Apple iPod Touch/iPhone Application development

Proposer: Michelle Kuttel

Abbreviation: iPhnApp

Brief Description: In this project, you will develop a lightweight CRM (Customer Relation Management)  application for Apple's iPod Touch/iPhone platform in collaboration with the local representatives of Apple in South Africa – the Core Group. This will be a native application (not purely web-based) using the iPhone OS. The aim of the application is to help to manage and nurture a company’s interactions with clients and sales prospects. The technology will be used to organize, automate and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service. The current idea is for the application to enable access to a calendar, blog/newsletter, contacts, file service, internal chat system and a database, as well as download of podcasts, web links to relevant sites and a client survey submission feature. However, alternative creative solutions will be encouraged.

Computer Science Content: software engineering, visualization, native device programming as well as web services 

Specific Learning Outcomes: You will learn about application devlopment for the iPhone OS, which comprises the operating system and technologies that you use to run applications natively on iPhone and iPod touch devices. Although the iPhone OS shares a common heritage and many underlying technologies with Mac OS X, iPhone OS was designed to meet the needs of a mobile environment, where user’s needs are slightly different. Existing Mac OS X developers will find many familiar technologies, but they’ll also find technologies that are available only on iPhone OS, such as the Multi-Touch interface and accelerometer support. You will also learn about HCI and web services.

Skills Required by Team as a Whole:

• Theory: Not much!

• Implementation: This will be challenging, but interesting. The iPhone SDK contains the code, information, and tools you need to develop, test, run, debug, and tune applications for the iPhone OS. The Xcode tools have been updated to support development for the iPhone OS. In addition to providing the basic editing, compilation, and debugging environment for your code, Xcode also provides the launching point for testing your applications on an iPhone or iPod touch device. Xcode also lets you run applications in iPhone simulator, a platform that mimics the basic iPhone OS environment on your local Macintosh computer.

Facilities needed: three Intel-based Apple laptops plus three Apple iPod Touches (all on 3-month loan from Apple IMC, August-October)

Supervision: Weekly meetings with Michelle Kuttel. Oliver Graaf of the Core Group will provide input on the requirements for the system.

Number of Students: 3 or 2