Wanted: MGoBlog iphone app

Submitted by PDX_Blue on
I've never bought an iPhone app cuz I can usually find what I need in free apps. I would however buy an MGoBlog app if anyone knew how to develop one. Surfing this site on my iPhone isn't super efficient. Any developers out there want to take a shot? You've got the world's biggest alumni base to market to.
MGoBoard
Football

Fat Mike

April 17th, 2010 at 3:37 AM ^

I find highly efficient on my iPod touch. In fact I just typed this on my iPod. But yes it would still be worth it to have an app specifically for mgoblog. Or even a mobile version for the website but I can see how that might be tough to make

Joined: 11/10/2009

MGoPoints: 443

willis j

April 17th, 2010 at 10:13 AM ^

for a mobile layout for better iPhone and BB viewing. Honestly the way the site is designed I thought it would come over to mobile browsing a lot better than it does. Honestly I just use an RSS feed through Google reader, works like a charm to read the posts at least. I'm going to check out BlueZoo's link as well.

Joined: 08/11/2008

MGoPoints: 187

Maize4Blue

April 17th, 2010 at 10:40 AM ^

The difference between UMHoops and MGoBlog is that UMHoops runs Wordpress (which has an extensive mobile theme gallery) while Drupal is sort of limited. It also becomes more limited because what should the mobile site have? Commenting? Ads? Just Brian's posts? Lots of questions and build time. Perhaps after the spring game when things die down (hahaha yeah right) Brian can implement something. I welcome a mobile version as well.

Joined: 06/30/2008

MGoPoints: 253

Argyle

April 17th, 2010 at 10:54 AM ^

I too would be willing to pay for a mgoApp. Reading the site isn't too bad as is, but commenting on threads such as this is no fun at all. I'm sure Brian has better things to do, but if he could turn an app project into a decent source of revenue for the site then it may be worth the effort.

Joined: 09/26/2009

MGoPoints: 1314

elaydin

April 17th, 2010 at 11:10 AM ^

I'm the developer of the "Michigan Sports Reader" BlueZoo mentioned above. One of the reasons I got into iphone apps is so I can make it easier to read various college football sites and message boards. It started with the scout.com boards (which have a pretty nice RSS feed), but I'd be more than willing to make this board more "iphone friendly". Currently, I just use the front page RSS feed in the app: selecting gets you a "clean" page without the side menus, ads and scripts. I'll take a look at what it would take to reformat the message boards. I'm open to any other suggestions.

Joined: 04/17/2010

MGoPoints: 2350

PDX_Blue

April 17th, 2010 at 3:02 PM ^

Okay, you just got my $0.99 (or whatever portion of it Apple doesn't keep). Quick suggestions: 1) Add the DetNews to the News section 2) Can you make re-orient to landscape if I turn my phone on its side? It re-orients for the actual articles but the listing of all articles doesn't. 3) Any chance we can see comments in response to the main page entries? Maybe this suffers from the same limitation as the MGoBoard though... Hopefully Brian has an MGoMobile in the pipe with access to everything but this is a helpful addition for now.

Joined: 11/08/2009

MGoPoints: 3

elaydin

April 17th, 2010 at 4:09 PM ^

1) will do (not sure why I didn't before) 2) easy enough 3) You're right. It is somewhat tied to the message board issue. If I can figure out an easy way to extract message board posts, this will be easier.

Joined: 04/17/2010

MGoPoints: 2350

formerlyanonymous

April 17th, 2010 at 11:26 AM ^

Brian had set a goal of having a mobile site available sometime during the off season. I have no idea the status of said goal. I know things have been busy with signing-day/freep-jihad/hockey/APR-reports/spring-game up until recently. I wouldn't be surprised by it not having been started, nor would I be surprised if it was already at 99% completion.

Joined: 06/30/2008

MGoPoints: 38964

goblue_westcoast

April 17th, 2010 at 12:21 PM ^

I've never written a mobile app before but I was teaching myself the Android SDK to write such a one for this site. My thoughts were to use the rss feed to get the post details, twitter to get updates from various sites, and delicious to get the post links (mgolicious, etc.). The problem is with the message boards since Brian would need to enable the json or xml hooks to get messages and/or post updates.

Joined: 02/20/2010

MGoPoints: 17

elaydin

April 17th, 2010 at 12:30 PM ^

having json or xml hooks to the message board would be great. Without it, I was going to see if I could parse through the html and reformat it. A bit of a pain, but should be possible. I'll try to hack something together this weekend and post some pics to this thread if I get anywhere.

Joined: 04/17/2010

MGoPoints: 2350

elaydin

April 18th, 2010 at 1:05 AM ^

Step 1 of getting the message board stuff worked out wasn't too bad. Below is the mgoboard main page (topic listings) Selecting a row currently takes you to the topic page. The next step is to reformat the topic page to be more iphone friendly.

Joined: 04/17/2010

MGoPoints: 2350