Building an Open WorldCat app for the iPhone
Aug 15th, 2008 by Karen
Ed Vielmetti has an interesting post about library related apps for the iPhone and Open Worldcat. He suggests that it would be great if there were an iPhone specific app for Open WorldCat. My reaction is “hell yeah”.
At UH we are thinking about building an Open WorldCat app for iPhones and iPod Touches. This is in part due to the mobile project we are kicking off this fall. However, I’m still trying to figure out how widely we can distribute something like this because of how the API agreement is written. Certainly we can make it available to our students, faculty and staff. But I’m not sure if we have to authenticate the download. Also, there are rules about what pieces of the services we can use/expose if we DON’T authenticate our users.
Most of last Thursday was spent just playing with the iPod Touch that arrived a week ago Monday. Lucky for me a couple of my staff already have iPhones so they could tell me how some things worked. My over reaction was iPod Touch “how do I love thee, let me count the ways”. The only issue I encountered was that I want to install apps on them and to do this I need to upgrade them at a cost of $9.99 a piece. It isn’t the money that is the issue but more the fact that I can’t get iTunes to play nice with my University credit card and you can’t buy this upgrade any other way. Not to mention the fact that I need multiple copies of the upgrade. Until we get this we really can’t develop and test our own apps.
Still I managed to get three setup and distributed to the members of my group who is doing the pilot project. The initial reactions of people are good but we’ve got some training to do still and some other materials to put together to help people get started. All and all though I’m pretty enthusiastic about the project and the possibilities.
We think an iPhone app for WorldCat is interesting too. We’ve been doing some thinking and experimenting with that idea on the API team, and would really like to hear more about the shape you think a WorldCat iPhone app would take. And you noted a question about how widely you could distribute your app, based on the API Terms. Could you tell us more about how you think your application might present a conflict?
When you are deciding what shape this app should take, please factor in a way for it to not need to store any data on the user’s iPhone. Until Apple gets all the current (as of Sept. 7, 2008) bugs out, all the data-holding iPhone apps are unstable. They are dropping data upon publishing updates and even sometimes upon sycs of the user’s iPhone with its local computer. Go for storing and retrieving data from a web server. For other readers, warning; don’t become reliant upon the data held in your iPhone by a third-party iPhone app. Your data may vanish the next time you plug the phone into the computer.