Just thought I would make an official announcement (Yes, I will buy an ad too) ...

I just launched iCampus, an app for the iphone that starts by giving you searchable campus maps, and other information such as campus events, news (opens up technician articles), and sports stuff.

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=326102871&mt=8

Its live on the app store (FINALLY). I was hoping it would be out by the first week of school, for all you Freshman especially, but Apple sucks at making backend systems function well.

99 cents shouldnt kill anyones budget, so support me by downloading my app, and leave plenty of feedback as well.

9/19/2009 10:34:39 PM

Can I get a free trial?

I so gave you a deal on that thing once upon a time

9/19/2009 10:47:15 PM

True ... you definitely hooked me up on occasion ... that was awesome

9/19/2009 10:54:22 PM

every time I start writing an iphone I realize the phone would have to be jailbroken to run it properly and/or apple just releases the same thing and charges 100x for for it. are you actually making money worth your time developing iphone apps? I mean you're a ccie right?

9/20/2009 2:10:32 AM

1) what kind of apps are you writing that would require jailbreaking, that couldn't be done with the current API
2) what apps have Apple released lately and charged "100x" for....?

9/20/2009 2:22:55 AM

lol, im going to downloading from appulo to robster you

9/20/2009 4:27:53 AM

Just out of curiosity there are some questions I've been wanting to ask someone who actually has an app in the app store.

1) What's the payment schedule? Does Apple pay you once a week, every day, once a month?

2) Do you get a daily or weekly e-mail detailing the download stats for your app or any other useful info? Like how often people who downloaded the app are using it, etc?

3) How many man hours would you say it requires to write a quality app for the iphone and is it something an otherwise technologically competent person with little programming experience could realistically learn to do and how would you go about that?

9/20/2009 4:59:11 AM

^
1) Monthly payments, with about a month delay.. So I get paid for August Sales at the end of September.
2)You have a management interface where you can see your sales statistics (daily, weekly, monthly)
3) It requires a good bit of time to get up to speed on Apple's API, and that is if you have programming experience. If you have no programming experience, I would not recommend taking the iPhone on as your first project.

^^ I dont understand what you wrote ??

9/20/2009 2:44:51 PM

He's stealin that shit.

9/20/2009 2:54:06 PM

Ahh .. cool ...

Do you have to have a jailbroken phone to use that?

9/20/2009 3:05:43 PM

pretty sure you do

9/20/2009 3:26:57 PM

Quote :

"It requires a good bit of time to get up to speed on Apple's API, and that is if you have programming experience. If you have no programming experience, I would not recommend taking the iPhone on as your first project."

My friend had to work with the iPhone API this summer. He said if you know Objective-C and Cocoa, you should be fine.

9/20/2009 4:01:18 PM

Yeah, exactly ... if you know objective c and cocoa

If you have not programmed for the MAC or iPhone before, you dont know these, and will have to ramp up.

9/20/2009 4:02:33 PM

nice app! does it have more than maps?

[Edited on September 20, 2009 at 4:54 PM. Reason : .]

9/20/2009 4:53:13 PM

Searchable map and then feeds for events, news, sports info.

You can see a few basic screenshots at http://www.iCampus.mobi

I am planning to work in directory search and some message board functionality in the next major feature release.

I am also thinking about some sort of feed aggregation tool, or menu of different feed sources. For instance, from the sports tab, you could have a list of 8 different news sources, and you could see the titles/descriptions of those articles in a list view, and then click on any one of them to be taken to the article (while still in the application).

Let me know if yall have any thoughts on other features you would like to see implemented.

9/20/2009 5:14:16 PM

Quote :

"1) what kind of apps are you writing that would require jailbreaking, that couldn't be done with the current API 2) what apps have Apple released lately and charged "100x" for....?"

I started writing an app (almost a year ago) that would run as a system service so you could have a cron job that would upload the phone's location to a webpage. there were a lot of other nice things so you could store your common locations and if you lost your phone you'd be able to goto my page and find where it was. Then I thought I'd be able to do this with push notifications since I learned system daemons were a no-no. Apparently the push notifications do not support executable instructions. Right as push notifications came out, mobileme also came out at $100/year. my app was $3 and $10/year for hosting on my web space and free if you wanted to host it on your own webspace

9/20/2009 9:04:51 PM

Back in my day, you just had to wander around campus to find your next class.

9/20/2009 9:08:09 PM

wait so you have to be connected to the internet/3g to get these

why can't you just bookmark your webpage and get the map from that?

9/20/2009 11:17:36 PM

^^^ you're equating your $3 cron job app to MobileMe? i think its feature set probably justifies the "100x" price in comparison to a simple location logger a little more than you're admitting.

9/20/2009 11:35:21 PM

sour grapes + whining

9/21/2009 1:40:56 AM

^^^ so ... to answer your question:

This is better than bookmarking the universities campus map for a few reasons.

a) the campus map on ncsu.edu REALLY sucks
b) this application will show you, like in the real google maps application, a blue dot indicating your current location. It is also searchable, unlike the web based ncsu campus map.

Here are a few screenshots, in case yall wanted to see:

9/21/2009 9:06:06 AM

Quote :

"Apparently the push notifications do not support executable instructions. Right as push notifications came out, mobileme also came out at $100/year."

What are you smoking? MobileMe has been out years before the iPhone gen 1. Back then it was called .Mac then they renamed it to MobileMe but for the same service with improvements.

9/21/2009 10:15:31 AM

http://m.ncsu.edu

(must have iphone, smartphone, or emulator to see the mobile site)

[Edited on September 21, 2009 at 1:11 PM. Reason : +]

9/21/2009 1:09:42 PM

I don't see a map on there anywhere ... the m.ncsu site. Maybe one day.

I can make a NCSU branded version of my app, if they will pay for the customization. (just in case you know someone that would like to see this done).

9/21/2009 1:40:40 PM

lol @ m.ncsu.edu

9/21/2009 1:46:01 PM

Quote :

"(must have iphone, smartphone, or emulator to see the mobile site)"

or must have Safari and just change your user agent to mobile safari under the developer tab.

9/21/2009 2:37:02 PM

There's also: http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/maps made by ITECS which is a much nicer version of the campus map that does have a mobile version.

Considering one of the guys behind it is working with the m.ncsu.edu group, I'd be shocked if this new map wasn't rolled into the mobile site sometime in the near future.

Quote :

"I can make a NCSU branded version of my app, if they will pay for the customization. (just in case you know someone that would like to see this done)."

Out of curiousity, how many other universities does your app actually have in it currently?

9/21/2009 2:59:04 PM

Quote :

"or must have Safari and just change your user agent to mobile safari under the developer tab."

that's what i meant by emulator... forgive my web vocabulary

Q:

Quote :

"Maybe one day"

A:

Quote :

"Considering one of the guys behind it is working with the m.ncsu.edu group, I'd be shocked if this new map wasn't rolled into the mobile site sometime in the near future."

9/21/2009 3:20:35 PM

Currently, their are 12 or 15 active universities ... but I have 120 campuses totally mapped out, and will be adding the rest over the next few weeks now that the application has been approved by apple.

[Edited on September 21, 2009 at 5:02 PM. Reason : .]

9/21/2009 5:01:46 PM

i'll buy one just because you're from TWW

9/22/2009 9:07:48 PM

I will buy this when I get an iPhone.

9/22/2009 10:08:58 PM

Thanks guys. Response has been pretty good thus far ... be sure to let me know if you have any suggestions for changes/features.

9/23/2009 9:02:01 AM

[quote=robster]^^ I dont understand what you wrote ??[/quote]

Appulous (hxxp://www.appulo.us)--it's a site that has cracked IPAs for iPhone apps.

Didn't want to hotlink to a warez site.

Cool app though. I have only bought one other app, but I would've gone for this when I was a student. May get it if/when I go back to school.

[Edited on September 24, 2009 at 9:09 PM. Reason : quote]

9/24/2009 9:08:16 PM