Obama ‘08 iPhone App

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 (*):

• Raven Zachary (Project Director) *
• Jason Grigsby (Project Manager)
• John Keith (Server Development)
• Lyza Gardner (Server Development, Design)
• Aileen Jeffries (Design)
• Jonathan Wight (Lead iPhone Development) *
• Dom Sagolla (QA, Community Development) *
• Mike Lee (iPhone Development, UI) *
• Louie Mantia (Design) *
• Tristan O’Tierney (iPhone Development) *

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.

This entry was posted by Dom Sagolla on October 02nd, 2008 and is filed under Apps, History, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.