Beacon Harvester ver. 1.10 available on the App Store

A couple of days ago another version of my first iOS application has become available for download. This version brings a couple of improvements as well as includes a huge number of things I had to learn while writing it 😉

Except the mobile application itself I have created a simple rest service on the Digital Ocean cloud servers so the users of my application can share beacons found by them all around the world.

The list of new features include:

• Facebook integration – now the user can share beacons data using his/her facebook id (anonymous mode is possible too)
• Geospatial REST service access – on the mentioned Digital Ocean, the GeoCouch database was installed which allows making the geospatial queries of data
• Ability to show beacons on the map (beacon data downloaded with geospatial query for the bounding box calculated using the visible map area)
• Searching for beacons with UUIDs registered by other users
• 2 separate lists of beacons – one for beacons found by the user himself and one for the remote beacons

To get all of that working I had to expand my knowledge a bit on geospatial queries and databases on top of completely new to me iOS libraries I had to use like RestKit, Facebook SDK, asynchronous image download, caching images, infinite scroll lists, custom delegates, categories and so on.

I have to admit that it was a nice learning experience but on the other hand the amount of functionality I have added to such a useless application is just ridiculous 🙂

Except for fixing a few bugs I have already discovered, I’m not planning currently to expand the functionality of the BeaconHarvester application any further but at the same time I plan to continue learing iOS development more and more, so watch this space for some news and new applications announcements.