CNL - Catholic News Live iOS/Android Mobile App

Catholic News Live - CNL App IconThe second app developed by Midwestern Mac is Catholic News Live, or CNL for short. This app, which is the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad/Android interface for the content aggregated by the Catholic News Live website, showcases a simple list and map layout on mobile phones and tablets, as well as Drupal's great flexibility.

The Catholic News Live website uses the Drupal distribution Managing News, which allows the site administrator to add news feeds that are automatically imported on a set schedule from websites all around the world. Each story is geotagged with a location (if proper locational keywords exist in the article), and then stories have latitude and longitude values for map display.

The iOS app takes these stories and allows users to not only view and read them in a simple list, but also share any story via any popular social media service (making use of the popular ShareKit for this purpose). Stories can also be displayed in a map view using the iOS MKMapView.

The Android app has similar features to the iOS app, but uses Android's built-in sharing service and the Android MapView.

Stories can be read in the app on the original websites using an instance of Midwestern Mac's open-source JJGWebView or the soon-to-be-released JJGWebViewActivity.

The app has had thousands of downloads, and is one of the most popular Catholic News apps on the App Store and Android Marketplace. Midwestern Mac continues to add new features and abilities to the app.

The CNL app is available on the iTunes App Store for $0.99, and the Android Market for $0.99.