Adventures with AppMakr
AppMakr is a convenient web-based tool for building iPhone (and now Android) apps out of RSS feeds and HTML/CSS files. We recently built an app using AppMakr based on our Facebook page for startup news (http://facebook.com/thinkstartup).
Here are some issues that we ran into:
RSS Mess. It turns out the default RSS feed for Facebook feeds cannot be read by AppMakr… so we needed to write code to parse the Graph API content (http://graph.facebook.com/thinkstartup/posts) and then generate a valid ATOM feed: http://cardinalblue.com/feed/thinkstartup
After we set up some other tabs (e.g. for Techcrunch, AllThingsDigital and GigaOm feeds), we arrived at the following app:
Running Out of Cache! After using out test versions of the app for a few days, we discovered that some of tabs would not load new content. It turned out that the iPhone app caches the feed posts, and so after you loaded 100 posts, it would not load any more! Oops… Apparently this is a known bug with AppMakr that hasn’t been fixed yet. I think there is a workaround by selecting an unlimited cache, but haven’t confirmed it yet.
HTML Tab Tweaking. Another problem was that we wanted a tab that loads our (rudimentary) mobile site: http://cardinalblue.com/mobile If you select the HTML tab in AppMakr, it actually expects a file containing static content, so instead we used an HTML file that opened up our mobile web site. It sounds simple in practice, but the browser didn’t act like a normal Safari browser and in particular it displayed the content too wide. It took endless tweaking to get it to do the right thing. Ideally, AppMakr should provide a tab that opens a browser to a certain page — although I’m not sure if Apple would like that too much… which brings us to the last point:
Guardians at the Gate. After two weeks of tweaking and editing, we (well, actually our newest employee Mariusz) got the app working the way we liked it. We submitted it to the App Store and 4 days later, it was promptly rejected. One reason was that our app contained “copyrighted” icons — namely a New York Times logo that was accidentally included in one of the posts. (That deserves a WTF!) The more significant reason was that Apple does not approve of apps that just contain links or web clippings. We tried fixing up our app to remove overt violations of copyright (such as taking out the Techcrunch/GigaOm/AllThingsDigital icons and feeds)… but the app was still rejected. So we’re giving up on this particular app… but will use AppMakr to build a new app containing original content.
Despite the issues, AppMakr still appears very promising as a way to reduce headaches in developing a mobile app, and we look forward to trying out their new Socialize feature (which enables social networking in your mobile app).
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John
