Pete Erickson hosted a MoDevDC MeetUp last Wednesday at TeqCorner in McLean, VA, where he kicked things off with a solid hour-long chat with Tom Love. Love and Brad Cox co-created the Objective-C programming language in the early 1980s at Stepstone and the rest, as they say, is history. The discussion covers Objective-C’s roots in Smalltalk, how Stepstone ended up licensing Objective-C to Apple, and why it’s such a shame for Love that the original… Read more »

So the developers here at PointAbout found an awesome new tool this week that has some really useful applications. It’s called Yahoo Pipes, and there’s a demo video below that shows you how to use it do do all kinds of RSS-enabling things to make your content more versatile than ever. For example, AppMakr is all about RSS. But, regular RSS– not Atom. If this was a problem before, it definitely isn’t any longer, thanks… Read more »

Want it to look snazzier? See how we can customize the look & feel. Setting multiple RSS feeds up in a PointAbout iPhone/Android application: Each feed corresponds to the icon at the bottom of the application.  For example, this example is for the “Business” feed.  Each icon in the app corresponds to its own feed.  The more feeds you want to include in the app, the more icons we’ll have.  Here’s how to format a… Read more »

PointAbout utilizes GeoRSS to create location-aware RSS feeds.  You can find more detail on the GeoRSS spec here. The best way to set a GeoRSS feed up is to have the mobile app (i.e., the iPhone app) send its lat + long coordinates to a server, and have the server crunch the data as follows: Step 1: Have the server find all the data points near the user.  The way you do this is by… Read more »