Invierno.

Muy dulce.

Our next project is a web application for the iPhone. This post is an update on our progress.

We decided to keep the storyboard of our Android mashup, because the iPhone supports all the functionality our app needs. In case you haven’t read our report on the Android project: our application (“GeoTrack”) tracks the geographical locations of Last.fm users. When a user logs in with his or her Last.fm nickname, the GPS coordinates are send to our server and the coordinates of other, nearby Last.fm users are send back. The user can then see (on a Google map or in a list) which other Last.fm users are nearby his/her location. For each user, extra details (distance, last logged in, artist matches, …) can be requested.

The iPhone web app will have the very imaginative title “iGeoTrack“. There will be some minor changes though, mainly UI-related:

• The “log in” screen will be similar and might require a password now.
• The user will be redirected to a menu, instead of immediately loading the map. The menu will feature the following items: Map, Users, Settings, About.
• The Map screen will be similar to the Geo screen in the Android app: it features a Google map with a clickable marker for each nearby Last.fm user.
• The Users screen will list all nearby Last.fm users (the markers on the map), similar to the Track tab in the Android app.
• The user details and artist matches views will also be almost identical to the corresponding Android views.
• A new Settings view will be available. The user will be able to configure the maximum distance to other users, the minimum % of similarity in music taste, …

The same server side configuration will be used in iGeoTrack for the backend. A MySQL database stores the locations of the Last.fm users and the PHP Last.fm API of Matt Oakes is used to retrieve the Last.fm information. All server side scripting is done in PHP.

The client side scripting is done in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. The iUI (0.31) framework is used to create the iPhone “look and feel”. We also use a small, but useful and simple toolkit called Fleegix.js to parse XML, make XHR queries and to do other cool AJAX-related stuff.

Most of the server side scripting is done. We’re now focused on finishing the UI. If we have time left, we might also add some of the extensions we talked about in the Android report (chatting with other users e.g.).

Team 6 out.