geerlingguy / catholic-diocese-app-ios Goto Github PK

I was originally thinking of using the GPL v3, but after reading about how FSF is unsupportive of iOS / App Store, and they think the GPL is incompatible with App Store guidelines, I'm having second thoughts about that.

I'm also familiar with MIT License, and am thinking of using that.

However, the main goal I have is to make sure this code (and derivatives) are never made into a for-profit-only solution owned by one company. I want this project to continue on being helpful to anyone and everyone, free of charge.

I'm working on this right now, but basically, there are maybe 5-10 different active code/comment styles being used throughout the project right now, and at least for the core/custom classes, I'd like to use a more formalized and nice-looking standard. I'm now wrapping comments at 80 lines, and using docblocks for method documentation, just inside the beginning of the method in the .m file...

I'm going to leave this issue open until I'm satisfied that most of the code conforms to some standard... at this point I still haven't seen a broad standard across the world of iOS developers, as many come from Java, or PHP, or C, or a thousand other backgrounds, and bring with them their own styles :-/

Not only does Xcode 4 complain about some images not being the right resolution (due to their being added in an older version of Xcode in a different way than is the norm (drag-and-drop) in Xcode 4), but also a lot of the graphics are archstl-centric... maybe use the OSC key logo for graphics and icons?

Over on Open Source Catholic, Travis B. and I discussed what kind of features would hopefully make it into the final cut of this project, and I outlined the following:

1. Parish finder (with location or name-based search... would also like to incorporate time-based search).
2. Diocesan News (laid out as-is on iPhone, and like Instapaper 4.0 on iPad).
3. Prayers (like it is now).
4. Bishop Info/Blog Section (maybe incorporating your idea of tying into Catholic-Heirarchy, and allowing bishop's blog to be read like news section).
5. Podcast (with ability to play episodes right there).
6. Parish checkin + photo upload (maybe... something like Foursquare-lite, tied into Parish finder).
7. Catechism / Bible tie-in (if only the USCCB allowed open access to these resources!).

Of course, some of these sections are already in the project and working, but if we could come to a consensus on what exact features we'd like to code and have working (maybe have a default five set up, but have classes available in case someone wants to switch in other tabs), that'd be best.

I'm also working on the Android version of the app right now, so, presumably, we could have these sections working for both editions of the app.

Because of a few issues, notably the 'word-wrap' default, no styling for ol, ul, blockquote, etc., and a lack of character encoding declarations, prayers with more than the most basic markup and characters will render poorly in the app's webview.

Therefore, I'm going to update the CSS and HTML for prayers to make things more consistent no matter what kind of markup or characters are added.

I almost had time to work on this specific issue after I finished the first release of Catholic News Live last spring, but just didn't get around to it.

At a minimum, we can simply make the app universal, and make sure everything expands (including the UITabBar) to fit the iPad's screen. The interface would be inefficient, at best, but would look a lot nicer on the iPad's huge screen.

Even better would be making the interface fit the iPad better; the map would be best full screen (or have the search interface in a column on the left with the map on the right). The news could be laid out flipbook style, or Instapaper 4.0-style, with the prayers the same way.

Since we now have an Android version of the app, we should probably switch this project's name to -iOS. This will also be helpful if we ever develop more versions of the app for other platforms, like Windows Mobile, Mac, etc.

Caveat: old URLs will NOT be updated, therefore we need to update them ourselves, and we'll probably lose a little bit of link juice after the change—the earlier the better!

The image loader and image view EGO classes aren't really needed for most implementations of this app, and even with the Catholic STL version of the app, there isn't a huge need for it. It's just a bit of icing on the cake.

But it does add code bloat to the project, and individual implementations of the app should choose whether to use something like it or not.

It seems that making this ARC compatible would be a wise way to future proof the project.

In Xcode, everything's grouped quite nicely. But on the filesystem (and on this project's main page), it's practically a flat store of all the files. This aids in confusion, imo. I'm currently using Xcode's path choosing tool to re-link each file after moving it into an appropriate folder in the Finder.

Lots of dioceses and organizations don't and won't have the manpower to maintain a "Request a Prayer" database and site like the Archdiocese of St. Louis has, so the view for Prayers should be more universalized, and it should show a simple list of prayers. The organization could customize the list to whatever prayers they'd like, and maybe just have a SQLite database that feeds that list.

Right now, there are maybe 15 or so places in the codebase where one must look to change settings like the URL for the news feed, the CSV file location for sacrament time data, etc.

Instead of this, we should be able to use a Localizations.strings file and centralize all the strings. This will also help if we ever want to localize the app in spanish, french, etc. languages.

What do you think about a profile view that parses data from a Bishop's page on CatholicHierarchy.org?

I'm not quite sure what it's even doing in there... must've been testing something, and then forgotten about it.

For the Archdiocese of St. Louis, I had the liberty of setting up a specialized feed for the iPhone app, which included a specially-sized image for the app, a special description and title, etc., and that feed had a rather strange structure, compared to plain-vanilla RSS:

/**
 * RSS feed is in the format:
 *
 * <item>
 *   <title>article title</title>
 *   <pubDate>article date</pubDate>
 *   <summary>article summary</summary>
 *   <link>http://www.example.com</link>
 *   <articleImage>article date</articleImage>
 * </item>
 */

The Prayers feed might be fine as-is, since it should be a little different anyways... people can adopt or drop this feature more readily than the News feature. Here's the prayer structure (from PrayerViewController.m):

/**
 * XML feed is in the format:
 *
 * <node>
 *   <title>prayer title</title>
 *   <link>http://www.example.com</link>
 *   <description>prayer summary</description>
 *   <pubDate>prayer date</pubDate>
 * </node>
 */