The Planned PEThood app is essentially used as a reservation system. It allows a user to view Planned PEThood’s facebook feed with pictures (and request a ‘Like’ on Facebook), contact the company by phone or email, see their location on a map, route the user to their location with a click of a button on the app (allows the user to choose google maps for routing or the local phone’s map navigator), and the user can navigate to the company website, blog, pricing information, and donate via PayPal directly on the app. The major feature of this app is the reservation system which allows the user to input all of their contact information, pet information, requested services, and lastly to pick a day on a calendar (this requires the app communicating back to a web server to determine holidays, closed days, past days, and all appointments being fulfilled). When the customer finally chooses a day on the calendar, a popup message is displayed on the phone for confirmation, a request is sent via email to the business, a confirmation email is sent to the customer, a line is added to a Google spreadsheet with all of the customer information (and pet information), and an event is created on the Google calendar which is maintained by the company. Rather than handle all of these confirmation events on the phone, PHP code on the web server performs all of these actions and if the needs to be an update, it’s easier to update PHP code than to re-release an Android app requiring customers to download an update. The customers enjoy the benefit of having the reservation system on their phone because they don’t have to be at a computer to verify their reservation.
