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CGA iPhone App


STRAT
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ugly? love it! retro!

no 3.5mm jack? well, don't listen to music through my phone.

standard video formats? 3gp and mp4.

outsold by iphones and blackberries? lemmings... :D

 

love my G1. best phone i've ever owned, and even better since the cupcake firmware was released today. anyway.. i'm thread jacking...

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It doesn't have a video player. Google said "you can just download one". Ergo, there is no standard video format - you can't encode a video that you know uG1y users can play. You also don't know they'll be able to hear it because it doesn't have a headphone jack, and unless it's something with a Star Wars joke you don't know they'll appreciate it because they didn't even understand that their phone is ugly.

 

When they finally launched the thing, after all that hype, I was expecting something amazing and instead saw the phone equivalent of Microsoft Bob running on Packard Bell hardware. Only without a headphone jack. And no media player. It's like watching the Yankees lately. At least it runs Safari, so they did one thing right - borrowed software from a real software company.

 

They need some better hardware, and fast, or they're going to lose any chance at the mass market and only be able to sell to the sort of people who only run "open" software - and they'll lose those people too if those other guys who were working on an open source phone ever get it done, because the other guys are more "open" and their phone is even uglier.

 

Anyway, my real point is - there are some many times more iPhones out there than uG1ies, it doesn't make sense to write software for Android.

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I kind of thought the author of the vBulletin might release something to allow post access. Their software is fairly popular, so it seems like it would make sense to be developed at that level.

 

....I like the iPhone a lot, but AT&T's horrible cellular service really brings it down. Several phones ago I used Sprint, and I have to say their coverage areas are comparable. There are a couple of junior model iPhones/iTouch coming out on Verizons network, but they key is that they are not full iPhones, and will cost less. I am guessing they will drop the iPod portion of the phone, and just make it strictly a phone, but that is just a guess.

Edited by Crazy Homeless Guy
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A CGA iPhone app has crossed my mind. I'd have to hire someone to program that though and I have no idea what that might cost. I have a feeling though that I would never recoup the money from the number of users who would use the app. (in advertising that is). I bet the total number of users would be in the low hundreds, maybe a thousand. Will look into it more. If this is an app you woudl want, post your interest here.

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I'd definitely buy that app, but I hear you Jeff on the costs. Even if the vBulletin peeps don't make an app, I would think making a mobile version of the board would be quite effective, cheaper, and accessible to much more than the iPhone. Like what Google's done with Gmail.

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I'd definitely buy that app, but I hear you Jeff on the costs. Even if the vBulletin peeps don't make an app, I would think making a mobile version of the board would be quite effective, cheaper, and accessible to much more than the iPhone. Like what Google's done with Gmail.

 

It is possible to develop an iPhone skin for the forums. This would be a more stripped down version of the forums. Like this one: http://forums.ilounge.com/index.php?styleid=7 I just took a quick peek around and did not see many iPhone vbulletin skins out there. Hmmm...

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I have a feeling though that I would never recoup the money from the number of users who would use the app. (in advertising that is).

 

Combining this with another post gives me a thought:

 

Why don't you see what it would cost to create a generic vBulletin iphone app. That way, you could sell it to a lot more people for use with any vb-based forum.

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not only that Jeff, but you'd get countless buyers to the app (including all the advertising it does) from the hundreds of peeps in the iphone fraternity and app store vicinity anyway, who are unaware of CGA.

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Combining this with another post gives me a thought:

 

Why don't you see what it would cost to create a generic vBulletin iphone app. That way, you could sell it to a lot more people for use with any vb-based forum.

 

 

That's kind of what the "hmmm" in my last post was alluding to. :)

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That's kind of what the "hmmm" in my last post was alluding to. :)

 

Let me know if you get some numbers. I had an idea for a completely different mapping/linking to stuff on the map iphone app, but no clue what it would cost to make. I'm not going to get into trying to code something. No skills, no time.

 

Actually, I just got a new 'hmmm' idea of my own.

Edited by Ernest Burden
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It doesn't have a video player. Google said "you can just download one". Ergo, there is no standard video format - you can't encode a video that you know uG1y users can play...

If you need to encode video for the G1, it can hardware decode any file encoded for iPhone (H264, mpeg-4), plus a couple more formats (3GP, and even streaming video). The basic video player that is on the market was literally coded by Google and included in the SDK, but there are better ones on the Market.

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  • 5 months later...

Once I get to this part of the site, I'll look more closely into an iPhone app. There are some new versions of our forum that are coming out soon that will change a lot of things, so I'm not sure how this will affect a possible iphone integration. I'm hoping it will make it easier.

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IS htere an RSS Feed I can use for CG ARCHITECT? maybe be able to create an app using that. Quicker you post the quicker i can get on it!

 

 

Yes there are RSS feeds for the forums, the news section, and the gallery.

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/external.php?type=RSS2 (forums)

http://www.cgarchitect.com/rss/gallery.asp (gallery)

http://www.cgarchitect.com/rss/news.asp (news)

 

The problem with an RSS feed app is that it would still launch a browser to read the full post from the feed. What really has to be done is create a special iPhone template that is loaded when the iPhone browser is detected. That way no app needs to be downloaded, although it would be a lot cleaner. A lot of news sites like Time Magazine, New York Times etc all have news apps to read their articles online, but I am not sure technically how they are doing this. ie. if they are using feeds, special server side apps, or if they just wrapped a customer web browser into an app. Definitely would like to see an app developed, just have not had the time to look into it.

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Just added CGA to Free RSS on my iTouch. It only shows 15 new topics. Is this number limited by the server? (I believe it is because my other feeds load up to 20, normally).

Now, one thing that would be awesome is being able to reply to posts straight from the feed reader (of course, I know it would be a lot to ask).

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I know you can get very interrogative with server side code. Surely there's a way to detect an iPhone browser and have PHP or ASP deliver content in a special format?

 

(does a google)

 

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/detect_apple_iphone_user_web_site_server.html

The Server Side Variable HTTP_USER_AGENT returns the word iPhone mixed in amongst the entire returned string. A simple function to detect that word and return TRUE would be simple to write. At that point, just do iPhone specific output. And to quote the above link:

The basic idea in either case is that once you have detected that they're running an iPhone, you can modify what you deliver to them, either changing what's on the page, perhaps giving them a completely different version of the page, or even taking them to a different site entirely.

 

note: I don't have an iPhone - never touched one - not even touched an iPod. So I might be over-simplifying this, but just thought I'd contribute.

 

Yes there are RSS feeds for the forums, the news section, and the gallery.

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/external.php?type=RSS2 (forums)

http://www.cgarchitect.com/rss/gallery.asp (gallery)

http://www.cgarchitect.com/rss/news.asp (news)

 

The problem with an RSS feed app is that it would still launch a browser to read the full post from the feed. What really has to be done is create a special iPhone template that is loaded when the iPhone browser is detected. That way no app needs to be downloaded, although it would be a lot cleaner. A lot of news sites like Time Magazine, New York Times etc all have news apps to read their articles online, but I am not sure technically how they are doing this. ie. if they are using feeds, special server side apps, or if they just wrapped a customer web browser into an app. Definitely would like to see an app developed, just have not had the time to look into it.

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