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Ibn al-Hazardous's picture

So, iPhone has been all the rage for a while, and last spring the iPad was launched. Here in Sweden, we won't get the iPad until November - but that'll be just in time for the holiday shopping. Besides, by then we will get a ton of Android tablets too.

Which begs the question: Has anybody around already made a solution for interfacing Drupal with an iApp? If not, would y'all be interested if we keep it generic and customizable?

To expound a bit on the idea: We're thinking of offering the website in a mobile version, and pdfs for subscribers. The app will be a menu on top with browser widgets showing stuff pulled from our Drupal site and pdf-widget for reading the actual issues. We will cache stuff from the front page and latest news for offline reading, as well as bookmarking stuff (where bookmarked items will have an extra protection in the cache). We will also have an extremely simplistic confirmation process for subscribers.

The real work is going to be done server side. We're going to have a light weight theme, rewrite links, keep a large assortment of image sizes handy, provide listings and stuff like that, keep tabs on subscribers, and provide cheap short term subscriptions.

This all seems generic enough, so we are probably going to target iOS and Android both (assuming we get the go).

Comments

There's a little work done here already

fending's picture

This is probably the most famous case study in Drupal+Mobile (iPhone/Android in particular):

http://drupal.org/node/659772

And aside from:

http://drupal.org/project/idrupal and
http://drupal.org/project/idrupal_ui

...you should check out these Drupalcon SF presentations:

http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/iphone-drupal-and-web-services
http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/drupal-web-services-platfor...
http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/developing-apps-iphoneipada...

...and then this:

http://cph2010.drupal.org/sessions/developing-apps-iphoneipadandroid-usi...

There are many (many!) projects to do theme switching based on device, and some googling will get you a ton more than the first two projects I listed, which have a very specific use case.

Thanks!

Ibn al-Hazardous's picture

A lot to digest there, I'm doing some reading and thinking.

When it comes to projects to do theme switching, I've been checking those out separately.

Still, even though there is a lot of content around - I'm hard pressed to find stuff that focus on the newspaper side of things.

There's NYT Press Engine

fending's picture

The Times released their mobile (iPad, not android) platform for licensing in Aug 2010. I had a hard time discerning exactly how that worked, though. You would think it would have to be pretty slick, but might (maybe, just maybe) simply use RSS or another feed mechanism. The NYT app itself was panned by Jobs, as I recall -- not enough news in it.

Don't underestimate the beercloud app, though -- it may have a specific non-news use case, but the mechanism for hooking iphone+android apps to it is certainly there.

Newspapers on Drupal

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