iMedia Ventures

I joined the Apple iOS Developer Program (you’ll need to if you plan to install apps on your phone prior to submitting to the App Store). It’s $99/year.

A little glitch with their Activation code (error validating my name or something) but after notifying support it was resolved within a few hours.

I then went about creating a Developer Provisioning profile which allows you to install an app on the phone. Since I already had a bunch of apps I made with PhoneGap I just picked one of those. Actually most of the work is completely separate from the app itself. Apple has a straightfoward Provisioning Assistant that walks you through all the steps, from certificates to profiles. I’ve attached a variety of screenshots below.

Once you have the app id you just copy it to the Bundle Identifier in the .plist file in Xcode. Unfortunately I couldn’t deploy the app to the phone because the phone uses a new version of the iOS (5.x) whereas the one with xCode was only 4.3. So I am now downloading xCode v4.2 which hopefully will work on my Snow Leopard OS. I don’t have the latest OS for my Mac (Lion).

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I had an idea recently after going to the T4G open data hackathon in Fredericton, New Brunswick. To aid in New Brunswick tourism when someon visits the area you could determine which municipality they are in and present them with some ideas for places to visit and things to do. I found a Google Fusion table that has the Nhttp://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?dsrcid=843427#mce_temp_url# which uses polygons. And knowing the location of the person via their mobile device we could determine which boundary they are within.

I haven’t tried modifying this code to work with the boundaries above, but I found this code on the Google Fusion Tables API group.

// check if point is in URL 
var latLng = results[0].geometry.location.toString() 
var SQL=”SELECT URL_VRL_Name FROM 1271853 WHERE 
ST_INTERSECTS(geometry,CIRCLE(LATLNG” + latLng + “,1))”; 
var queryText = encodeURIComponent(SQL); 
var query = new 
google.visualization.Query(‘http://www.google.com/fusiontables/gvizdata?tq=’ 
 + queryText);   
query.send(getURLLookup); 

function getURLLookup(response) { 
    numRows = response.getDataTable().getNumberOfRows(); 
      numCols = response.getDataTable().getNumberOfColumns(); 
    if (numRows == 0) { // point not in URL polygon 
        document.getElementById(‘geoMessage’).innerHTML = “** ** OK – 
Address not within a URL/VRL”; 
    } else { 
       document.getElementById(‘geoMessage’).innerHTML = “** ** Address is 
within the: ” + response.getDataTable().getValue(0, 0) + “.”; 
    } 

I love learning. I’m always reading and trying new things. As I looked into mobile application development I tried to figure out the best way to do things.

The first major discovery was that you could use HTML5, CSS and Javascript to build a powerful, slick mobile app and get the benefits of using web standards, as well as the internals of the device thanks to sites like PhoneGap.

Then I started looking at IDEs and tools that help you build mobile apps fast. I came across sites like BuzzTouch which allows you build apps using their web application. I was able to easily create screens and link them together, pull in RSS feeds and so on. Then I hit a wall as I discovered I couldn’t easily link from custom HTML screens to the screens I had already created with Buzztouch. Doing that requires going back to objective C programming (which is platform specific). Also you can only current build apps for iPhones and Androids. Also v2.0 of their server will require a server installation instead of using their already hosted web app for v1.5. Buzztouch is great for some people though. One of the amazing things is the ability to update your app from the app itself without having to resubmit to iTunes.

Another cool site is Tiggr. You can use a visual drag and drop editor to create your app and they generate HTML5, CSS and Javascript. The first month is free and then it’s $45 per month per developer. They say it’s good for fast prototypes which makes sense, so I wonder if it can also be used for production apps.

You have to evaluate your goals and the goals for your app to determine which path is best for you. But generally I don’t like to be put into a box where I may run up against the wall at some point. Also as a developer I want to also learn the technologies and not just generate code. So I am going to stick with the ‘standards’ (HTML5, CSS, JS, jQuery mobile, PHP, etc). This way I can leverage these skills if I decide to start taking contracts.

Also any of these tools require you to learn their tool and way of doing things and the code generated may not be easy to understand or modify. 

Also as I work on mobile apps I realize that there is an important server side component to all of this. The server can provide the content to the device (unless it’s static content which is rare these days), it can filter the content for a smaller device, provide API access, update websites with client locations, push notifications to device, and so on. Many of the tools I mentioned and have worked with do not do any of this.