First fruits!!

I was Twittering with my friends over at Doodurls the other day, and they asked me if I could create them an iPhone app to showcase their site. I said "sure" and then promptly had my schedule fill up with "real life".

So, this weekend I finally got round to looking at the task at hand. They are using Wordpress and are at the mercy of the plug-ins available. After some debate, the best candidate RSS feed was put in place for me to tinker with. It wasn't perfect - the URL data was Http encoded in line in a "link" tag - but it was parseable. I decided I'd iron out the kinks in their RSS feed before I attempted to go the Zen of Objective-C. I actually wrote a proof of concept app in MS.Net 2.0. I then hit on the idea of Flash and Air, so ported the to NeoSwiff's C# compiler for Flash. This was quite a feet as the compiler's subset of C# is more like MS.Net 1.0 munged with Actionscript. I actually went the route of porting to VS.Net 2003 first which removed a lot of the issues with generics *before* I got on to the problem of missing UI classes! After a long evening, I got the code compiling in NeoSwiff (well, I'd moved to the newer GlobFX version, which supports Flash 9, but essentially it is the same Class library and language implementation!) I got it to work in the debugger, but the Flash plug-in absolutely refused to run the code through a browser or from IIS. I gave up.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have re-factored the code so that it runs in Flex Builder 3.0 and is Actionscript (which was actually pretty simple - I'm impressed with Actionscript!) So, the basics of the Air app are now done and dusted!! I plan to get the remaining features implemented and then I'll get on to porting it to iPhone! Phew! Coding is fun :-)