I am definitely one of those who feel that almost every app is completely useless. That being said, I have a few exceptions. Google Maps is great when speed is not an issue. It has couse me to entirely lose my sense of direction, which was once excellent. Facebook is of course great for stalking.  I find myself bringing people who I spoke to maybe once in High School in regular conversation now. Like, “Oh did you know Lisa went camping this weekend?” I mean seriously wtf, who cares? I do. I am also a huge fan of breaking news and tend to feel that the best use of a mobile device is actually news. At the moment, my fav apps on that front are CNN and AP.

In general, I want the info I’m looking for quickly. I really like how skireport.com works. You can get quick stats about nearby area or those on a list of “my areas” you’ve created. Basically… Are they open? How much snow? If you choose to click deeper, there are more details as well as a message board feature. I really love the idea of conversation based around a location or an event. In online forums, no matter the starting subject, the conversation inevitably seems to turn to porn or a mess of people calling each other dbags. That is not the case here and you can get a good idea of how the conditions really are by taking a look at the posts.

I decided the SkiReport format would lend itself perfectly to many niche topics. After being frustrated about how difficult it is to navigate to the scores you are looking for in many general sports apps, I decided to translate the format over to a NY Rangers App. I created this as something I would actually use. Open the app and instantly get current real-time score, results or the last game, or the next match-up and game time… whichever is most relevant. There is also an anonymous post option similar to the SkiReport model. As a bonus feature, I though it would be cool to have to option to restrict posting to a certain geographical radius.  So there’s that. You can view posts from anywhere, but only contribute if you are in the designated bar/arena vicinity.

Since my usual source, totallyscored.com, has be out of commission for quite some time, it was harder than you’d think to find an RSS feed that gives you straight up NHL scores. Luckily I was crusin’ the blogs discovered a simple way to get them through espn.com. It something they don’t want you to know about: http://sports.espn.go.com/nhl/bottomline/scores. The resource in the forum kindly put them into RSS format but I decided, since the scores would always be behind the scenes, to parse the raw text from the ESPN site.

Here’s that code: http://andreadulko.com/?page_id=379

The next bit of PHP deals with user comments. In Xcode, whatever the user enters into the textfield, using NSString, has spaces replaces with %20 and is POST-ed to this php script.

Finally, I created a page whose contents could be displayed as user-entered comments in the actual application. In order to display linebreaks in the UITextView, I needed to replace “<br>” with “<\n>” using this nifty line:     NSString *stringthree = [results2 stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"<br>" withString:@"\n"];

Here’s the script that is pulling the last five comments: http://andreadulko.com/?page_id=384.

For anyone who’s interested, I zipped up the complete XCode portion: andreadulko.com/rangers.zip.