Makes No Sense At All

It’s been quiet here for quite some time, and one of the reasons for that is that I’ve working on a new iPhone application, which is now available from the AppStore: TeamTweet.

TeamTweet is an iPhone application that makes it possible for anyone to create live reports from sports events, so that fans, family and friends can follow what’s going on, wherever they are. It does this by combining a specialized user-interface for sports-events with the power of Twitter.

When you have installed TeamTweet on your iPhone, you start by setting up a Twitter account on http://twitter.com for the team for which you want to create reports. Next you setup the team in TeamTweet, add the teams players, and attach the twitter account to the team. You’re then set to go.

Prior to the match you create it in TeamTweet, which will send out a first tweet with the name and date of the event. The match appears in the list of planned contests, on the day you start the contest in TeamTweet and you enter relevant events as they occur. Events are specific per sport, currently the following sports are available in TeamTweet:

• Baseball
• Basketball
• (American) Football
• Hockey
• Running
• Soccer

Events can be either time related (for example start of period, end of match) or about things that happen (for example goal, yellow card). TeamTweet always presents the list of events that are relevant for the current state of the match, and with a few clicks you specify what exactly happened. Examples are which player scored a goal or the reason why a player got sent off. TeamTweet takes care of the timing and score.
The events show up in the live match report and are immediately sent to the Twitter account of the team, so that all followers can get the updates within seconds.

TeamTweet maintains a full history of match reports, and you can send out match reports by e-mail. This provides you all the key information when you want to create a full match report afterwards.

For one of my projects on the iPad I wanted to popup a detail window out of an existing image view, using some animation while popping up. CoreAnimation was the way to go, but I was facing difficulties to:

a) find out how to do it and
b) get it working.

The animation should combine movement (from the location of the clicked image to the location where the popup is shown), scaling (from the image size to the popup size) and rotation (for a nice effect). Google searches delivered bits and pieces, the best sample I found was MFFlip from Mike Lee. This didn’t include scaling and movement like I wanted it, so I added this and then packed it up nicely into a single class ViewFlipper with a single factory method that takes 2 views as parameters and does all the calculations and animation. The ViewFlipper class can be included without further dependencies into any project, except that you need to include the QuartzCore framework.

I’ve created a little sample iPad program around it that you can download here. I’ve put some documentation in the code that describes the what goes on inside. I hope this is useful for others who are struggling with this too.

Note: initially I kept having trouble with all of the examples I found, it turned out this was caused by the fact that I had one view with 3 subviews: a UITableView covering the entire view, the imageView and popupView (which were shown above the UITableView). I managed to solve this by moving the imageView and popupView onto a view of its own. I gave this extra view a transparent background, so that the underlying UITableView was still visible. This extra view also has the advantage that you can catch touch events on it which you can use to popdown the popup.

Today version 1.2.3 of RitMeester has been released. This is a bugfix release that solves a synchronization problem with the iPhone client, when characters like &, < or > were used.

In the initial international version (MasterDrive) this problem was already solved.

Today a localized, English version of MasterDrive has been released. Masterdrive was originally developed for the Netherlands only (dubbed Ritmeester), targeting owners of lease-car who need to keep a registration of their car usage for the tax authorities. Over time functionality was added to also maintain a registration for professionals who want to keep track of car usage for commercial purposes, e.g. to invoice customers. The logical next step was to make the application available to a much wider audience by localizing it into English, a step that is now completed with the release of Masterdrive.

With Masterdrive it is very easy to maintain a administration of the drives made with your car(s) on your Mac. It supports drive templates with all the relevant information for much used drives, to make data entry as quick as possible.

Per April 21 the iPhone companion application version 1.1.2 is available for all countries through the AppStore.