Newsflash
I recently completed a contest through the University of Missouri – Columbia. The goal was to make an iPhone application that was somehow journalism or advertising related.
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!