Wanted: MGoBlog iphone app
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.
or a blackberry app.
Yep. That's right. I check this site on my blackberry...
Jim Balsillie says thanks for giving him some money to buy an NHL franchise, even if the NHL (Gary Bettman in particular) are jackasses.
You may now return to your regulary scheduled thread.
April 17th, 2010 at 10:24 AM ^
So do I and sure would like a mobile version. But I'm willing to sacrifice the load wait time in honor of my love of Michigan football!
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
To-Do List for upgrades to this site?
called "Michigan Sports Reader"
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/michigan-sports-reader/id365227344?mt=8
Under "News & Blogs", it has what looks like the RSS feed of the site.
It has a nice interface to the scout boards, so maybe the developer can add this one.
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.
April 17th, 2010 at 10:19 AM ^
A mobile site would be awesome. That way I can stay up to date every hour of every day!
April 17th, 2010 at 10:29 AM ^
Surely mgoblog can
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.
How do you only have 58 points? Not that it matters at all, just curious.
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.
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.
great job on the app. any chance you can replace the Freep with DetNews or something tho?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two words: Opera Mini. I have been using it on my Android for a few weeks now. It is great. ♦
I was just talking about this on here a few days ago. Wouldn't you know, the damn day after I posted how great it is, it suddenly stops working entirely. Now when I select it nothing happens, just stays on my home screen. Sad panda.
I'm following up with elaydin; hopefully we can get something worked out.
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.