An iOS client for my UK inflation app

After last week’s great Xcake meet I felt a fresh surge to take on new challenges and bend some less-familiar pieces of technology to my will.

Motivation

The first product of this enthusiasm was a prototype web app built to get a bit more experience with Python and Google App Engine. A few days later it got an API.

The resulting rapid feedback loop led me to pick up my copy of Beginning iPhone Development which had been sitting gathering dust for the last couple of years and get stuck back into following the examples.

Revisting Cocoa

I first dabbled with developing for Cocoa when I first started using a Mac and managed a range of “Hello World” apps, simple calculators and embedded WebKit views, but nothing substantial came of it. Thankfully a few of the concepts seemed to have stuck and after working through the first few chapters of the book again I felt confident enough to get started on something of my own and an iOS client for ukinflation.appspot.com seemed a logical choice.

This is the result: UK Inflation App - Screenshot

What I Learnt

Even though this is a trivial app there have been a few aspects which have been useful from a learning perspective:

accessing an external API
decoding JSON
local data persistence with a plist file
interacting with view elements

These are all things which could make for useful reference material in the future.

Moving on

I’m not part of the paid iOS developer program at this time so I haven’t been able to test the app on actual hardware, which would have been nice. I may stump up the 99 bucks to get my hands on Xcode 4 and have the ability to run my code on a device. I may decide to have a crack at developing a desktop Mac app. Who knows.

The topic of push notifications was mentioned at the last Xcake so there’s another potential area of investigation involving both server and client technologies.

Stay tuned!