Barack Obama iPhone Application

October 2, 2008 10:29 PM

Barack Obama iPhone Application
As part of a small volunteer team of folks we released the official Barack Obama iPhone app today. To go from first line of code to shipping took just under 3 weeks. We had a team of 10 developers (only 3 coders). The app has (obviously) been pretty well received so far, despite a small bug that causes it to crash for most of Pittsburgh. You can read a bit about my role as Lead Developer on my blog: toxicsoftware Raven Zachary was the primary project leader and wrote up a much better post.
posted by schwa (19 comments total)

Fucking brilliant piece of work, I was playing with it earlier today.
posted by mathowie at 10:29 PM on October 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

Brilliant work, congratulations.
posted by waxpancake at 10:53 PM on October 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

Wow. Thanks mathowie. That means a lot to me. The best part of all this is that I'm a British citizen living in the US (permanent resident) and ineligible to vote, ha! At least I can do say I did my part.

Here's the credits page from the app showing all team members.

Oh and there's a party on Tuesday planned in Portland, OR. Any iPhone users and/or Obama supporters are welcome!
posted by schwa at 11:22 PM on October 2, 2008

Oh and I have to admit - the app is crashier than I would like (3 weeks dev cycle!). We're going to be putting out a stability release ASAP.
posted by schwa at 11:37 PM on October 2, 2008

nice idea
posted by defc0n1 at 2:53 AM on October 3, 2008

This is one of the few iphone apps that genuinely makes me wish I had one...
posted by andythebean at 8:06 PM on October 3, 2008 [1 favorite]

hey schwa, check your mefi mail...
posted by mathowie at 9:56 PM on October 3, 2008

mathowie, I saw it - just in a mad rush trying to put out Obama.app 1.1. will respond asap
posted by schwa at 6:41 AM on October 4, 2008

Great app! As much as I hate "2.0", I'd definitely say this is grassroots 2.0. Congratulations on the great execution! (non-US volunteer for Obama here myself)
posted by lodev at 3:19 PM on October 4, 2008 [1 favorite]

A MetaFilter user made that? That's awesome! I love this thing, and I think every campaign is going to have something like it in 2012.

I especially love the nearby events thing; it would be awesome to see something like that for non-political events too. You know, if you need something to do after the election.
posted by JDHarper at 4:53 PM on October 4, 2008

@JDHarper Thanks!

Almost all the code I used to do the Local Events feature is open source! Check out my TouchCode iphone open source repository: http://code.google.com/p/touchcode/. That feature used portions of TouchConnection (code for making talking to remote servers trivial), TouchSQL (yaobjc sqlite wrapper) and as part of working on the app I started work on TouchRSS (RSS client code).

Making a local events news client would be great. The trouble is finding good local news feeds.
posted by schwa at 6:02 PM on October 4, 2008

This may be a dumb question: Is it possible to write iPhone apps without using a Mac? I'd love to try my hand at it, but I don't have a Mac at the moment.
posted by JDHarper at 9:46 PM on October 4, 2008

@jdharper, Not to my knowledge. You really need a Mac. You might be able to do something for Jailbroken apps on windows/linux - but to release on the appstore - you need the Xcode environment.
posted by schwa at 7:35 AM on October 5, 2008

Myself and Raven (project manager) are going to be at the Wednesday Oct. 8 meeting of Portland Cocoahead discussing the application and the development process.

(Oh and @jdharper, I'm just down the road from you in Anderson, SC ;-)
posted by schwa at 7:45 AM on October 5, 2008

I love this app. I read about it on Fark and installed it immediately. I would love to see the Congress have an app like this so you could follow bills and hearings easily. Great job!
posted by Biblio at 10:45 AM on October 5, 2008 [1 favorite]

Well, rats. I might have to invest in a Mac Mini then. (I think I'll wait until after the 10/14 apple event to buy it though.)
posted by JDHarper at 12:02 PM on October 5, 2008

This is awesome. I feel like all of my favorite things are coming together.
posted by iamkimiam at 10:59 PM on October 6, 2008

I love the positions tabs, so you can quickly see where he stands on issues. Kinda works for and against him equally (in my case). As I was able to identify some areas where I figured we agreed.

I'd love to see a McCain one as well, you know, to compare and contrast and to be informed and all.

Slick app. Obama has way better graphic designers.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:05 AM on October 8, 2008

Hey what d'ya know - it was all worth it after all!
posted by schwa at 9:12 PM on November 4, 2008