Lehrblogger

I was awarded a student scholarship to attend the annual Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, so I’ll be flying to San Francisco in June. According to the website, the event “provides developers and IT professionals with in-depth technical information and hands-on learning about the powerful technologies in iPhone OS and Mac OS X from the Apple engineers who created them.” Many of the planned sessions sound interesting, and I’m also looking forward to the Apple Design Awards. I’ll probably spend the next month working on Meetapp (rather than Delvicious) so that I’m better prepared for the iPhone development labs.

I’m also planning to attend the Scala Lift Off on June 6th, a conference for developers using Scala and the associated web framework Lift. I hope to have more time to talk with some of the people who attended the Scala BASE meeting at which I presented my TwiTerra project in January. Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala, will also be speaking, and my friend Jorge Ortiz plans to attend as well.

I’m excited to go to both events and to visit other friends in California, so I’ll be sure to post about them again.

previously: project description, initial progress

David Nolen’s Little Computers class is now over, and I’ve made substantial progress this semester on Meetapp, the iPhone application I have been building for users of Meetup.com. Currently, it will fetch a list of a user’s groups from the API at that user’s request, make secondary API requests to fetch the events associated with each of those groups, and then display all of those events (i.e. all of those events that a user might be attending) in a table. It will also filter that table to show only those events that the user is organizing (rather than simply attending), and the user can drill down for more detailed information about both types of events. So far, I have -

• built a straightforward application that uses a navigation controller, a toolbar, and some tables to organize the information.
• implemented HTTP communication with the Meetup API using stored credentials for the user.
• created data structures for managing information about a user’s groups and events.
• designed and re-designed the interface so that it was simpler, cleaner, and better-suited for the functionality I was actually implementing.

The app has some use in it’s current form, but there’s a lot I still want to do before it’s ready to be posted for the public in Apple’s App Store.

The most recent code is on GitHub, and please feel free to contact me with questions about my progress so far or future plans. I hope to continue the project later this summer, but Delvicious will be my prioritized side-project, at least for the time being. I’m looking forward to watching the lectures from Stanford’s iPhone class to brush up when I jump back in to Objective-C in a couple of months.

previously: project description

I’ve made some initial progress on organizing the interface for my Meetup.com iPhone Application. I have a tab bar at the bottom, table views with navigation bars for each tab, and an array of strings populating one of table views with sample text. I started off with David’s UITableView tutorial, but ran into a series of problems when I tried to integrate it into Apple’s Tab Bar Application project template. I eventually gave up on using Interface Builder and decided to do the entire thing programmatically using this excellent tutorial that I found online. That worked without any trouble, and I was able to modify the example to serve as the basics of my application.

I have uploaded what I have so far to a repository on GitHub – more frequent updates will be committed there, but I’ll also post here at major milestones.

A side note – Joe Hewitt, the developer of the Facebook iPhone app, recently open-sourced several of the iPhone libraries that he used as the ‘Three20 Project’. They look like they might be useful, and the post certainly deserves a link and a thank you.

This is my first post about David Nolen’s class Little Computers. We’re thinking about the iPhone as a computing device and learning to write applications for it.

I am going to build an iPhone application for users of Meetup.com for my primary project in Little Computers. Meetup is a pretty cool company – if you’re unfamiliar, it’s worth reading the following and checking out their site.

Meetup is the world’s largest network of local groups. Meetup makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. More than 2,000 groups get together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities.

Meetup’s mission is to revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize. Meetup believes that people can change their personal world, or the whole world, by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference.

I considered many alternative apps to build – xkcd, Diplomacy, a super simple app for exchanging contact info, a very complex app for music sharing, and others – but settled on this one. It seems like something that could be truly useful to a lot of people, doable within the course of the semester, and challenging and interesting to make. The slide deck and sketches I made to present the idea to the class is below. (Special thanks to my classmate Alex Kauffmann for the brilliant name – it’s much better than Unofficial Meetup.)