Checking out the Landscape

I have started browsing around to explore what other colleges are currently doing with iPhone apps. I have always found exploring the landscape to be helpful in the process of getting started. It is always nice to learn from those who have gone before me and discover some of the best and worst practices out there so that when I am done my apps can hopefully live comfortably among some of the better practices.

What I have found so far (worth noting):

• iStanford - Cost: FREE
  This app offers a directory, athletics, maps, events and courses.
  
  My Thoughts:
  This is a pretty nice app with lots to offer given the price. It has a nice clean and professional design far above most that I have seen within the few minutes I have been searching.
  
  The individual components of the app have their pluses and minuses. The directory must only work on the Stanford network or I am missing the login screen for it. The athletics looks like it is feed from RSS feeds which is a bonus if ours are handled that way as well. Maps, events and courses also seem to be pretty basic and reasonable to implement. So far I think that this will be a model I can use to work from.
  
  
• Ohio State University Map - Cost: $1.99
  A map of the Ohio State campus that allows users to zoom in and out and use the GPS functionality to find there way around.
  
  My thoughts: I'm not sure I would pay $1.99 for a map of campus even if I was a visiting student. If I got seriously lost a lot and didn't want to continue to look like a fool when I had to call my friends to come find me, maybe but I clearly think this type of app should be free.
  
  I think this is a neat and possibly doable idea for my class project if I can get the localization coding down and mesh that with our current flash maps. If I want to go in this direction for my application I need spend speed up my iPhone App lessons and get to Chapter 17 on localization in the text.
  
  
• Penn State University - Cost: FREE
  Basically an application for providing Penn State news to your iPhone.
  
  My Thoughts: Seems very basic and hopefully easy. This should be easily handled by inserting the RSS feed from our news site into an iPhone App. THe text I currently have does not seem to cover this so I did some quick searching on the internet and came up with this auto conversion program, AppLoop. I should be able to figure out how to do this. With a little more research on the coding I came across these links which I will explore further later: How-to: building services into iPhone Applications, How to put twitter updates in your iPhone Apps (info on the NSXMLParser function)
  
  
• ACU MindWire - Cost: $ .99
  Abilene Christian University is using this app to offer education content.
  
  My Thoughts: I am intrigued by a universities use of an iPhone app to extend learning beyond the classroom. This is very forward thinking. I'm not sure that this is something I am ready to progress into for this class but it is something that I might consider working on as a value add for my students in my classes. I will have to think about this one further. It's disappointing that I can not download it and try it out to see under the hood and kick the tires.
  

I have also downloaded the Go Huskies App from Northeastern and IMason from George Mason University. Each of these are free and look interesting but I have not had time to review them yet. So more to come at a later time.