Kevlyn, the server side is simple enough.  I can with with you on that part.  Since my server is already processing feeds, I would just need to add a switch in the Send Notice section to detect an Apple client and send through them instead of Google.  I don't know how Apple's system works.  If you can get me the info I can take a look at it.

Google is as simple as sending a JSON object in a post using cURL.  You include a app security key, ID, and the app payload (game info and priv or pub post).

Thanks Ninthbit, but I really need to be on the whole data pipe so that I can make sure everything works as intended.

I've got the server side registration of the device complete.  So that means the app will take your RPOL credentials, log into the site, get the appropriate feed and store that in the database.  I have the script to fetch and store your notifications pretty much done as well.  So, all that's really left for me right now is to display the feed information in the main screen and test  the push notifications.

Once I've got those two items finished, I think i'll have a good v1.0 app to try to get through the iTunes store.

And that's my Saturday update!

Just a quick update.

So I've gotten the basic framework operational, and now I'm making a minor revision of the feed system.  Then I've got some notification testing via push server that needs to happen.  Overall it's getting pretty close to testing.  When I get there I'll see if I can round up any volunteers to help make sure there's no bugs.  It's a pretty simple system though so it shouldn't be too bad.

I'm awaiting with baited breath.  Great job to both of you!

Okay, today I finished some tweaking to the server side script and it is now at a point where I have turned it on at my testing server so that it will run constantly.  It notifies my iPad properly when new messages appear.

So, I'll run it like this a few days and if it doesn't seem to misbehave, then it'll be ready for production testing.


On the app side, there's some more tweaking to be done so that the app behaves as expected.   Currently its got me logging in every time I launch, I stubbed in a mock check for stored credentials and now I'll polish off that check and then iron out the preferences screen.  Just as I was typing this out I've gotten 3 notices for new messages, so it appears to be working like a charm!

For the app itself, here's the todo list that I can think of.

Add the preferences screen, and wire in the preferences options.
Adjust the main screen as it's being covered by the status bar
Alter the iPad version to account for the additional space available.
Collect a couple of beta testers to help me put more than a single account load on the app/server.

Had a little setback this week on the app.  The screen flows that worked well for me did so until I went to work on the app preferences and the main screen problem.  To address those I had to rewrite the flow, which introduced its own set of challenges as I moved the splash screen out of first position.

With that said, though, I've now worked out the new flow and I'm getting ready to work out the preferences screen.  But to show what's happening, here's a screen shot...



I have some issues with game names that I need to go and fix, but that's a server side issue.

There's only a couple of preferences I can think to add right now, so I thought I'd solicit a little feedback.  When you tap any of the game cells it opens the device browser and takes you right to the game.   For my personal preference, I wanted a list of all my games, so I opted to highlight the items that have new messages.  I am going to add an option to display new messages only, and then there won't be any highlighting needed.   Also I will add a log out option that will send a message to the server and remove the device and log the user out.

Are there any other preferences to add while I'm working on this?  Otherwise, I'm very close to soliciting testers to help me out!

Looks good to me!
Only thing I can think of for possible features is selecting a color to highlight / for text? But that's just an idea, I certainly don't need it.

I'll look into that, I can definitely see how some people would want to customize the colors.  BTW, eventually that die icon will get replaced with the character image from the game.  But that's probably not a v1 feature I'll implement.

is the highlight still green if there's Private messages waiting for you?

what about both private and public?

that looks HOSS!  Way to go mate.

It's just a single color to note that there's new activity, and it's only visible on the full display.  If you tell it to only show new activity then there's no color needed.

I've got the color picker wired up, and now I'm just working out a display issue when transitioning between preference screens.  Is having different colored backgrounds for the different type messages something that is needed?

There are new public messages waiting for you.
There are new private messages waiting for you.
There are new public and private messages waiting for you.

Needed? No, but that'd definitely be nice.

Okay, they're on the list then.  Shouldn't be too difficult to add in once I get the other issue sorted out.

Did you say there's an option to only show a list of games that have new activity?

By default I have it set to show all games and highlight cells that have new activity.

I've added the option to only display new activity and it doesn't currently highlight the cells, because it's only showing new activity.

Once I get done with this next bit though, then the different message types will have different colors.

Hey there.  The GM of this game told me to post here, and I'll copy/paste what I put in my RTJ.

I would love to help any way I can. I might not know much about app development, but I could help beta test or whatever. I'd love love to be kept in the loop about when an ios version is going to be released and it's progress.

Looking forward to helping however I can!

Long time since we had an update on this. How's it going?

Kevlyn hasn't been on since mid March.  I have to wonder if he's lost intrest.  Ironically, I now have an iPhone from work.  I just don't have a Mac or a developer account.  :(

Android is a one-time $25 fee to publish apps... Apple charges $99 a year, and requires you to develop on their computers.

It especially sucks since he said he was so close.

And now I am officially returned from my absence.   And a lot has happened since my last update.  First of all, I was ill for a while, and I guess technically I still am but I'm adjusted.  I lost the computer that I was using to develop, so I lost all of my server side code during that time.  And my job decided that I should contribute an insane amount of hours.  All in all.  Suck City.

Earlier this week, when I returned, I thought that I would spend the weekend trying to reconstruct the files that I lost.  So when I sat down to do that on Thursday, I actually managed to find most of the stuff.  So I started reviewing my work and began having multitudes of errors, problems, and general pull-your-hair-out-ness.

By yesterday I had worked out most of the XCode side of things, as I'm running Yosemite and XCode 6, I had to bring my project out of the dark ages.  And by Friday night I had everything running again and then remembered where I left off, I was getting an insane amount of notifications to the app and decided to wait until yesterday to address that problem.

As it turns out, in the process, all of my certificates had expired and created a whole slew of new issues revolving around push notifications.  When I went to fix one problem, the overkill of notifications, I inadvertently created a whole slew of new problems that required me to retroactively recreate all of my certificates, only because I was playing whack-a-cert in trying to identify my problem.  And the reason that all of this became a huge deal is because I am trying to move forward.

A few minutes ago I officially migrated all the server side scripts off to their home, and have now paved the way to make beta testing a reality.  I need to do some tweaking to the iPhone side of the screens, and I need to go back through the menu items and see what the status of all those controls are.   My goal here, if all goes according to plan, is to get a couple (3-4) people to help me start with alpha testing within this week.  This testing really is to make sure that the server side scripts work as expected, and if so, the following week would try to move the server into production mode as well and then do a beta testing period to identify any flaws.

The App store is seriously backing up with the release of iOS 8, so once we get out past the beta period then it's likely a couple of weeks into the world.

Please let me know how I can help or if you want/need code review, etc...

Okay, I have spent today going through the preferences screens, making some tweaks because iOS 8 behaved a little differently with some of the screen transitions, but overall everything works as expected.  Within the "Menu" option you have the following tinkerable settings:

Refresh Interval - Set this to whatever you like, by default its every 60 seconds.  If you play  a lot less frequently then set this to a higher number of seconds, 300 for five minutes, etc.   I will probably set it to 500 by default for the general release and let the frequent players reduce that number if they like.

Show All Games -  This is a toggle that will either display only the games that have messages to view, with no special formatting included, if turned off.  Or if turned on this will present all of the games in your list, with the items containing new messages being highlighted by the color settings on the screen.

Text Color - This is the color that you want the text for your new messages to be.  There's three sliders and a text field for hex colors if you so choose.

New Message Color - This is the same color slider, but lets you pick the color you like for the row highlighting for new messages.

Log Off - If for some reason you want to log off, click on that and the app will quit polling the server and return you to the login screen.

I think I'm ready to start soliciting for alpha testers.  If you are interested then just PM your email address to me.  If you have development experience, that's great, but not needed at all.  I will probably be using the testflightapp.com site to handle the alpha/beta testing which will allow me to get any crash reports you have.

Once I've got that in place, I'll give the Alpha testers a few days to provide feedback to me and provided things go well, create a more general Beta release for anyone that's interested.  (Or if there's not enough interest and everything is working well, we'll deploy to the app store.  During the beta period I'll get feedback from the testers and see if there are any additional features requested.

For those that have offered to help, it is appreciated and not likely necessary for this release.  However, this is a pretty basic app and I'm likely to start working on a v2 of the app once v1 is finished.   V2 will just improve the aesthetics of the app, really, and probably clean up some of the code.


Thanks!

I would love to try the App, I have an Iphone 4s and am always on RPoL at work on it lol

has there been any update on this?

Nope, the developer stopped posting entirely.