Posted by Matt on Sep 12, 2010
New iPhone Application
On Thursday, I pushed out a new iPhone application for all iOS devices. The app is a companion to the Department of State’s Democracy Video Challenge. It allows people to view participant videos, view the contest rules, and connect via Facebook.
Link to the application is here.
This was an interesting endeavor as I had to learn to integrate with several API’s, notably YouTube and Facebook.
At first, I tried using Google’s gdata SDK to connect to YouTube. But I found it to be a pain to work with. The documentation was lacking for my purposes and the library had far too many disparate functions. In the end,I found it easier to use the raw YouTube XML feeds and build my own parser to get out the data I wanted.
As a contrast, the Facebook Connect API was a cinch. Facebook maintains an SDK on Github with several good sample applications.
As always, I find that ASIHTTPRequest is an invaluable tool for the Cocoa developer who needs to work with a web-service. If you haven’t tried it yet, go do it.
The application doesn’t support fast app switching yet. I started working on it when the 3.1 SDK was current. Due to timing of several other projects, I had to sit on it for several months until I could push the code out the door. I’m hoping to get a second pass at the app during which I want to include several new capabilities including making it a universal to run on the iPad in fullscreen.