Month: October 2014

Categories
Android iPhone Development

App allows tourists to experience ‘12 Years a Slave’

Here’s a nice write-up from the Baton Rouge Advocate on an app for Android and iOS that I worked on with Frank Eakin and Justine Boyer. I did the software development for both apps, in Java and Objective-C.

TwelveYearsApp

App allows tourists to experience ‘12 Years a Slave’

The app officially launches at noon on Saturday, November 1, 2014 at the Louisiana Book Fair on the grounds of the State Capitol in Baton Rouge. Steve McQueen, the director of the movie “Twelve Years a Slave”, and Louis Gossett, Jr., actor and the narrator of the audiobook, are helping to kick off the app launch. On Sunday, November 2, 2014 Frank Eakin and the descendants of many of the characters in the book will take a tour of the app sites, followed by a celebration in Marksville, Louisiana.

I had a great time working on these apps, as they combined my love of history with a great design, great content, and a very interesting story. Many were introduced to the story of Solomon Northup through the movie, Twelve Years a Slave, and I hope they can now easily visit the historical sites associated with his story of being kidnapped as a free man in New York and brought to slavery in Louisiana.

Purchase the Twelve Years a Slave Tour Guide app for the iPhone and the Twelve Years a Slave Tour Guide app for Android.

Categories
iPhone Development

HTML5 Video Autoplay on iOS Sample App

Link to my HTML5 Video Autoplay on iOS Sample App GitHub repo

As part of a current project building a large hybrid native/web iPad app, some issues came up regarding iOS 7 and 8 and HTML5 content in a UIWebView with an autoplaying video.

This is an area where Mobile Safari differs from the UIWebView that iOS developers can embed into their own apps. Mobile Safari doesn’t allow video to autoplay, ostensibly to protect users on cellular data plans from large data charges. As far as I can tell, its behavior doesn’t change if the device is on a wifi network, so there may be other reasons.

There are many StackOverflow issues about this, some of which appear to be outdated, so the easiest thing for me to do was to build a quick, simple app to test out HTML5 autoplay. The key setting to know is that you must change the UIWebView to allow media playback without user interaction – you can set this in the Storyboard, or you can set it via code:


self.webView.mediaPlaybackRequiresUserAction = NO;

You don’t need any kind of Javascript to let the HTML5 video autoplay – simply set the autoplay attribute on the video tag, and you’ll be able to run the video as soon as the HTML loads.

Categories
MapRhino

MapRhino: The Are We There Yet App for Kids on a Road Trip!

I’ve been working on a new app that isn’t like anything else out there yet – MapRhino!

It’s an app for kids on road trips who have iPads – the parents load up the MapRhino app on their iPhone, put in their destination, and then the kids get the car’s location and the time remaining until they get there on their iPads.

The greatest part about it is that it doesn’t require any kind of wireless data plan for the iPads – the iPhone and the iPads set up their own wireless network in the car using the Wifi and Bluetooth connections built into the devices, and the iPads can get the streaming updates.

Unfortunately, it uses some Apple-only technology, so it’s only going to work with iPhones and iPads (for now), but all you need is a recent iPhone and iPad.

I’m in the process of finishing up beta testing, to get the app out into the App Store, but I’ve included a screenshot of the iPad app so you can see what it looks like.