[adelaide.pm] iPhone Application for Perl Mongers

[David Lloyd]

HI There,

I was toying with the idea of an iPhone application for Perl Mongers and was thinking the following basic things might be useful:

Find a group
Events
News
About

Given the devices capabilities I was thinking:

Local group could be 'guessed' by the location the device discovers it is at
Group could be located by known city name, lat/long - all depends on what Google maps which backs MapKit's maps can do
Events could be garnered from some standard feed
News could be garnered from some standard feed

Personally I like the idea of the application being a "real" application, i.e. one running natively written in Objective C. That said, this may not give groups the ability to customise their pages, and such, so I was thinking that once a group's page has been located then something similar to the following could happen:

Attempt to fetch [groupid]/iphone.html
Attempt to fetch [groupid]/index.html (i.e. the default user page which may or may not be small screen friendly)
Display some "good" fall back information seeing we know at least the name and lat/long
Absent all the above, something that is not an OS crash :)

This would allow groups to make iPhone specific pages, or if they believe their real page is OK on the iPhone, to let it just fall through that and to degrade further accordingly.

From what I can tell there's no centralised way to determine when meeting's and events occur. This is something that could be somewhat fixed. The list of PM groups is a plain, easy-to-understand XML document and I'm sure there is some standard, *ahem ical *ahem*, for saying when meetings are. The good thing about standards is there are so many of them.

So:

Do we think this is a totally bizarre idea?
Would anyone be willing to look at betas assuming we go ahead?
Feedback?

I would propose to host the code at Google Code, using Mercurial (because I like Mercurial :P) and to license it either under Apache License 2.0 or the Perl license itself (1).

DSL

(1) This translates as "anything but GPL v2.0"
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