iphone/ipod app

hitlersson666

it would rock and i do see it working :cool: please

Hobbes

I am thinking of making this. Will be similar to the firefox plugin functionality. Will be a while though.

Would be interested to know if anyone else is interested in developing this? I have an app store account. The basic app would be free and boards.ie would own the code after completion.

00sully

I was thinking of starting an open source one for android if anyone is interested? been a while since I touched java tho

Conor

The main problem is not the app development, it's the fact that there's no API to work with. You'd have to screen-scrape vBulletin and that's rather unpleasant to do.

I had started work on a vBulletin API back before I worked for boards but it has stalled due to a lack of free time on my part.

TskTsk

Have already suggested Tapatalk to the Boards.ie admins

Owen

The new terms and conditions actually prevent anyone doing this without permission.

Conor

PaintDoctor wrote: »

The new terms and conditions actually prevent anyone doing this without permission.

Unfortunately it's not easy to encode

• Don't scrape our site just to make linkbait somewhere else.
• Don't consume all our bandwidth with your rubbish spiders.
• Don't hammer the hell out our servers with silly numbers of concurrent requests
• ... and so on

in any sort of legally binding language without either leaving something out or prohibiting something we don't want to prohibit.


The usual rules apply. If you want to do something that's prohibited by the ToU, just ask. We'll sort something out.

00sully

ok well assuming im not breaking the toc with my idea here

http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055792195

I *think* I can extend this to android with some development since the webkit browser in android provides some access to the DOM.

so I wont be scraping or using any boards bandwidth - just using custom JS to render the site in a more friendly way for android mobile devices with screen res of QVGA and HVGA. This will basically render the forum removing unwanted elements and styling others (hiding images etc...adds :-o )

I should have a test of this soon (if not this weekend then 2 weeks)

Hobbes

OK still working through iPhone dev but so far I have to concur with Conor.

To create an app to interface with boards is absolutly childs play on the iphone (the coding part, creating a deployable app is another story ). So simple it is scary. To whip up something that matches say the firefox plugin I could do in an hour or so. Faster if I was a bit more experienced.

The issue comes in the volume of data you need to pull in. Scraping the site to get the data is a waste of resources at both ends. So needs a neat api on the server.

.. 00Sully. nice Although the plan was to create an app avoiding the webkit where possible.