Lobaco 1.0: iPhone Testers Required!

It’s been a long 7 months since I first laid eyes on Xcode and the iOS SDK all that time ago and I’ve had quite the love/hate relationship with it. There were times when I could spend only a couple hours coding and blast through features barely breaking a sweat, and others when I’d spend multiple torturous hours figuring out why something just wasn’t working the way I thought it should. The last couple months have been quite successful as my code base has grown large enough to cover most of the rudimentary functions I use constantly and my muscle memory with certain functions is approaching a usable level. Last weekend it all came to head after I polished off the last of my TODO list and sank back into my chair.

Then it hit me, this was a feature complete 1.0 release.

Apart from the achievements (which are barely implemented in the web client) you can do everything on the iPhone client that you could do with the full web client. I’ve taken design cues from many iPhone applications that I’ve been using and I feel its quite usable, especially if you’re familiar with the myriad of Twitter clients out there. I’ve been fiddling with it over the past few days and it seems to be stable enough for me to unleash on others to see how it goes and that’s where you, my faithful readers, come into play.

I’m looking for people to beta test this application pending a full release of it to the app store. If you’re interested in testing out the application and have any 3G and up iPhone (2G might work, but it would be dreadfully slow) hit me up on my gmail therefinedgeek@gmail.com and we’ll take it from there. I haven’t really experimented with Apple’s beta testing yet so the first lot of you are more than likely to be in for a fun ride as I stumble my way through deploying the application to you, but this is all part of the fun of being a very, very early adopter 🙂

Despite all the trials and tribulations that developing this client has brought me the experience is proving to be invaluable as it’s helped me refine the idea down to the core ideal I started with almost 2 years ago: getting people communicating around a location. It’s also been the first new language I’ve learned in almost 5 years and it has reminded me just how much fun it was learning and creating in a completely new environment, so much so that I’m almost completely sold on the idea of recoding the web client in Ruby on Rails. Still that’s all pie in the sky stuff for now as the next big improvement to Lobaco is moving the entire service off my poor VPS and into the wonderful world of the cloud, most likely Windows Azure. I hope you’ll jump on board with me for testing Lobaco and hopefully in the future this will grow into something much more than my pet project.