My first iOS app
After 6 months of iterations and spending the preceding 2 months learning about Objective-C and Cocoa, I’m proud to have shipped my first iOS app: Out East, NZ.
It went live just before Christmas and it’s an universal app for iPhones, iPads and iPods. It’s a tourism app, where travellers can get infos and reviews on things to do and see, places to eat and sleep etc. for the Eastland region of New Zealand.
The app has been developed for Tourism Eastland in collaboration between myself, Cymen Crick and Mike Howe of Rankers and Aaron Innes of Broker Brothers.
It’s a great team. The others provided most of the requirements, the vision, the ideas and the design. They also provided great feedback along the way and made sure the actual data for this app was present and ready. While I was involved in some of the things mentioned above, my main responsibility was all of the implementation: coding the actual iOS app in Objective-C and Cocoa, creating a custom map with TileMill, and writing the server-side API with Ruby and Rails. And it all had to be available offline (while still downloading updates from the server periodically).
It was a great and fun project to work on. I think mostly, because there was a great deal of respect and trust involved and I had lots of freedom to develop my own ideas and make my own suggestions. But also because the whole collaboration and communication was excellent. It was open, constructive and clear. And that’s not something I take for granted. It also proves that distributed teams can work very productively (not that I needed another proof): We had Cymen and Aaron in Gisborne on New Zealand’s North Island, Mike in Golden Bay on the South Island, and myself in Düsseldorf, Germany and everything was smoothly managed via Basecamp and Skype.
Despite being fun, it was also challenging. I had to learn so much new stuff (and I am still learning): Objective-C, Cocoa, additional libraries, developing a custom map, and all the tools involved – Xcode, TestFlight, provisioning profiles, iTunes Connect and the whole app-review thing, TileMill etc. Sometimes – or maybe even often – it was really frustrating to implement even basic things, because everything was so new to me and I had to consult the documentation for every little bit. But it has nevertheless been a very rewarding and inspiring journey and it feels a lot less frustrating by now.
While we wish we had been able to include more features in this first version, everybody involved is still very happy with the end result.
Try the app for yourself. It’s free. And feedback is always welcome.