iPhone News Application Platform

In co-operation with Addit Solutions I created a platform for the generation of iPhone apps that deliver "news-like" content. The idea was to create such a back-end applications that would be easily customizable and extendable to cover the needs of any news-site that wanted to create an iPhone App to deliver it's content.

The platform consisted of two parts. A web application panel to handle all the information and a native iPhone application to show the content to the user. The web application exposed it's content in XML format via a REST API which was consumed by the iPhone application. In the web application the following were included:

• Mini-CMS: for the categorization and submission of articles. The platform can also connect via webservices to consume feeds of existing databases.
• Banner Management: A versatile mechanism to deliver iPhone specific banners. The mechanism also provided all the necessary information to track the effectiveness of your banners
• Adhoc distribution manager: All the necessary functionality to deliver the application using Apple's Adhoc distribution model. This is needed during the testing/evaluation phase of the application's development, so that the end customer can see the live application before it is submitted to the AppStore
• User management

Based on this platform, various applications were created:

NewsIt iPhone App

This application delivers the NewsIt website's content to your iPhone. It displays content from various categories, video articles and user's articles. You can use the app to submit/report your own article to NewsIt, while at the same time you can save any article to your phone for later reading. The app requires an active Internet connection to work.

During the first week, the app was number 7 on the Top 25 list of the Free iPhone Apps in the AppStore.

OIKIA Magazine iPhone App

This application delivers the Oikia Magazine website's content to your iPhone. It displays content from various categories and video articles. The app requires an active Internet connection to work.