull out your Rock mobile app, and boom. It feels like God just unleashed all the light of heaven into your eye sockets. So that's why we're proud to announce in the next version of Rock Mobile, every block is now fully has full dark mode support. So everything is beautifully responsive right out of the box, which is pretty cool. Sweet. We didn't stop there. We also wanted to revisit the way that we include typography in your mobile applications. And so we took a page right out of Apple's book and now base all of our blocks and components based on their typography guidelines. So it's just a very clean and obvious way to lay out your mobile application. Really, this has all been in a push towards native feel. And what is native feel? Well, that's what makes a mobile application feel like a mobile application. It's all those micro interactions and animations and little things that you're so accustomed to that you don't even realize until they're not there. And then it's like, Man, this app sucks. So we really have been pushing towards that. And a couple other things that we brought in for that are page transitions and context menus. Page transitions, you can kind of see me playing with it on the left there. It's like as you go from page to page, it has that slide in and you can pop right out. That was missing in Rock Mobile, and I think that was a sorely missed feature. Context menus for iOS users are super common, so we added support for that as well, which is really cool. On top of that, we redid our media player. It's much nicer. It's much newer. It uses a much more modern element under the hood for iOS and Android. There's a lot of bug fixes. It's just a smooth experience. And a lot of people that use Resi I know were pretty disappointed that it didn't work with Rock Mobile, so now it does work with Resi, which is very cool. Another sorely missed part of Rock Mobile is animation. They were really, really hard to use, really, really hard to define and customize, and it was just something that I think didn't get utilized because of that. So we added support for something called Lottie files. And Lottie files are really, really cool. These are JSON based animations that are supported on iOS, Android, and web. So you can use them anywhere. They're super performant, they're rich and interactive, and they're super easy to customize and use. So, I mean, there's a few examples here that I just pulled straight off of their home page. They have a rich library that you can choose from. They have over 500,000 animations that you can go and just kind of pick and choose and edit. And on top of that, they have a really, really nifty editor that lets you kind of go in and change stuff around without having to know a whole lot. And if you are adventurous and daring, you can dive in and actually create these from scratch. They have a much more advanced editor as well. I kind of wanted to segue into a different type of technology. We talked about this briefly in the keynote, and that's NFC. And many of you are familiar with this. It's called Near Field Communication. And if you aren't familiar with it, you are, you just don't know it. This is your tap to pay. This is your hotel access keys. This is even at Chick fil A, they have little tokens on the table where you can tap and order directly from your table. It's super powerful technology. These are little tiny tokens, or big if you want them to be, that you can encode with whatever data you really want to. They're accessible. Almost every modern smartphone has a built in NFC reader. On the iPhone, it's kind of near the camera. On Android, it's like the center of the device. They're super dynamic because you can utilize short links and ROCK, which we kind of briefly touched on in the keynote as well, where you can have it display you can link to giving during a session, but check-in before. So that's pretty cool in that sense. And they're super secure. Like, I couldn't just set it to my Venmo and do that. Very cool. The biggest feature I think that we're proud to announce this year is check-in. We really, really, really, really wanted to reimagine what check-in looks like from a mobile device. At a glance, check-in might seem really simple. It's just a way to say, hey, I was here. I'm here at this event. But when you start breaking down what it takes to check someone in, there's a lot of data that goes into that. Mean, first and foremost, we need to know who's checking in, right? Who's checking to the event? We need to know the area they're checking into. Is this high school? Is this kids? You know, what's the general area? What group are they checking into? Is this seventh grade boys or what? What location are they checking into? Where are they going to be once they check-in? What time are they checking in? When is the schedule that they're checking in for? And I mean, if you're printing labels, where should these labels print? Especially with the new Cloud Print, like where do these go? And so when you start to configure check-in, you start to feel a little like this guy. Like, you're like, oh my gosh. And your boss comes in, you're like, I'm configuring check-in. Go away. And we really, really, really wanted to fix that. Thank you, whoever was laughing. That was awesome. We really, really, really wanted to make that easier and more straightforward. So let's go back to this. First and foremost, when you're logged into the mobile app, we know who you are. We can check that bubble. That's great. Now what? If only we had these little tiny tokens that we could encode with data to tell you about your check-in process. Oh, wait. We can. And we did. And that's NFC. So what if I said, hey, this token, tied to this printer. You're tied to this check-in area. And you're tied to this location. Great. Well, we're starting to get there, right? And what if I told you Rock is pretty smart? Because you know the person, because you know the area, and because you know the location, Rock can say, oh, Okay, well, really only one group makes sense for that. So we're going to fill that bubble in for you. On the same cord, it's really only one schedule that makes sense for all of these parameters. So we can check that bubble, too. And for you check-in gurus and we actually got this question during express check-in a little bit. It's like, wait, no, no, That won't work for us because we do have overlapping schedules. We do have multiple locations. We do have multiple groups. We don't know where they're checking in. And that's where the app or the block is smart enough to prompt you with that information. So it will ask you and fill in the gaps. Pretty cool. All roads lead to the success screen. We want to take a second and talk about the vision of check-in, right? Where is check-in going? Where are we going with this? And I think in a perfect world, we think kiosks could be killed and burned. Like, we essentially, the mobile app is a, yeah, yeah, forget the kiosks. As a matter of fact, you should probably ban John Edmiston from your check-in rooms because I think he feels pretty strongly about that. But that's what mobile check-in is. It's a kiosk in your pocket. And so it can drastically simplify and cut down the necessary steps to check-in someone. Instead of having to go in and type in your phone number and figure out what the family is, we know a lot more information because of the context that you're in of the mobile application. That's pretty much it for check-in. We also added a few new blocks. This is very new in web and new in mobile, and that's content collections. And content collections are a way for you to search across all of your different sources of content, like content channels and other types of sources, and display all of that in one area. Right now, is I have this set to like a grouped mode, so there's a couple different types of configuration in that sense. It has it's powered by universal search, so it's extremely fast. It has extensive filter and sort options that are super customizable on the same cord. It's highly customizable in general. You can modify what each item looks like and what it comes out as. And it has built in pagination. And people don't really know what that is. That's when you scroll down, it actually loads more so it stays performant in that sense. Also on the search side of things, we introduced Smart Search. And that you can kind of think of that as like a Search V2 block. It's very similar to Search, but we just added some sorely missed features, I think. And the first being you can search between components. So now you can say, oh, I'm searching for a person here. No, I need to search for groups. So you can click that little dropdown on the top right and switch the component that way, which is very cool. So kind of like I was saying, you can switch between search components. It has rich built in entity based templates, so lots of data there that you don't have to work at all to see. It has built in pagination also. And it has really cool data view checking. So if you see the Ted Decker there and that Giving badge, well, was from there's actually a Data View that we configured for givers. And since Ted is in that Data View, that badge gets highlighted green, which is pretty cool. We also added the ability to add a connection request. And this block is super cool, too, because it actually starts blank with just the type. And as you fill it in, you can say, oh, the type. And then it'll go fetch the proper opportunities, connectors, and all that stuff and kind of fill in the data that's available as you go. And I think I kind of flew through this, but we also have Giving. And that's the big one. We're super excited to announce Native Giving. And this is a super complicated piece of technology. I mean, what you're looking at here is a pretty complex version of the UI. I mean, we wanted to add the features that were there from the get go, like cover fees and multiple funds and such. But it is very possible to simplify that and get that into a simpler UI. So I mean, that's pretty smooth. And when you bring an NFC, I mean, Tap to Give, you could pre populate and say, Tap to Give $5 Boom. Boom. Apple Pay. Done. Like, that's so awesome and so easy. Very cool. We worked really, really hard with MiWell to make this a possibility. So shout out to those guys. The engineering team over there is fantastic. And I have a big problem talking too fast, so we're at Q and A.