Development

Veggie Phrases App Available on Android

Just a short post to say that Veggie Phrases is now available on the Android Marketplace, you can read the details on AppBrain - if you’ve not seen the app before it’s a handy pocket phrasebook to help travelling vegetarians and vegans communicate their dining preferences when overseas and best of all it’s completely free!

I’ll follow up when I get the chance with a brief description of the process I followed but for now, please grab your phone and give it a try. Let me know if you have an issues, I only had a chance to test it briefly since I’m an iPhone user!

Download Veggie Phrases for Android

How I Built my First iPhone App with JQTouch + PhoneGap

I registered as an iPhone developer earlier this year primarily to get my hands on the pre-release iOS upgrades but recently I was asked to help design the user interface for a BI-related smartphone application and it started my brain ticking.  When it comes down to it I’m a BI + SQL guy and it’s been a long time since I’ve actually gotten my hands dirty with real coding (remember the BBC Micro anyone?) but I have spent time on-and-off dabbling with PHP, HTML, CSS and Visual Basic as well as having managed a couple of development projects so whilst I’m rusty I’ve not been totally out of the loop.

Still, given that I’m hardly a candidate for Developer of the Year I figured that learning Objective-C and Cocoa Touch would be a little heavy going but thankfully it’s possible to build apps for the iPhone using only JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3 which puts me in much more familiar territory.  Now that I knew I at least had a good starting point I could really start to think about the big issues in front of me:

1. Content – what is the app for?
2. Styling – how can I achieve the iPhone look-and-feel?
3. Compilation – how to turn a website into an executable binary?
4. Publication – what do I need to do to release my creation in the wild?

Since I knew I’d be putting some time into it I didn’t want to build an application that was just a glorified tech demo, I wanted to build an app that serves a valid purpose and that doesn’t exist already which was quite tricky.  Fortune was clearly smiling on me since I started working on this project in the same week that I went for a short break to Bratislava (it’s lovely by the way, you should go), being a vegetarian one of my pre-holiday tasks is to find out how to say “I am vegetarian” in the local language and for that I use the International Vegetarian Union’s Vegetarian Phrases in World Languages.  It’s a great resource and I usually just print the phrases to take them with me but then I had the lightbulb moment – wouldn’t it be brilliant if I had an app that did this?  Thankfully the manager of the IVU agreed with me and so I had my concept – a veggie phrasebook.

Next came the styling issue, if you’ve been an iPhone user for a while you’ll be used to the default look-and-feel that comes with most iOS applications and I had no idea how I was going to recreate that. Thankfully I’m not the first person to have hit this brick wall and developers with skills that are orders of magnitude better than mine have built a number of solutions, the best one out there in my opinion is JQTouch, a JQuery plugin that mimics the native iPhone styling as well as providing excellent navigation animations. A demo of JQTouch is available here: JQTouch Demo and is will only work if viewed on an iPhone or Android handset or in a WebKit browser (e.g. Safari or Chrome).

My general approach to learning new technologies tends to be very simple: just start - sure, you’ll get it wrong and it might be frustrating for a while but you’ll be learning all the way and come out the other end battle-scarred but victorious.  Thankfully JQTouch fits my methodology perfectly, there’s no installation to speak of, just download and unzip the package and dive in there with your favourite text editor (I’m fond of TextWrangler on Mac and Notepad++ on Windows).  JQTouch essentially uses one giant HTML file with divs for each ‘page’ of the application, the file includes the JQTouch libraries and a couple of CSS theme files and image sets – one in black (as per the demo) and one titled ‘Apple’ which looks very much like the settings page of the iPhone.

Having assembled the content, built the base HTML pages and customised the theme my next concern was how to turn it into a compiled app.  It’s quite nice being able to run the entire app in a browser window but I wouldn’t quite feel like I’d regained my developer strips without a bona-fide compiled app and there are a few toolkits out there that will help achieve that.  The most interesting toolkit to me right now is Appcelerator Titanium which looks powerful but might take some ‘discovery’ time and since I wanted to do the best possible job but in the shortest possible timescale I opted for PhoneGap, a cross-platform toolkit that allowed me to literally copy and paste my web root folder and make a compilable Xcode project almost immediately (seriously, read their Getting Started).

If you’re new to Apple development in general, Xcode is Apple’s development environment for both Mac and iOS applications and comes bundled with the OS as standard – it’s a little like Visual Studio in that it’s an IDE but the similarities end pretty quickly after the obvious.  Personally I find Xcode to be a little fiddly and not as intuitive as Visual Studio but that could be a little bias from having spent a lot more time in the Microsoft camp when it comes to development.  Nonetheless, Xcode is a great IDE and other than spending the best part of three hours trying to nail down my digital certificate signing chain (what happened to “it just works”?) it became surprisingly easy to debug the app on my iPhone and build the final version of the app.

My secret weapon in this whole process was (believe it or not) the data professional’s Swiss Army Knife – Excel.  I’ve often said that if you could teach even half of the world’s office workers how to use Excel properly you could change the world and I believe that the same is true even for the classically technical professions who eschew the GUI over scripting methods.  Excel’s blend of spacial referencing and a comprehensive function library make it an ideal code generator and I regularly use it to write large batches of SQL – this time I simply copied the IVU phrases into a spreadsheet, sorted and categorised them and used formulae to generate the best part of over 4,500 lines of HTML – even the menus came from Pivot Tables.

A little bit of tweaking and I was ready to submit the binary to Apple for approval, but that’s enough for now so I’ll talk a little more about the submission process in a future post.  Sure, there might be a few kinks round the edges but I think it’s a reasonably good first app and I’ve gained a stack of good experience building it which over the coming months I intend to share in a series of posts.

If you’d like to take a look please check out my Veggie Phrases app page or you can try it out (it’s free) here…

IVU Veggie Phrases iPhone App Released

Today Apple have approved my first iPhone application - Veggie Phrases, based on the IVU’s Vegetarian Phrases in World Languages with their kind permission.  I’ve already spotted a dozen spelling and other errors which I’ll correct in the next update but at least it’s out there now. 

You can read the full description here or download the app from iTunes by clicking on the button below…