Archive for September, 2009

MonaMusic™ lets you listen to arrangements made famous by The Hampton [Rock] String Quartet™ while following along with the sheet music published by Mona Lisa Sound™. Audio can be sync’d to the sheet music for automatic control. Four different audio modes are available allowing you to scroll through the sheet music and/or audio freely, overlay page turning indicators make it easy to navigate, you can easily sync each page to the audio, and fully tether the audio and sheet music together. An abundance of background information for each song is provided including video, links to related web sites, direct sheet music purchasing, note taking and bookmarking.

Urban Airship is powering the in app purchase piece of MonaMusic with StoreFront, allowing them to sell their entire catalog of sheet music directly within their application.

This is a first of its kind application which marries the Mona Lisa Sound sheet music publisher’s novel licensing rights, gorgeous print quality, breakthrough classic rock emphasis, The Hampton Rock String Quartet™ live audio, and close cooperation with the licensors of The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Kinks, Cream, The Eagles, The Doobie Brothers, Mott The Hoople, Pink Floyd, The Cars, The Moody Blues, and others.

John Reed, President and Founder of Mona Lisa Music, had this to say: “As a developer I was struggling through the last phases of my application – trying to integrate Apple’s storefront framework. Urban Airship did all the work for me with a simple drop in library. Hooking into my code was very easy. Now I have an interface that is much richer than I would have implemented if I had continued my struggle. Thanks for getting my in app purchases on line! Next version of my app will utilize Urban Airship’s push services. I’m glad I found Urban Airship.”

Gowalla (iTunes link) is a fun iPhone app for sharing and discovering eateries, coffeehouses, nightlife hotspots, hipster hangouts, retail meccas, famous landmarks, and much more. Everywhere you go, you can stamp your passport to earn rewards at the places you visit. At each spot, you can pick up items left behind by others. Then, you can share your experiences with friends, and follow along to see where they check in. Since it uses your iPhone’s GPS, it works everywhere in the world.

The Gowalla team started working on push notification support in early July and it was included in the latest release of their app. Gowalla is using Urban Airship to send push notifications when your friends check-in.

“Configuring push notifications with Urban Airship was a breeze. Thanks to the sample code, we were able to get push notifications working in Gowalla in under 30 minutes. I’d recommend Urban Airship to anyone who wants to focus on their own app, rather than the plumbing,” says Scott Raymond, lead developer of the Gowalla app.

We’re having a blast using Gowalla here at Urban Airship and happy that they’re on board.

Meter Maid (iTunes download) watches your parking meter for you. Just set how much time is on your meter and receive a push notification before the meter expires — no need to keep checking your watch.

“When I started building Meter Maid, I just wanted to focus on building a great app with a great interface. I didn’t want to worry about the complexities of building and maintaining a whole backend infrastructure for push notifications. I found Urban Airship and it was a no brainer. I implemented the service in a few minutes, and saved myself months of work and headache. I couldn’t have built the app without them,” said Zach Waugh, lead developer for Meter Maid.

Meter maid also lets you save the GPS location of where you parked so you can always find your way back to your car. You can see the location on a map and even get directions to your car from your current location. The app was designed to be simple and as easy to use as possible. Featuring a beautiful and intuitive interface, you can set your parking meter with one hand in less than 10 seconds.

The Carrier, a complete original graphic novel by Philadelphia creator Evan Young, is now available (iTunes download) worldwide. This marks a watershed moment for the American comic book industry: The Carrier is the first graphic novel to be published exclusively on the iPhone.

The Carrier.app from StopWatch Media is the first complete graphic novel to be published exclusively on the iPhone. On one hand, Evan Young’s story is an action adventure about a man with a briefcase attached to his wrist. On the other hand, the app, developed by StopWatch’s Geoffrey Young, represents a groundbreaking shift for the comic book industry. The Young brothers have built the app to utilize the iPhone’s geo-location and Push capabilities, deliver emails, and tell the story of The Carrier in a real-time format. The entire package serves up a series of unique digital extras in what is, essentially, the first mobile comic book experience.

“Urban Airship provides what Apple should have given developers in the first place: a clean and simple Push interface, free from hoops, hurdles, and caveats. With any serious engineering effort, there is always the question of how to best utilize finite resources – should I spend my valuable and limited time reading Apple documentation and wrestling with APNS via low-level network and authentication protocols, or should I use the straightforward JSON API from Urban Airship and leave the interface complexities to them? Of course, the choice was an easy one, and one that I’m glad we made for our application. The Push Notification service from Urban Airship is a stable and well engineered product that has proven to be both time and cost effective for us. Urban Airship is top notch, both from a technical and support perspective, and I’d use them again in a second” said Geoffrey Young, lead developer of The Carrier.

We’re excited to announce the release of StoreFront 1.1 with the addition of some nice new features that we’re sure everyone will enjoy.

The big feature for 1.1 is the addition of the StoreFront delegate class which allows developers to hook into StoreFront events. Now when a download is completed, we can notify your application. We highly recommend everyone download and/or upgrade to the latest version.

Full change log available.

We’ve also put together this short clip for those of you not familiar with StoreFront to preview it’s features:

Related Links:

• Download StoreFront
• StoreFront Documentation
• In-App Purchase API Documentation
• StoreFront Integration Video

While there are several parking or location management tools available for iPhone, push services built into mySpots Parking Pro (iTunes download) finally allows for user created reminder capabilities that have historically been missing. Until now the only real way to set a reminder is to exit an application and setup a whole new timer in the iPhone’s Clock tool. mySpots Parking Pro brings together saving, sharing, and now to create parking reminders all within the same application.

mySpots Parking Pro uses Urban Airship push notifications to send user created reminders back to their iPhone, perfect for reminding them that their meter is expiring or they need to move their car for street cleaning in a couple days.  Reminders can actually be used for any saved location, whether it be parking, a restaurant, or new place to check out before it closes.

Says Travis Williams, the developer of mySpots Parking Pro, “The service is well thought out with features like scheduling that many applications could take advantage of.” He continues, “Sample code made it incredibly fast to integrate notifications into the application, and helped us avoid having to set up a complex and costly server environment on our own. It’s the definitely route to take for push notifications if you keep focus on the application.”

We couldn’t be happier to have mySpots Parking Pro sending pushes with our services.

We will be doing scheduled maintenance on the Urban Airship API servers on Sunday night at midnight PDT (-0700 UTC). We expect less than an hour in total.

If this interferes with a anticipated high-traffic period, please contact us.

Update 2009-09-14 1 AM PDT: Maintenance complete.