Townie

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 ↓

#1nknwnx on 2010-03-01 at 18:10:48 America/Los_Angeles

Did you develop this application with nu?  If so, any issues or steps you needed to take to get it approved?

#2timburks on 2010-03-02 at 10:36:22 America/Los_Angeles

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.

#3nknwnx on 2010-03-03 at 13:14:03 America/Los_Angeles

Sounds very interesting, maybe you'll have time to share more details.  Are you running the server on linux or osx?

#4timburks on 2010-03-04 at 17:39:27 America/Los_Angeles

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.

#5amirkhella on 2010-07-12 at 19:58:53 America/Los_Angeles

Congrats, Tim.

Looks simple, clean and elegant!

Any insights you can share about your design/development experience on the iPad?

#6timburks on 2010-08-07 at 20:43:26 America/Los_Angeles

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.

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