Active's first iPhone app released

guest — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:19:07 GMT

Active just officially released our first iPhone app—ActiveReader. This app lets you read all the articles from Active.com in a mobile-friendly format. It also stores those articles on the phone itself so you can still read them, even if you're offline. Articles are organized by activity like running, cycling, baseball, or you can search our site for articles.

Technical Stuff

This app was created with a tool called Titanium Developer which allows you write both desktop and mobile apps in HTML/CSS/Javascript rather than the technologies specific to that platform (in the iPhone's case that means Objective-C and Cocoa). Behind the scenes we're using some new technology for us to store and serve the articles—CouchDB. Couch is a schema-less, document-oriented database which stores JSON and speaks HTTP. So rather than using a database driver to query your data, you send a regular old HTTP request, just as if you were accessing a webpage. The iPhone sends this request and stores any new articles in a SQLite3 database in the phone itself. This allows you to read even when you're offline (although you can't search because that goes to our live site).

This is only the first of many new mobile apps you'll be seeing from us. Stay tuned!

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Active's first iPhone app released