It’s been no secret among those of you who know me or follow my tweets that I’ve been working on an iPhone application for the University of Edinburgh’s award winning newspaper, The Student. As of earlier this week, the app is now available from the App Store.

The project initially started in late 2009 when Neil Pooran, one of the paper’s News editors, came to me with the idea of developing an iPhone application for accessing The Student’s content. We talked about it briefly and, thinking this would be pretty cool, I decided to take on the project. I offered up my development time free of charge, and work soon began on designing the application’s user interface and features.

Over a couple of meetings and after looking at the plethora of other newspapers on the App Store, we decided on the most important features and came up with a rough idea of how it should look. I then spent a bit of time researching the best way to implement the design from a technological perspective, as well as looking at the interface from a usability perspective.

The application works by downloading headlines and articles from The Student’s website, parsing them into logical data structures and storing them in a database. Browsing headlines and viewing articles simply repeats this process in reverse: the data is retrieved from the database and presented in an appropriate format. The app makes extensive use of Cocoa’s Core Data framework to provide fast and efficient database storage and information retrieval. 

Along with the core functionality of downloading and viewing articles, the app includes the ability to share stories on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook sharing is relatively straightforward and uses the Facebook Connect system that has become prevalent among other iPhone apps for bragging about your high score. 

Twitter sharing, on the other hand, turns out to be a little bit trickier (and pretty cool too). In order to interface with the Twitter API, a user must authenticate the application to use their twitter account, something that is accomplished with OAuth. OAuth is nice because it allows the application to securely access a user’s account, without the user having to trust the app with their login details. It also gives the user greater control, as they can log in to twitter at any time and revoke the application’s access. Just to add an extra layer of cool, any tweets posted from the application show up on twitter as coming from “The Student for iPhone”.

I’m pretty proud of the way the application has turned out and the development process has been a lot of fun. It is a great feeling to release your own software and I’m very pleased to have been a major part of (what we think is) the first student-designed student media iPhone application in the UK. Now it’s your turn to download it, give it a spin, and (hopefully) leave a good review. Here’s to version 2.0 and iPad support!