earthalbum: iPhone Edition
I’ve been working on a port of earthalbum to the iPhone / iPod Touch for a couple of months and it’s finally ready! Key points:
- It’s a native iPhone app written in Objective C; it leverages the latest iPhone OS SDK (3.1) and in particular the new MapKit framework.
- Tap anywhere to bring up the top-rated Flickr pics in that location. Tap again to view a full-size version of the picture; from there, you can save the picture to your iPhone photo album to share with family and friends or to set as your iPhone background.
- Pinch to zoom in and out.
- Using the iPhone’s built-in geolocation features, you can zoom in on your current location and browse pictures that were taken around you.
- It’s preloaded with a number of points of interest that you can jump to– e.g. the Eiffel Tower, Mount Everest, the Sphinx, and many of the world’s top cities.
- Once you’ve zoomed in on a photo, you can save it to your camera roll and set it as your iPhone background.
Generally, folks should find it pretty straightforward– I tried to make the user interface as straightforward as possible. You can get it here in the App Store. Hope you enjoy it! If you like it, please rate it highly; if you don’t, please email me your suggestions at supportATearthalbum.com and I’ll try to address them.
Technical Notes
I initially considered implementing earthalbum on the iPhone with something like PhoneGap and QuickConnect; both of these are frameworks that essentially allow you to program iPhone apps using JavaScript. After some experimentation, however, I ultimately decided to bite the bullet and program it in Objective C, which is the “native” language for iPhone apps.
Objective C was fairly easy to pick up– given the languages I already knew, I found it to be an amalgam of C (it’s a strict superset of C) and Java with the syntax of Tcl. This is likely because lots of languages borrow from each other, and in particular many object-oriented languages borrow heavily from Smalltalk. Overall, I found programming in Xcode (the Mac OS X IDE) and Objective C to be an elegant experience.
Still, the MapKit framework has its share of quirks, and as usual, I’m heavily indebted to a lot of folks on the Internet who helped me figure out to work around a number of issues.
- There’s no easy way to capture a UITouch on a map, so I ended up having to creating a transparent overlay to capture the touches.
- The zoom-in effect upon app startup is courtesy of fading the default png on an iPhone app.
- Asynchronous image loading uses the techniques from Mark Johnson’s asynchronous image class.
- sbrautaset’s JSON parser is used for both the Flickr and Google reverse-geocoding webservices. I initially used MKReverseGeocoder but it kept failing, apparently randomly; I finally figured out what was going on after looking on this forum.
In any case, I hope you have as much fun using the app as I did writing it!
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