I’m building an iPhone app in a New Media class, and it was featured on Channel 6 in Maine.
If you want to cut to the chase, check out the article and video here.
This semester, my Information Design class collaborated with a graduate journalism class called “The Future of News.” They were trying to figure out what all of this New Media stuff means for the role of journalism in the modern world. Specifically, they were interested in what role citizen journalism might play, and whether it could take over from “real” journalism.
Through discussions with the grad students and our own research, my class decided that, at present, the best way to think of citizen journalism is that people are taking a more active process in the generation and moderation of news content. Newspapers won’t disappear tomorrow, and may never, but citizens are finding their way in to fill valuable gaps in news gathering.
With the Future of News class, my New Media peers and I conceived of a system in which citizens can submit news stories and collaborate on breaking coverage of localized events. We based the model largely on the coverage of the Hudson River plane crash, where the first reports from the scene came in over Twitter. We figured that, with the ubiquity of video and GPS in mobile phones, people could post short packets of information that would be grouped together by geographical location.
To that end, my New Media class began construction of a prototype system, independent from the journalism students. We split into three groups:
- Database and Backend – A place to store data about users and stories. Also handled all the manipulation of submitted data (sorting, searching, etc).
- Facebook Application – Facebook is the most popular social networking service, so we decided to leverage its user base to generate, browse, and share news content.
- Mobile Devices – Users can submit geotagged stories from anywhere at any time. The iPhone is the most promising, and we’re all biased New Media douchebags, so we decided to use it.
I was on the Mobile Devices team. The main reason that I decided to take this class is that I knew I would be able to learn iPhone development, something I’ve been wanting to do for some time now. However, there are no professors here who know anything about iPhone development, and only one or two students have even looked at Apple’s development tools, so it was up to me and my team to learn Objective-C and Cocoa Touch in six weeks on our own and actually build something. This book was an invaluable resource, by the way. The application ended up being 1080 lines of Objective-C. I did most of the coding, with a partner helping pointing out when I did stupid things because I was too tired to be coding.
As you can see from the video above, we managed to pull it off. The app you see there is a very rough prototype, and it probably won’t continue beyond the end of school, but I can now use what I’ve learned about iPhone development to work on a few ideas that I have for some applications, one of which is particular to island life.
Bonus: Fire Juggling part II
I juggled my fyrefli FyreBalls with some friends on Saturday evening in Old Town. Here are the pictures (also directly on Flickr):