Sunday, February 07, 2010

Australian repeater finder - iPhone version

It's basically working here. It won't do anything unless you view it on an iPhone with the javascript GPS code supported. When opened, the page will request your position from the device, (you need to agree to this). Then a list of the nearest 40 repeaters are shown like this:

repeaters front.jpg


Tapping on an entry in the list takes you to some more detail:

detail.png


The iPhone version was built by developing a webservice that returns a JSON format list of near repeaters given a query with lat and lng. I used Dashcode to handle that json service as a "datasource" and then it was almost trivial to wire up the user interface.

Dashcode is an amazing, free, tool from Apple that can be used to make data driven web sites for Safari, Mobile Safari (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad etc).
at

6 comments:

  1. Unknown9:34 AM

    Great app, Peter. Just goes to show you can get very good results with webkit and the iphone extras.

    I wanted to scratch my own itch for getting the nearest ABC frequencies when I'm travelling. Bruce knocked up a prototype in Monotouch, and I'm working with Appcelerator Titanium for my own version. http://iphonium.com/
    http://www.appcelerator.com/

    Exciting days for mobile development with HTML, I reckon.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Peter Marks9:41 AM

    Finding "things" close to where you are is a generically useful problem to solve. Be it coffee shops, radio stations (broadcast, repeaters or beacons).

    Maybe there is a need for a location based social site that's user customisable?

    How did you find Titanium? I've had a small play with it and it felt "heavy" if you know what I mean.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown10:04 AM

    Titanium is still lacking some features, and yes, you could say it's heavy.

    But for scripty guys like me it's a great way to get native apps going without much effort.

    ObjC, for me, is heavier.

    I'm tinkering with XMPP again. There are good JS APIs to it now, and the opensource servers are pretty good.

    Yeah, the Google maps API is great. You can do so much from python/ruby/js now.

    Interesting to see the demise of Flash on the cards; good thing if you ask me!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Peter Marks10:16 AM

    Good on Apple for having the guts to not have flash on the new mobile platforms. Having switched to Youtube with HTML 5 it works fine and it's great to have standards based video at last.

    They are right about flash: cpu hog, buggy and proprietary. In a mobile device I want: long battery live, no crashes and open standards.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ice skating demon ish12:39 AM

    Hi do you know if it's possible to have a data source (xml) and then use the search field part to query the users input and display that in a list I am really stuck and you seem to might have the answer (hopefully)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Unknown7:30 AM

    Hi Peter, I really like the iphone verson and have used it a few times when out and about away from my qth. But the last few times I've tried it seems to have stopped working.

    Cheers, Kevin VK3ZXY

    ReplyDelete