iPhone Development | Jason Allen Blood

Aug

Fantasy Demon 2011

Ok… Well I haven’t had any time yet to work on this, and with the recent debate as to whether or not there would even BE a 2011-2012 season, I got myself sidetracked.

Here is what I’m planning on doing in the coming weeks:

First, I need to move my server operations to something more stable, hosted using PHP and mySQL. Right now the services supporting the app are all in .NET running against SQL Server which is far too expensive.

Second, with far more development experience under my belt on the iOS platform, I want to bring a native iPad application to the table. In particular, the application needs better support for draft guides and drafting your team. Last year it was super helpful to have a ranked list and just remove players as they came off the board. I always knew then who was the best based on rank and possible combination of position (best available RB, for example).

I want to integrate the player images into their profile. This will be especially true on the large screen of the iPad.

I want to integrate more sources of fantasy news ala-Pulse style interface. It’s a great general news app, and that was easily the most used feature throughout the year.

I want to start integrating social elements into the application. This extends the Start This Guy concept to add user profiles (linked via Facebook, no registration please) and to hookup with other players, post on your walls, etc. A general forum would be useful as well…

Aug

iMallRat

Hello,

Here is a status update on the project:

First, we have a domain and WordPress site established at http://www.imallrat.com. I will be posting there periodically as the application gets developed.

Secondly, we are in process of surveying many people in our “target audience” to get a good feel for features and level of importance. My sister is helping with that effort and I will post our results once we have them.

Third, screen layout and design is underway. I have put feelers out to hire a graphics person for visual design and have many promising leads.

The mallrat application is coming soon folks. I’m excited and I know you are too…

Oct

Mall Rat Initiative

Been thinking about this app lately and decided to perform a reboot.

While have an interactive map of a mall is nice, the fact is loading all the data is a hassle and Point Inside beat me to it. Granted, their app sucks. There is certainly room for improvement, but in order to pull this off I would need to translate every mall into vector maps, GPS locations for each store, and constantly keep track of stores as they come and go.

Since people have short fuses, any local mall in their area I didn’t have loaded would cause tons of bad reviews. Then, I ‘d have to go around to each store and beg for their deals just to make money. Could it all work? Of course. Despite all the work, it’s still an awesome idea. Done right people would love it I’m sure. But there is an easier way…

So, tinkering with location based crowd sourced apps had me thinking. What if I just focused on the shopper themselves rather than the mall? Suppose I allow users to create profiles, upload images of items and deals, and talk / rate them? Each review would be GPS based, so I can sort by the listings nearest you, grouped by mall address, and you can read people’s reviews of the stores or items for sale.

Make the app based on creating a local shopping “community”. Users can facebook or email deals to others / friends. They would choose a category for the item, then rate it (clothes would be hot / not, electronics might be good buy or bad, etc.), optionally type text comments and photo. Easy!

Jun

Fantasy Demon

So I have been so busy with this app that I haven’t, until now, spent any time updating my personal blog about it. All the information you need about this app can be found at the offical blog: http://blog.fantasydemon.com

This app is a fantasy football app and though I know there are a ton of these, especially large ones from big companies like Yahoo, I wanted to create something both unique and more functional (that is, something I myself would like to use). Things that make this app special are the abililty to browse news from multiple sources, the full “guide store” where you can purchase and download different guides from myself and third parties, and a non-league based team draft tool.

Dec

Mall Rat Development Update

Ok, so working long and hard last night I was able to tackle a couple issues with this project, though some more issues were raised.

I managed to get the map to render a store location marker. I also got the You Are Here to properly calculate it’s location based on Lat / Lng and the settings for the map file. I also fixed the issue of the marker being centered over it’s pixel location rather that upper left corner. This sounds trivial but actually is not given that the marker has to maintain scale as we zoom.

I copied to code to create the Skyway app version, but this caused untold issues. My recommendation going forward: NEVER do an entire project copy. You are better off creating a new blank project and copying over the files one at a time. Sucks? Yeah, but xCode is a colossal piece of shit, reminding me of the old Interdev, so it doesn’t really surprise me.

Remaining issues on the map include: showing multiple locations (show me all the taco bells for example), marking the parking location, and handling some minor issues that only show on the actual phone. Another issue to resolve will be handling the large maps. The phone gets very slow when it has to render the entire file (full zoom out), despite the png being only a couple hundred KB. This is odd given the file is smaller in size than the ones I’m using for the Mall of America which doesn’t show this issue. Could it be PNG format? I will have to play around…

Dec

Phase II

I have begun work on Phase II of the uCook iPhone application. I am planning to make a series of interface improvements as well as new features:

Store Locations on Google Maps
Improved emails
Sync with uCook shopping lists (requires registration)

I have a new set of loading screens, recipe detail screens, and larger table rows for easier reading. I will post some screenshots once I have them available.

Dec

Rainbow Rabbit does it again!

Jane Mitchell from Rainbow Rabbit has created the preliminary graphics for Mall Rat. Below is the image for the splash screen:

mall rat splash screen

Dec

Project Begins

Mall Rat is an iPhone program designed to accomplish a few key features for shoppers:

Give an interactive Map of the Mall of choice
Allow disconnected access to Mall data
Allow browsing and searching of Mall stores and shops
Give access to user created content such as tweets and store reviews
Give access to Mall events

The set of technical challenges will be as follows:

Creating a fully interactive map, including pan, zoom, support for multiple floors, showing your current location based on GPS, showing a store location, and marking a parking location.
Creating a mall database download and sync mechanism so the application can continue to run if the internet connection is down or poor.
Creating a set of administrative tools to allow a central database to contain the mall information (stores, maps, etc), and finding a cheap way to keep this data accurate.

The project is relatively ambitious though certainly do able.

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