Ninth Division

The story of BigOmaha for the iPhone

Posted on 07. May, 2009 by andy in Apps

Building the BigOmaha iPhone app was a great effort in a labor of love.  I just wanted to be part of the excited and fun that makes BigOmaha.

First, have you downloaded the BigOmaha iPhone app?  Go get it, it’s free.  Then you will know what I am talking about here; not to mention know whats happening at this great event.

Just in case you don’t know much about BigOmaha the conference, study up here.

How did the app go from a crazy idea to this -

@sant0sk1 - @andypeters the #BigOmaha app looks pretty slick. Nice work!

@jprichardson – @andypeters application looks nice.

@boutcher – @andypeters Nice work, Andy! App looks kick ass

@jimmywinter – Just downloaded the #BigOmaha iPhone app. It’s blowin my mind! Way to go @ninthdivision!!

@SalvaORenick – Just downloaded BigOmaha for the iPhone – http://bit.ly/uIDnm (via @ninthdivision) Nice work guys.

@secretpenguin – Just downloaded the BigOmaha iPhone app available for free in the app store or iTunes. Great work @NinthDivision

this is how…

How it started?

Dusty Davidson of Brightmix sent me an email at 3AM one night which started as so – “Bear with me, i’m just thinking out loud..”. This was sometime after their visit to SXSW.  How about an iPhone App for BigOmaha – “perfect I said” – “count me in”  I said.

Still fired up about the buzz from SXSW and Twitter, I sat down with Jeff and Dusty to begin brainstorming.  Those guys love Twitter!

Idea!

Ideas galore!  It all started as an app that was based on Twitter for BigOmaha (basically).  Giving people the ability see what people are talking about, doing and going during the conference (Tweeting about BigOmaha).  Following people you met at BigOmaha.  Dusty,  Jeff, and I get real excited about Twitter.  My main goal was to have an app that allowed you to see what people were saying about BigOmaha during the conference; and to follow people you meet (or like what they say) immediately in the app.  But at the same time – not be just another Twitter client.

Also – we thought, well it should have the basics you are always wondering about – the people and the schedule!  So those were natural features that almost seemed obvious.

Well, the app that you see on your iPhone/iPod right now is about 75% of the goal. 

Problems?

Little did I realize the work load that started pouring in the next couple weeks for me at Ninth Division.  It became a lot harder to carve time for the app.  Also the details were not quite ready for the app either.

Design and Implementation

Like I mentioned before, this was a labor of love.  We did this for fun to support the greatness of BigOmaha.  It was also for Erin Standley at Brightmix, as she provided all the great looking icons seen in the app.  Not to mention a great set of eyes before the app was submitted to the App Store.  She now understands that I am high maintance; Erin – I appoligise again for that. 

I showed her what the app was going to look like.  Gave her sizing for the images and she did her magic.  I said I needed this – BAM done and they looked great!  Awesome work Erin.

In the mean time I was working on the app.  Specifically on the follow feature and tying it into search.twitter.com.  Those of you who are familar with the API know that it returns JSON.  You may also know (or not) that JSON is not supported (out of the box) by the iPhone SDK.  So I used the ever so popular JSON-framework to parse the search results for #BigOmaha.

The rest was pretty straight forward.  Two UITableViews (People and Agenda) with the data in a plist file.  All the cool graphic effects were done using Quartz on the iPhone SDK.  Those reflections and image roundings were not done in photoshop.  This was a great way for me to pour more into Core Graphics and Quartz.  So, yah now they look awesome.  I hope the speakers like the way they were presented.  The agenda table ended up being too cramped for me, but I was rushing it to get out.  All in all not bad, if I do it again I’ll spend time on the UI to make it less busy.

Cuts

Running out of time to meet App Store submission deadline of Friday May 1, 2009 I had to scrape the Twitter client feature.  I was very sad about that. That means my most wanted feature – the ability to follow people (and have it sync with your twitter client) within the app was pulled.  I was going to have it setup so you could swipe the tweet from the person you like and follow that person with a confirmation.  It was working, but buggy and so it got pulled.

Submission

The was submitted to the App Store on Friday April 24, 2009.  As many know the approval process takes time.  Sometimes too much time.  In my experience it is a 5 business day response time.  Others it seems like more… so there was natural concern on twitter that it wouldn’t be ready.

It was accepted and put on the App Store on May 2, 2009.  After looking on twitter, I saw many excited users had gotten the app.  GREAT!  I am still sure that I was the last person to download the app.  LOL!

Done. done and DONE!

Over 200 downloads at the time of the posting, the app was a pretty good hit.  It gives an idea what Ninth Division can do (much more than a dang joke app).

Tags: bigomaha