Early early preview of Hanselminutes for the iPhone

Monday, January 4, 2010

So back in November, I came across this tweet...

Someone has contact me about a $1.99 "Hanselminutes Podcast" app. Thoughts?

My reply to this was so...

@shanselman I'd rather it was for free and you did a blog series on how to build it with Monotouch. Failin that, I'd do it.

So... I did!

Well kind of. At the moment the app is very very basic. You can play and listen to podcasts but that's about it. The reasoning behind this is because I've only got so much spare time aside from working full time and sadly not all my spare time can be spent building this app. What would be great however would be for people to check out the code, download it and play around with it. I've already started working on splitting up the list of podcasts and the podcast player into different views but it's in no state to check in or share.

"Where's the code already?" - Here - http://bit.ly/hanseliphone. It's hosted up on Codeplex to hopefully get a few more people to download it rather than putting it on something more foreign like GitHub. That said, in the future I would love to move it over to GitHub fully since I think it has a much better community feel and it's much easier to see changes and handle patches and forking for starters.

"Your code is awful..." - Great, Make it better for me by blogging about why it's bad but also submit a patch fixing the bad code. We're all learning and anyone can say that code is bad.

"How do I get started?" - I put a small "Getting Started" page up on Codeplex to help you out - you will need a Mac to run any of the code so bare this in mind when you're downloading the bits.

Check it out - http://bit.ly/hanseliphone

Feedback welcome,

ChrisNTR

Any chance of you doing a Cocoa Touch/Objective-C version?

Joe Chung - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 1:48:05 AM

Any chance of putting a screenshot or two on the CodePlex page?

Rob Gibbens - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 7:29:37 PM

@Joe

I won't be doing a Objective-C version although technically it *is* a Cocoa Touch version :) I'd love for someone to port the code/do their own Objective-C version to see how it compares.

@Rob

Sure, There's nothing too exciting about the app in terms of looks at the moment as it's still early but I'll whip up two quick screens.

Chris Hardy (ChrisNTR) - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 7:44:31 PM

@Khalid

There's some stuff you can't do with just building a web app - for instance, once a podcast has fully downloaded, it's saved on the device so if you were to hop on to an airplane - you could listen to the downloaded podcasts. With a web app, that's much harder to achieve. But obviously the main point is a lot of geeking out.

Chris Hardy (ChrisNTR) - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 8:49:35 PM

Hi Chris, I would love to join the project. See you on CodePlex!

Richard de Zwart (mountain1965) - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 8:53:40 PM

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