Progress Report - Success Finally!

I have finally finished coding up my application. It does not meet the grandiose desires I had at the beginning of the term but let's face it, that was a lot for one person to want to accomplish in 10 short weeks without knowing Objective-C. My application does have a nifty application icon and splash screen, don't blink as it goes by, that I am pleased with. Once the application gets started it displays a table with a list of choices for calendars to display. Users can click on the calendar they wish to view and it will open a mobile version of the specified calendar in the safari browser. This step is were I find my biggest disappointment in the app I have created. When I chose to scale down my ideas I had every intention of displaying everything in the app but after weeks of struggling I gave up and went this route. I do have some ideas of how I could possibly go back and get this working and think I will continue to pursue it at a later date.

Progress Report - iPhone App Creation

I feel like I have immersed myself in x-code the past few weeks. The first book I purchased seemed relatively good but I was really struggling to get through it and was not seeing the connections that I needed to be making in order to create my app before the end of the semester. I found some great video at the Pragmatic Bookshelf for learning how to do iPhone programming and I think they have been the key to jump starting my progress. There are five videos in the "Writing you First iPhone Application" training set. The videos are a bit fast at times so I have to slow them down, pause them or out and out rerun certain sections to make sure I have the steps right. Since I chose to code along with the video using this process of pausing and rerunning certain sections of the video I would often introduce unintended errors which would then need to be debugged before my app would run as the one in the video does. This process, although tedious has been one of the most valuable learning opportunities because you can never learn code better than by debugging it. I have been through all but the final one thus far but feel comfortable beginning work on my app.

The past two evenings have been spent setting up the mainWindow.nib file and all the various functions in the appDelegate and ViewController files. When the application opens I now have a title bar and navigational listing of the different calendars I am going to offer on the calendar. Each of the items on the navigational listing only goes to a blank screen but that will be tonights project. I hope to begin placing the functions that access the RSS feeds associated with each calendar into the view. I have success modified and completed a previous tutorial that did this exact thing but have to figure out how to integrate that into the work I have done thus far so that I can control the way my app looks and processes. After that step is complete I will need to write the coding which will allow the user to delete calendars they do not what to use from their navigational menu.

Wish me luck tonight!

Pie in the Sky Ideas for an iPhone App

While I am making my way through my reading for ENGL5376 and ENGL5369 I am still taking a few minutes here and there to do some research from my final project for Online Publishing. After exploring a number of the university based apps I think I have a good idea of how I want to progress and what I want to do. I have decided to set a goal for a final ideal pie in the sky app with all the possible bells and whistles I might like to create but then start small working away on the components a piece at a time.

The pie in the sky project will be to create an app similar to iStanford. I was very impressed with the design and elegance of the app. It is packed with a lot of components that I like some of which I would like to integrate now and others that would be possible list items once I become more proficient. If all goes as planned my final app will include the following components:

1. News Feed - using an RSS feed we already have established on the Clarkson news site.
2. Events Calendar - using an RSS feed provided from the current off site product we subscribe to
3. Athletics Feed - I have to check and see if we have RSS feeds for our current news information. I'm not sure that we do since these pages are handled by the athletic department and site development and hosting is handled by a third party off site.
   
4. Maps - input the current map images and use localization coding to allow for GPS location while on campus.

I think these four items will provide a pretty good start for the app with the map being on of the most difficult. I have a couple of other items I would like to include in the app but am not sure how time consuming all of the above will be so I am prepared to add more at a later date if I find the ability. I plan to start with the RSS feed and figure I will work my way down the list from there. I found what looks like a nice tutorial on building a simple RSS reader but will have to wait until this evening to check it out since I didn't carry along the Mac today. We will see how the process goes from here but I better get back to reading since I still have a lot to get finished before class on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.

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.