Woah! What a crazy 24 hours this past day has been. And all because Apple have approved and published an app I had been quietly working on for the school.
A couple of weeks ago I began work on creating an app for the iPhone, based around the content we have on the school website. This was part of my ongoing mission to ensure that we make our website content available to as many pupils, parents and friends of the school as possible. The process of making the app was deceptively simple thanks to the website appmakr.com
This company took all the stress of making an app away, and left me to think about just two things: the look of the app (possible through the graphics I created), and the content of the app. The app is populated through RSS feeds, and so all I needed to do was decide what content was going into the app, find the relevant RSS feed and paste its URL into the appmakr editor.
I wanted to create the app with access to the three most important features on the website; these are the main articles, the video news clips, and the podcast / audio clips. The main articles RSS feed was straightfoward - we have it on the website all the time, but the video and audio feeds were slightly different.
Our videos are hosted by Vimeo - who provide a great solution for us. Until recently though, their videos would not play on iPhones because the actual video was embedded as a flash file (like many other video hostings sites too). Recently however, Vimeo has created iPhone friendly versions of videos for its plus customers (and yes, we are a plus customer). This has meant that the our Vimeo video RSS feed is iPhone compatible, and so possible to use within the app.
Our podcasts are hosted by Jellycast, and sent to iTunes automatically, and so for the app I used the Jellycast RSS feed that iTunes use to pull in the content.
Once these feeds had been validated, and I had previewed the look of the app (altering some of the graphics so that the "back" and "refresh" buttons would not obsure any of the graphic elements, it was ready to be submitted to apple for approval.
This process was the slowest part - taking almost two weeks for the approval to arrive, but now it is live in the App store - our very own school App for others to download and use.
Feedback so far has been positive from other teachers and educators around the country, with comments ranging from "wow that's brilliant", "the iPhone app is great" through to "WOAHHHHHH! That is super cool!" and "Wow! how did you ever manage to do that?"
The school has received emails today after people had seen the app on the internet, there is a mention of the school and app on the Ictopus newsblog, and this evening I've been replying to emails, direct messages on Twitter, and phone calls all related to the app.
We seem to have caused a bit of a stir with this little feature - and it seems that we may have created the first custom app for a school (although if anyone is aware of other schools with their own apps, please leave a comment so I can retract this claim).
It is just the latest part of my aim of making our website fully accessible to all, no matter what device they are using. For non iPhone users we also have a "Mippin" service that pulls the RSS content of our articles and podcasts to phones. The website is also viewable (in a range of forms) on many other web enabled devices, as can be seen in this list. And our Odiogo enhanced feed allows our articles to be read to listeners.
P.S. If you are interested in making your own app, Mashable are currently running a promotion offering a discount on the cost of developing an app.
