Free App: Frost Alert

[Crundy]

Could do, but with two small problems:
1) It wouldn't be able to "alert" the user, as such. It would only be able to flag days in the next 5 days which were below the selected temperature for the selected region. Not too bad, but you would have to remember to load the app and check the results as and when required
2) I've never developed for the iPhone / iPod before, and don't have an iPhone to test it on.

That is a good idea though, and I could charge a small amount (like 49p) for it to pay for development costs. I'll look into it and see if the iPhone SDK comes with an emulator to test apps.

[Davyburns]

It wouldn't be able to "alert" the user, as such. It would only be able to flag days in the next 5 days which were below the selected temperature for the selected region.

There are apps such as ebay that send "push" notifications at a given time when an auction is ending, maybe you could use those

[Crundy]

OK, I'll look into it.

Another problem: XCode only runs on a mac (Apple haven't made a Windows version) and I don't have a mac. I'll have to see if I can either borrow one, or get a version of MacOS which runs on an intel machine.

[Davyburns]

If you can overcome these problems, it could prove lucrative, there must be lots of gardeners in the US and Canada who suffer at the hands of frost. There are also a lot of developers who make apps for the iphone, but not for apple through a jailbreak called Cydia, i'm sure you would get help from those if you can find a forum.

[Crundy]

I think I'd rather do it through the official channels, because if you convince people to jailbreak their phones in order to run your software and then something goes wrong, you end up in the dungheap. I'd rather have the code testers at Apple have a good run over it first and tell me if there are any memory leaks or vulnerabilities before releasing it.

[chris]

Check out "hackintosh" (running os x on an intel machine).

Or buy me the SDK, and I'll port it for you

[Crundy]

You have to pay for the SDK? No wonder I hate Apple.

[Davyburns]

I wasnt suggesting that you should make an app outside of apple, I was merely offering a suggestion as to where you might get help with the problems you have

[Crundy]

Ah, with you. OK I'll have a poke around and see what I can do.

[chris]

You have to pay for the SDK? No wonder I hate Apple.

I think the fee is $99 - that said, you can download the SDK to play around with, it just means that you can't use itunes/the app store as a means to publish your development.

You keep 70% of the revenue earned too, so there's that to figure in too.

Maybe better to take it to PM, but if you want to colaborate in moving it to a different platform - I'd be happy to work on it with you. Most of my freelance dev work is moving to the open source platforms now (typical after I spent months writing a CMS to flog!) Simply for the same reason as your self - the end users don't want to pay for MS hosting (in particular, a SQL license)... That said though, if people wanted to use it - you could always use MySQL.. you'd obv still need IIS but that'd bring the cost right down. Suggesting as a lot of the sites I've done have opted for MySQL over MSSQL simply due to the cost.

Edit: seems its just $99 now, no other tier?

[Crundy]

I thought Apple nicked 40% of the revenue?

I could rewrite the app in Perl / PHP and run it under linux w/MySQL. I only did it in .NET initially as a way to learn LINQ-to-SQL / LINQ-to-XML. Actually, I think I did initially look at it, but the XML handling in PHP was awful IIRC.

I suppose I should look at developing iOS apps, so I'll try using Hackintosh at some point to play around with it. Yet another language I have to learn, as I've never used Objective-C before :-/

I still can't believe they charge for the SDK. Incredible. Lets look at the rivals:

.NET: Free framework, free dev in notepad, free basic IDEs (expensive pro IDE)
Java: Free SDK and JRE, free IDE (JDeveloper)
Perl / PHP: Free interpretors, free IDE (Eclipse)
C++: Loads of free compilers to native code, free IDE (Eclipse)

Seriously, what is it with Apple?

[chris]

Edited my post - but here it states 70% - maybe it changed since you looked at it?

Distribute your App - iOS Developer Program - Apple Developer

PHP has some decent XML interaction now, I think there's an inbuilt class for it now? You could also run PHP CLI too, then just shedule your jobs in cron/whatever... Much better than having to mess around with either ASP's cache timeouts if you don't have access to the server.

[Crundy]

Oh yeah, guess it is 70%.

I did look at the PHP XML classes, but I think I played around with them for a couple of days before thinking "Screw this" and just used the super cool .NET XElement classes.

[RobP]

An iPhone app would be fantastic! Good idea. The rhs app claims to have a frost warning but am still awaiting an alert despite a frost killing my last sowing of radishes and winter leftover a couple of days ago. It needs an in app purchase though for 1.59 if I remember correctly, so could probably pitch it at the 99c level (59p) and be fairly successful.

I have spent quite some time looking for an app that does this and to date only found the rhs one that doesn't appear to work (can't configure your min temp for a warning, or when it comes etc, it's not got much functionality).

You'd have my £1 if you made it anyway! And if it worked overseas I'm sure you'd have a good Market for it and should recoup your investment in the developer kit.

[chris]

Something 'may' be in the pipeline

Edit: Any users of Andriod here too?