I’ve had a busy week this week attending the various Social Media in Liverpool Week events that I wrote about last week. I just wanted to post an update to talk about the Social Media Cafe Liverpool iPhone app that I released last night.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to declare the app live last night but the review went through and I can finally do it, head here to download the app and get lots of information about the great talks we’ve had at Social Media Cafe over the last year. You can find the slides for my Life Cycle of an iPhone App talk here.

As I mentioned in my talk, I have made the app available as Open Source Software under the Artistic License 2.0. What this means is that anyone can go away and create apps based on my code. The main requirement is that if you do so then you can’t modify the source code to hide the fact that I was the original creator, but read the license for confirmation on the details.

The source code is actually available in two parts. The Social Media Cafe app is quite simple and small and provides an app that will download a feed of information and then pass it on to a “Hierarchy View Controller”. This is part of the “HierarchyApp” which is a separate code base which I developed last year. I’ve also released this as open source under the same license so with both of these available anyone should be able to develop some interesting apps with a minimum of effort. Click the following links for more information:

Social Media Cafe iPhone app on GitHub

HierarchyApp on GitHub

While the data within the app can be updated by modifying a simple text file on a server there’s still plenty of features that the app could do with, which will require modifying the source code. It might be nice to have a page of information about the next event, or perhaps a page showing recent twitter traffic. If you have any ideas for features, or you come across bugs, then add them to the smcliv Issues page on GitHub and hopefully I, or anyone else who feels like delving into the code, will add them.

If you do use the code then I’d love to hear about it and see what you’ve done, and if you want me to help you develop an app I’d still be happy to get involved.