Yesterday I released a new iPhone app into the App Store. It’s a local guide to Los Altos, California, the town where I live, and a bit more: with a few simple discussion and sharing features, Townie is an app for community.
Townie is a free download from the App Store. You can get it at http://itunes.com/apps/townie or visit the townie web site at http://town.io.
If you are a resident or in any way connected to Los Altos, I'd love for you to join me in using Townie to better get to know our town.
6 comments ↓
Did you develop this application with nu? If so, any issues or steps you needed to take to get it approved?
Not in the client, but I used Nu a lot in the back end. The back end is scripted with Nu and there are some Objective-C components that are used both in the client and on the server.
Review times are much shorter now than this time last year. I thought there might be an objection since nearly everything in the app is server-driven, but it spent only three days in review and was approved with no problems.
Sounds very interesting, maybe you'll have time to share more details. Are you running the server on linux or osx?
I'm using a Debian Linux server, running on a Rackspace Cloud Server. The front end http and https service is handled with the pound load balancer and behind that I have single-threaded Nunja web servers. Currently all my data is in PostgreSQL, and there's a simple Nu adaptor for that. Except for the application itself, all the components are open-source and on github. I've broken them into some rather finely-grained pieces. Credit for several should go to Jeff Buck, especially for contributing to NuCURL and Nu itself. Jeff also was instrumental in getting all this running on Debian.
Congrats, Tim.
Looks simple, clean and elegant!
Any insights you can share about your design/development experience on the iPad?
Thanks Amir,
Townie was a very minimalist project. Most of the app is handled with a single table controller that's driven from my server. But that said, there's a lot more needed to turn Townie into a serious product. So far it's mainly been a place for me to develop ideas that I've used in other (contract) projects, but I hope to focus more on it soon.