Constant Contact Labs Developer Blog

• Constant Contact iPhone App Launched Posted Friday, November 6, 2009 Huan Lai 0 Comments

  

  After months of on and off development, the first Constant Contact iPhone app (QuickView) is out the door and in the App Store. The free app allows you to check the status of your Constant Contact Email Marketing campaigns and update contacts and contact lists. Now that the shameless self promotion is out of the way, over the next few blog posts, I’ll talk about my experiences building the app from the ground up. My role as the primary developer gives me a rather comprehensive viewpoint into this whole adventure.

  Being the first post, I’‘ll talk about the app’s humble beginnings. Prior to becoming the QuickView app that you see (and hopefully love) today, it existed as two barebones apps. The first one, CCManager, was my first time doing anything on the iPhone or Cocoa (honestly, it was my first time using a Mac, but I’ll hold my tongue on that subject matter as to not start up any religious wars). It was more or less a proof of concept app, hitting the Constant Contact RESTful web services and displaying the results in some sort of readable format on the device. Accessing the web services was relatively painless, thanks to the public domain Objective-C REST Client that I managed to find. The second one, JMML, had a little more interactivity to it, allowing users to hand their iPhone to potential clients, who would then enter their contact information and join the mailing list.

  Over time, the feedback received indicated that there definitely was a demand for a more robust and general purpose app that could be submitted to the App Store for public use. With the over-encompassing goal of “make something cool” in mind, I set out to build what became known as V0.1 for internal beta testing. In that, a good majority of the functionalities present in QuickView were implemented and was very well received by the beta testers. After the hype of “yay we have an iPhone app” was over, some pretty big flaws were revealed, namely my lack of UI design skills.

  With the help of some people much more knowledgeable than I in UI design and the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, V0.2 was produced, which touted a complete UI redesign. It wasn’t until the app went through a few weeks after that point, going through an extensive amount of sanding and polishing was it deemed worthy of being submitted for review. So the waiting game began. After roughly 3 weeks, the app was rejected for a small and easily fixable icon issue. Three weeks later (Tuesday of this week), the App was approved and is now up on the App Store.

  While this is something that is officially released to the public, most of its existence was that of a learning project. Because of this, the requirements weren’t as stable as one could have hoped and the code probably isn’t as clean as one could have hoped. But all in all, I consider this a very successful project. Not only is there now a Constant Contact application, but the journey also proved to be particularly fruitful. From the architectural standpoint, we gained much knowledge on the iPhone platform and Cocoa, and got our feet wet in the world of smart phones. But in addition to this, we were also able to get a much deeper understanding of the Constant Contact web services.  As the Constant Contact web services continue to evolve, I look forward to doing many other things with them that we are currently unable to do. These, as well as any unmentioned discoveries, will prove greatly useful for any future projects the Labs will work on.

   

  The opinions expressed here represent those of the author and not those of Constant Contact, Inc. Read Blog Terms

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