Newsflash is released into the App Store as of April 27th.  It has made it onto the top 25 free news apps, and got about 500 downloads in the first day.  Definitely not a huge release by App Store standards, but it is still exciting to see all of the use!

We are looking forward to getting some feedback and releasing a version with some upgrades. One improvement would be to have international geocoding. Right now, we rolled our own geocoding database from Geocoder.us (which only works in the United States), but Google just released an API for reverse geocoding that may work better. I will be keeping an eye on the reviews to see what people like and don’t like about this first version.

Check out the Newsflash website for more info.

As a group we decided that there was no real good news reader for the iPhone. Sure, there are some RSS readers, but you need to subscribe to all the feeds yourself. Also, there are a few good apps for certain news sources (New York Times, AP Mobile News). We wanted to make a news aggregator for the iPhone. Using existing APIs to get the articles, it turned out to be a reasonable goal and we were able to focus on ease of use and customization. The result was Newsflash, an application with no real business plan.

One of the buildings on Infinite Loop

One of the coolest parts of the contest was that the finalists got to visit Apple’s campus in Cupertino, CA.  We went to an executive briefing center and got to show off our work to some of the engineers working on the iPhone OS.  It was an awesome experience.

Another perk of the contest was getting to learn the iPhone SDK without needing to buy an iPhone (they were provided by the school for the duration of the contest). Hopefully I can get around to using this knowledge to build another app someday.

We put together a low budget video to promote our entry on the school’s website.  Newsflash is totally free and has no advertisements.  It should be in the App Store very soon (pending approval from Apple).  Go ahead and download it… it should at least be worth what you paid for it!