December, 2010
I just finished releasing updates to the mobile 311 application into the iPhone App Store and Windows Phone Marketplace and felt inclined to write a bit about my experiences.
To give some brief background: Advanced Mobile 311 is a new product for Blue Dot that is providing the ability for citizens to easily report issues in their communities. 311 is a phone number set aside in the US for reporting non-emergency problems and our applications take this concept into the hands of smart phone users allowing them to mark the location of problems on a map (possibly using GPS), take a picture and submit a specific service request to their city or municipality. We certainly aren’t the only one doing this and some US cities like San Fransisco and New York have already implemented and been running crowd sourcing 311 solutions for a while now. City Sourced is working hard at this same problem with limited partnerships around the US. Much more can be said around the business models and players in the Gov 2.0 movement, but for now I’m more interested in the process of writing and delivering consumer applications which is something very new for me.
While it will take a week or so for the application updates I just submitted to make it through the review process in their respective store, you can check out the existing apps both in the iPhone App Store and the Windows Marketplace (requires Zune unfortunately). Both are free of charge so feel free to try them out! By in large it has been a positive experience developing both applications.
Prior to this, I had no real experience developing applications on a mac, using Xcode or writing Objective-c. Once I got over the C# to Objective-c transition and understood the basic paradigms of the development framework I was quite productive in creating the iPhone version of the application. I have been a mac user for a long time (really since I was a kid) so the OS is familiar to me and I intuitively understand the UX. The API and maturity of the iOS SDK is really very impressive and the 311 application fit very well into what the platform was designed to do. I actually created the iPhone app first (as Windows Phone 7 was just a rumor at this time) so it was a good exercise to have to think in another language. I think the one thing that I struggled with the most was memory management specifically around the didReceiveMemoryWarning and viewDidUnload paradigm. Debugging programs and understanding errors in Xcode is kinda like taking a step back in time when you are used to Visual Studio and .net development. The maturity of the iOS platform also means that you have to deal with supporting multiple devices and multiple versions of the operating system along with new devices like the iPad which have a different form factor and require a different set of graphics. All that said, it was quite pleasurable developing on my mac and the speed of the iPhone simulator is a breath of fresh air after using the WM emulator. The tools felt lightweight, high performing and easy to work with. I even dove in and did some of the graphic design for the internal menu icons and status bubbles.
Submitting to the App Store was really no big deal. Instructions to properly build and sign your application were straightforward. The only thing that bites me each time is that I chose to have a space in my application’s name “Mobile 311” and this seems to be a continued source of problems when uploading to the Store (there are workarounds - comment if you are interested).
On the Windows Phone side of things we were lucky enough to be on the white list for applications that came out with the release of the physical phone. The Microsoft stack is really where Blue Dot feels at home and the development experience on the Windows Phone was very impressive (especially since I was basically working on a pre-release tool set and a version 1.0 product with limited access to real devices and all the other interesting things that come with being an early adopter). I must say that Microsoft was very supportive in this process, even providing consulting resources when necessary (although most of my issues were resolved by waiting for the next release of the tools). Development for Windows Phone applications is done in Visual Studio 2010 and in C# & Silverlight. I had never done any WPF or Silverlight development before, but the ramp up was pretty easy and I must say that it is a huge improvement over WinForms development. Visual Studio is a truly first class development environment and VS 2010 only raises the bar. The new wp7 emulator is fantastic (MS obviously took a page from Apple’s book here) - it loads very quickly and makes it easy to develop and debug your application. I struggled a little bit with things like the camera functionality (which does not work on the emulator) and understanding how the Task system works. It is really nice not to have to worry about memory management and the debugging tools are far superior to those in Xcode. Overall, it was very fun to re-create this application in another tool set/environment. I tried to make the app feel like a windows phone app and not an iPhone port and was pretty happy with how things turned out.
Submitting to the Marketplace was a very similar process to App Store submittal. The only thing that annoys me here is that the Marketplace holds all sorts of other stuff (not just phone apps) and you can only view things in the store you have Zune installed.
We are considering creating apps for the other leading smartphone operating systems, but until that happens I also created a mobile optimized web site that is reachable by any browser for submitting service request. Obviously there is no way to use things like GPS, but you can still submit requests to the system.
Finally, all of the server components are now up and running in Windows Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud OS. Our server is architect-ed in a way that it can run both in a traditional hosted model and on Azure. The difference between our 311 system and some of the other offerings right now is that we are pre-integrated into some of the major ERP systems that cities already use to mange service requests. And by having our infrastructure in Azure we can offer a data stream to anyone without them having to purchase and provision servers or worry about physically infrastructure.
Go check out the apps! iPhone, Windows Phone
