Weekend iPhonedev Challenge: Twitter Client
Friday, April 24, 2009 at 9:08AM As the iPhone continues to pull more and more developers into its web, the availability of free knowledge about how to code for it becomes more and more important. I'm going to attempt my own little contribution to this knowledgebase and improve my own knowledge at the same time. I will be taking part of my weekend to develop a simple Twitter client for the iphone, with a goal of finishing it by Sunday night and posting the code I wrote for it on Monday. If you want to join in the fun, feel free to tweet about it (click the link for a preformatted tweet) and develop your own project. You don't have to share your code, but I'm sure the community will appreciate if you do. If you need it posted here, feel free to email me a zip of it and I'll include it on Monday.
Feature Goals (feel free to set your own if you're taking the challenge)
- Main View - Show a table of the last 10 tweets (based on settings, see next bullet). Each table cell should drill down to a child view that displays the tweet sender's picture, real name, username, location, and the tweet itself (along with a way to get back to the Main View). Main view should also have a configuration button (or simply an information symbol) that can be tapped to flip over to the Settings View.
- Settings View - Allow the user to switch the main view between Friends Timeline and the Public Timeline. Of course, you should also provide a place for the user to enter their account information (I suggest you create a test account with Twitter if you don't want to use your own account for such a simple project).
That's it. A simple program that can easily be tackled in a single weekend using core concepts and a documented public third-party API. If there's enough time, the first thing I'd add would be a function to send a tweet (right now the guidelines only query for tweets already published). Of course, if you can't complete this in a weekend, don't give up. Completing the challenge in any amount of time will increase your knowledge and make you a better developer in general.
If you want to support this idea, please post a comment below or tweet about it so I know that there is interest in continuing these challenges in the future. Thanks!
If you don't have any clue on where to start this, I'd begin by figuring out how to make calls to the Twitter API, and how to parse XML. If you need help, feel free to tweet me @taintedzodiac. Here's some documentation on the Twitter API to get you started: