iknownaija App: Odili Charles talks App development

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having just returned from speaking on HTML5 at the 2013 GDG Uyo DevFest, and failing to qualify for the semi-finals of the 2013 Google Cloud Developer Challenge with MemoTickswhich was coded less than 48 hours before the deadline, I set out to begin development on an idea conceived and communicated to me by my brother Odili Chukwudi Emmanuel a few months earlier.

It was to be a mobile app with a sortable (chronological and reverse-chronological) timeline of Nigeria’s history, showcasing notable historical happenings in Nigeria since 1900. We affirmed it was a great idea, one that would make a desirable mobile app for Nigerians and even foreigners interested in Nigeria especially regarding tourism and as celebrating Nigeria’s Centenary buzzed.

Although the Centenary celebration has been heavily criticized in somw quarters, including Governor Fashola of Lagos State who opined that the Centenary Celebration was not only un-neccesary, but could also serve to distort Nigeria’s History as to whether Nigeria was 100 or 54. We decided it was best not to meddle in such waters and allow the Politicians and Law-makers do their due diligence, rather we would go ahead and provide a unique and un-biased digital experience on mobile for Nigeria’s History, Facts, Festivals, and Places of Interest. This was how iKnowNaija was birth.

With iknownaija.com registered, I put up a distro of Drupal 7, setup some Entities to allow my brother ( B.A History and International Relations Obafemi Awolowo University) enter and manage data. Next I created some Drupal Views that exposed the collected data in formats we could get into the mobile app.

It is common knowledge that with mobile development, most dev-shops have to choose between native and hybrid style, and since this was a startup with just two brothers, limited time, limited tools, and no budget (yes, no funding whatsoever, watch out for part 2 of this post), We settled for a HTML5 approach for the app. This was so that we could easily, develop and test, and leverage the promise of write-once-run-everywhere for mobile platforms fielding devices with a reasonable webkit browser implementation.

Developing the app was really challenging but fun. Our first attempt was with Sencha Touch, using its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) implementation called Touch4J. However, I later ditched it for a custom and lightweight home-brewed solution with Bootstrap 3, this time with a Errai – a GWT based framework I have come to love. Read more from source