iHub Politics Pro Android - Political News, Blogs & Tweets

Finally,

After months of development, the finishing touches on iHub Politics Pro for Android has been published to the Android Market.  We've partnered with AppBunches to distribute our Android line of iHub Internet Information Centers.

Check out the sexy snapshots below.

For the price of a cheap cup of coffee, you can have the world of U.S. politics in your hands.  News, Blogs, Tweets of all the top political movers and shakers.  Stay on top of whats going on in your country.

Order iHub Politics Pro for Android today !

iHub - Coming to an Android Store Near You

We've successfully ported our internet information hub engine to Java and the Android platform !! First delivery of iHub Politics to the Android Market draws near. Android applications will be distributed by our partner - AppBunches.

Cloud-based, more than a hundred carefully selected channels including News Headlines, Blogs & Tweets all in one convenient mobile app for the low price of a cup of coffee (Java?)

Hubs Outages....In The Clouds - UPDATED

Due to file hosting changes at our web hosting provider - all of our http related resources were rendered useless and caused an outage of several days to our iHub line of products :(

The team furiously updated the code base to fully utilize "The Cloud" by Amazon and we're sending out updates to our entire product line to Apple for approval.

We'll keep you posted. We apologize for any inconvenience - and be on the lookout for updates to the following products.

• iHubHealth -- UPDATE NOW AVAILABLE ON ITUNES (7.3.2010)
  
• iHubPolitics -- UPDATE NOW AVAILABLE ON ITUNES (7.3.2010)
• iHubTechnology -- PENDING

Space buffs - be on the lookout from the initial offering of our science series - iHubSpace.

iHub - Space - Coming to a Galaxy Near You

The iHub team is putting the polish on iHubSpace - the Final Frontier of Astrophysics, Astronomy and Space content delivered straight to your iPhone and iPod Touch..

Get updates from NASA missions, European Space Administration (ESA), Astronomy media publishers & Astrophysics Journals.


The latest space news and great space blogs from The Planetary Society, Discover & NewScientist magazines. Also, follow astrophysicists such as Michio Kaku and Neil deGrasse Tyson along with NASA astronauts and space movers and shakers in the Twittersphere.

Coming soon -- to a galaxy (i.e. iTunes) near you :)

iHub - Politics - PRO - Now Available on iTunes

iHubPoliticsPRO is now available for sale on iTunes. Our best iHub so far, we've replaced the shopping category with a twitter feed type (along with Top headlines and Top Blogs).

Content channels were categorized across the entire political spectrum with subtopics ranging from Liberal to Conservative and Democrat to Republican.

This iHub has literally hundreds of content channels and testing this guy was extremely interesting (especially during the Health care debates).

We hope you enjoy it - get your copy today - and let us know what you think.


LINKS
iHubLife website - Politics iHub
iTunes iHubPolitics Download

Frustrations, Rejections, Perseverence & Tweets

We've been rejected by Apple for our sports-based information centers. SEVERAL TIMES !! We've made suitable adjustments each time but the sports-based information centers keep getting rejected..... don't worry.... we're not stopping.


We've been polishing our Politics based information center over the last several weeks. One final smoke QA test and it should be ready for submission. Look out for this one .... this is the first application on the PRO version of the iHub platform which adds top ranked Twitter feed channels along with News Headlines & Top Blogs.

We're keeping the faith ... we're currently building iPad optimized view controllers for iPad specific versions of our PRO line of iHubs -- coming soon.

Bigger, Stronger & Better .... now only if Apple can get into an Approval state of mind.

Apples, Cookie Cutters and RSS Generators

So I was browsing some tech news headlines using iHubTech on my iPod Touch (of course).... and I came across this headline from TechCrunch - Apple's New Stance on 'Cookie Cutter" Apps : Add More Features Or Perish.

Seems like Apple is trying to filter out the bottom feeder applications that are created around a common template / core and customized into 100 different applications. RSS based applications are notorious for this crap - they'll provide a simple feed reading capability and a couple of feeds and create dozens of apps this way. Some programs actually provided round-trip engineering where you provide it an RSS feed and it will automatically CREATE the iPhone application for you based on that feed.

We actually created our iHub line of applications for iPhone / iPod Touch to compete against these simplistic RSS readers. From the beginning we were determined to create INTERNET INFORMATION CENTERS - central hubs composed of hundreds of feeds per each topic application. To fulfill this need we created a suite of tools to aggregate, organize, combine, randomize, rank and constantly refresh internet content from news, blogs, podcasts and forums on our own servers.... providing the user with only the TOP headlines from the TOP content providers from ALL over the internet.

I'm actually content (excuse the pun) with Apple's decision to clamp down on some of the low quality RSS based reader applications out there.... I just hope they take the time to correctly distinguish the heros from the zeros.

iHub - Sports - NFL & MLB - Submitted - FINALLY

Well... talk about a crazy 6 months. Late September, we needed to withdraw our iHubSports football application to rework some issues and then things went absolutely nuts. Each team member had significant life events (an iHubBaby is coming soon !!) and lucrative new contracts to complete which put a damper on our iPhone development efforts. Good news is that we're back and its time to

PLAY BALL !!

We polished our NFL football iHub and we completed our MLB baseball iHub content aggregator just in time for SPRING TRAINING !!

We included a couple neat features not previously available in prior iHub applications including keywords in the channel descriptions providing a granular "tag" for the channel - as whether the channel is dedicated to a single team or league-wide news. A cool one-button Twitter one-button capability will tweet the currently viewed article to your Twitter account.

We also put out a new website - www.ihublife.com - describing all of our offerings & content services (look out for new mobile platforms, PC applications & web services). Resources were applied to provide a more stable content platform from which to deliver our channel feeds and our composite headline feeds - a result of some hiccups we had regarding the technology feeds and our ISP.... lessons learned.

LINKS
iHubLife website - www.ihublife.com
iHubSportsNFL Product page
iHubSportsMLB Product page

iHubSportsNFL - Submitted - NFL Football Time !!!

I love the Fall season especially in the Northeast. Weather changes , wonderful cool breezes, leaves change color and most importantly

FALL = FOOTBALL

WHEW!! -- Busy summer, we released several updates to our current iHubTech & iHubHealth products but we're a little late on this one - the initial offering from our iHubSports line - iHubSportsNFL. We've just submitted over the weekend and we should be approved no later than week 4 of the season. No better way to keep up to date with all the breaking news & blogs from across all the NFL !!


We decided to organize the subtopics by NFL divisions and we added a new keyword label to each article listing - to help the user determine if the feed is relevant to their favorite team and/or division.


We've added a couple of new features to the line. First feature is a One-Click access to the NFL scoreboard (by tapping the logo on the News and/or Blogs screen). Instead of implementing a custom scoreboard capability which may experience a lag time - we decided to implement this by simply loading up the ESPN mobile NFL scoreboard - specifically formatted for the iPhone with a single click of the logo.

We've also added a Twitter client capability - allowing the user to Tweet the current article to his/her Twitter account.

iHubTech Approved -Tech News Headlines & Blogs

WOOHOO !!

iHubTech just got approved by Apple and is now available on iTunes. This enhanced TECH information hub contains approximately 200 channels providing the LATEST news and blogs content across the following subtopics.

Computer Hardware
Computer Software
Energy Tech
Gadgets & Mobile
Games
Hacker & Security
HOWTO
Military Tech
Robotics & A.I. & Nanotechnology
TOP Technology Headlines
Coding Development

We're not just saying this because we built it - this application is a must have for those interested and involved in Technology.

We've ranked and organized all the channels for you -- all you need to do is scan the headlines and choose what you want to read.... constantly updated content from WIRED, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, ArsTechnica, TechReport, CNET, PCMagazine, TechMeme, eWeek ...it just goes on and on.

Dump those corny RSS Readers - forcing you to do all the work searching for feeds or just giving you 5 or 10 articles or just a single channel !! C'mon dudes --- RESPECT THE GAME.

CONTENT EVERYWHERE - Why RSS readers suck !

It never ceases to amaze me how much free content is available on the internet. Newspaper websites, portals, university classes, company news, online video, consumer product reviews,etc. But even so, getting to the content could still be a laborious and infuriating task -- technical progress was needed to help ...

1. find and search content (Google)
   
2. aggregate content
   
3. organize, group and rank content
   
4. effectively and conveniently present the content.

To get to this point wasn't easy. Free content is everywhere on the internet but we all needed a "Google" or "Yahoo" to search for it. Then the portals came... but these were ad heavy websites that gave us aggregation at the expense of a dozen flashy ads battling for your eyeballs and forcing us to remember another user login and profile

The real breakthrough in terms of digitally available content on the internet was syndication and the syndication standards that followed. The RSS standard was the major winner in this space and a sleuth of RSS readers (i.e. Google Reader) followed suit but they all suffer the same problem. They force you to seek out, collect and organize your feeds. Who really has the time for that? Some readers (or portals) provided master list of feeds but they usually contained a bunch of stuff you weren't interested in ... and many were never updated to reflect dead links or blogs.

Content is KING -- but you need to give it to the user in an effective, convenient and organized fashion and this is why we created our iHub line of applications. We have "content owners" that intelligently seek out, group and organize our content along with servers that constantly refresh and rebuild our composite feeds.

iHub Theory of Content Evolution
CONTENT --> SEARCH ENGINES --> RSS FEEDS --> RSS READERS --> iHUB

I'm excited -- Our iHubTechnology product is coming out soon. Get Ready To Get Your Geek On because we collected and organized the best tech feeds available today.... hardware, software, hacker, security, coding ... YUMMY!

iPhone Application - Approval - iHubHealth

YAY !! -- Our iHubHealth 1.0 application has been approved and is currently available on iTunes.

The team would like to thank all the girlfriends, wives, nieces, moms, dads, cousins and friends that were thoroughly ignored throughout the past several months.

We still love you :)

iPhone App Submission - iHubHealth 1.0

Well... it took us a little longer then we anticipated but working on a software project with a distributed team effort can be difficult. The team invested loads of personal time, work time and a host of weekends and nights but we're finally done. We're pretty proud of our application - iHubHealth 1.0

and we just submitted the application to Apple... here's hoping on a seamless (and quick) release to the application store.

This application was more difficult than others because the content we had the team gather had to be vetted, organized, ranked, checked and rechecked over and over again. This is much easier said than done especially when you're dealing with dozens of blogs and hundreds of news channels. Blogs are real tricky... lots of good blogs that are stale or dead and lots of bad blogs that get updated daily. Your content people really have to take their time to read the blogs to make sure there not just commercial fronts with fluff content.

Along with the normal complexity of XML-based software development and Objective-C it became somewhat of a bear of a project. Anyway... the 80 hour weeks are over and we hope people enjoy the result.

We have an entire suite of these apps in the pipeline... we have most of the administrative applications complete and we have the entire server-side infrastructure complete too. We just need to write some web based UIs on to help administer and maintain the channels which we can push with dynamic updates to the devices.

Look for new titles every couple of weeks. Keep checking the blog for updates.

Early DEV Thoughts on Objective-C

I've been a developer for over 15 years.  I started out with primarily C and C++ on UNIX during my undergrad years and during my first couple of years in the industry.  

I shifted to Borland C++ and eventually Microsoft Visual C++ during the early MFC days (ouch) and then went on the usual migration path of Visual Basic 6.0 -- Visual Basic .NET -- C#.NET development.   I've also done a good amount of scripting from REXX to VBscript to Javascript.

BUT I have to admit - developing using Objective-C is a pretty painful experience.  Even though my engineering side appreciates the flexibility and the seemingly robust combination of MVC UI infrastructure integrated with dynamic progamming elements (runtime methods, etc) topped off with asynchronous messaging facilities and the like... I'm slightly disappointed at the difficulty of the "development experience".  For all the flexibility - not enough is done in the language (and the development environment) to ease or "control" the experience for the developer and let's not even talk about memory management.  You're pretty much thrust into the soup... not sure about how effective this is when you're trying to expand your developer base.

I know with time I'll appreciate the flexibility of the language once I'm comfortably ramped up the learning curve - but this language is pretty painful - or maybe I'm just being a little punk.  Sorry for the vent. 

Welcome to iHubLife - iPhone Development Blog

Thanks for stopping by - we're gonna try to give you some of the good, bad & the ugly regarding technical development of our iHubLife line of applications.

Quick introduction of our team. The core development team is currently composed of 3 senior level software development professionals. We also work with a small cadre of content professionals.

The Geeks are :

Saro "Obi Juan" Concepcion - I called him up about the idea after a friend suggested I start iPhone development. Juan said "#$$#@#" it !! and bought two MAC minis the next day and we started designing and coding iPhone Apps

Bert "The Flirt" Nieves - and I said "sure dude" and called Bactu up and he said "hell yeah dude. Let's just do it..."

Rob "Bactu" Bacher - The Big Brains behind the iHub. Organized to a fault. I despise him :)

Well ... thats the intro ... stop by often and leave your comments or suggestions.