iphone

[Update: I received a demo unit and put it through its paces: read my review of the Fostex AR-4i here. (Works with both iPhone 4 and 4S).]

Just found out about this new product through the YouTube grapevine:

The Fostex AR-4i is said to allow for multiple microphone input, and works with the iPhone 4's dock connector. It looks like a rather klunky device, meant more for handheld use than any existing tripod mount (unless the device has a tripod mount on it, which would be handy).

The 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.

A companion app to the Catholic News Live website, my new CNL app has been approved for sale on the iTunes App Store.

You can purchase the CNL app for $0.99 here, or read more about the app (and see some pretty screenshots) on the Catholic News Live website. Catholic News Live delivers the latest Catholic News to your computer and iPhone, and pulls in news from over 50 different Catholic sources, every five minutes.

The App's highlight features are the ability to view news on a world map, and to share news via whatever social media you use. It's a very simple, but very powerful little app that will help you stay in tune with what's going on with the Catholic Church.

Just a little bit of an overview of a couple things I'm working on / where I've been:

Or... "Best Practices of In-App Web Browsers"

Being the usability nut that I am, I have decided that my goal of making a perfect in-app browser for various iPhone apps is an impossible task. But, judging from what I've been able to do so far, and from many different Web View examples I've seen from around the web, there are some basics that every in-app browser should get right.

I'll start by showing the in-app browser in two very well-known iPhone apps: Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook's Browser

Twitter's Browser

Fundamentally, and functionally, these two in-app browsers are the same. And, after looking at maybe a few hundred other browsers, It seems like the list of essential features of a usable in-app browser are:

Midwestern Mac, LLC worked with the Archdiocese of St. Louis to build a location-aware, news aggregating, and content submission app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The app, Catholic STL, has three main features, and leverages many different iOS APIs.

The Parishes view (and subviews) shows all parishes (about 200) in the Archdiocese on a map (MKMapView), as annotations, and when a user taps on an annotation's details, he is shown the parish's address, various parish event times, and more links for the parish website and location. The Parishes view also has two different types of search: the user can enter an arbitrary address, and the map will show parishes around that address, or the user can search for a parish by name or by city.

I'm happy to announce that my first iPhone App—Catholic STL—has been accepted by Apple for the iTunes App Store, and is available for free starting today!

The Archdiocese of St. Louis also announced the App this morning, and has a 'mobile app' section on the website with screenshots, an introductory video, and more information about the App. The App is free, so what are you waiting for? If you live in St. Louis, or are visiting, go ahead and download it now.

The App basically lets users find parishes and sacrament times/parish information in the first section, read news in the second section, and read and post prayer requests on the Archdiocesan website in the third section.

After having jumped into the pool of mobile app development head first (more on that to come), I finally have a little more perspective when it comes to developing for iOS vs. Android.

One of the first things that I did when I started developing an App for iOS is purchase an iPod Touch. There's no way I wanted to be using my iPhone for all my development work, and I needed a device I could acquire quickly, at a low cost (i.e. without a contract), and not worry about battery life, durability, etc.

Plus, I know tons of people with iPod Touches already—most are people who don't want to spend an outrageous amount of money on a 'smartphone' plan with one of the major US carriers, but want a great mobile computing device/PDA/media player.

So, buy the iPod Touch for ~$200, download Xcode, and you're good to go for iOS development. Plus, the whole App Store process, while it's a bit convoluted at times, is very well structured, and offers developers easy avenues towards getting an app from development to sale to success with little effort required.

Of course, as I'm getting nearer and nearer the App's release, I'm hearing calls from all corners of Geekdom, "When you gonna release for Android?!" And the more frequent the cries of distress, the more frequently I look around for ways that I can/should start developing for Android.