Archive for October 2008

 
 

Forming New Communities

building iPhoneDevCamp Copenhagen It’s only been a few weeks since the last iPhoneDevCamp (in Copenhagen), and now people are looking to repeat that success around the globe:

Looking to get started with your own community?  Take a peek at our Satellites page, or read the latest article on iPhoneDevCamp in Mac|Life magazine.

Now that the iPhone SDK license agreement NDA has been lifted, communities worldwide can teach, learn, write, and publish with greater freedom.  If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area next month, you can hear all about this at the O’Reilly iPhoneLive conference that Raven and I are helping to produce.

Most Educational: Harp App


Harp App has shipped! The video above has a charming demonstration of the winner for Best Educational App at iPhoneDevCamp 2, showing off the multitouch features of Apple’s platform for only $1.99.

Obama ‘08 iPhone App

Obama '08 for iPhone Ten (10) dedicated men and women have worked feverishly, in secret this past month on an iPhone app for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. All of us are unpaid volunteers.  Six (6) of us are iPhoneDevCamp alumni (*):

I think we may have achieved a record for the launch of such a complex app in such a short period, and many excellent features were dropped for lack of time. It was really fun to develop, knowing the power of features like Call Friends (which sorts your address book by key battleground states) and Get Involved (which uses CoreLocation to direct you to the nearest Obama Headquarters).  The app was designed as a means to donate your time in discreet segments — we call it ‘micro-volunteering’.

A huge portion of the code was taken from Jonathan Wight’s superb TouchCode repository, which won “Best Open Source” at iPhoneDevCamp 2 this summer.

We use Basecamp for bootstrapping, Subversion for revisions, Lighthouse for bug tracking (thanks entp!), Google Groups for our (stellar) Beta list, and Campfire for our engineering chat.  Check out our Facebook Group as well.

Special thanks to John Geleynse and Erik Lammerding at Apple for their attention and encouragement.

Help us make the app better by sending email to iphone@barackobama.com.  Use it to call your friends!  The election is little more than a month away, and your action can make the difference.