Epistle: making your ministry mobile

Away from Tumbler but not AFK

I realize it has been quite a while since my last post. When I originally promised to update twice a week, I did not realize how easy it would be do get sucked into my work. We are on the fringe of releasing the first version Epistle and I am excited to get feedback from the individuals and churches who have agreed to be a part of the initial testing and feedback period.

Of course the problem with being on the fringe of completion is that we are constantly encountering detail problems, little items that seem inconsequential but are nevertheless important to our app as a whole. We’re almost there. I can’t wait to see this app live and in action.

The development team spent most of today outside on an old foam couch, programming beneath open skies. We drew a lot of curious looks, but it was good to see the sun again. It’s a gorgeous end-of-summer time-of-year in Indiana. Get outside, and take a copy of Epistle beta with you.

*Edit* I just changed our Tumblr theme because the old one didn’t list dates.

User Interfaces

We have reached User Interface perfection. The user will become one with the App, losing themselves in the easy flow, finding out just how nice it would be to become a cyborg.

Ok, maybe not quite, but our UI is becoming pretty nice. It won’t blow your mind with astounding 3d rendering and out-of-this-world artwork, but is clean and efficient. The style, layout, and navigation contribute to communicating effectively, drawing attention to the content rather than the goodies. The popularity of minimalist web design has increased recently, and I think with an intense attention to detail, it will work quite well in the mobile world as well.

As Ryan and I finish up the UI work for the mobile App, Peter is working on getting file uploading/downloading operational (most useful for sharing sermons and bulletins) and launching our code into the Amazon Coud.

Keep tuned for the launch of our website, EpistleApp.com It’s not online yet, but it will rise like a galleon on the waves of the internet soon, very soon.

Week of the Hunt

This has been the week of the hunt. We have stalked memory leaks, bloated code, and solutions to dynamic web presentation. Some of us have landed big game. Peter is currently completely rewriting our API, making the code smaller and more robust. “This is the best kind of refactoring in the world,” crowed Peter. He has already been able to delete hundreds of lines of now obsolete code; this is how programmers get endorphin highs. 

Ryan’s hunt for memory leaks is finally complete. Any leak that does occur is the last of a near-extinct species. With the leaks gone, and some other work complete, the mobile App is more stable than ever before, and Ryan can move on to developing a mobile mind-melding user interface.

Geocoding. Dan had never heard of it before, but working with the Google Maps API he has managed to to geocode addresses from the database in order to automatically generate maps for the Church subdomain. He’s also been slowly creating a friendly navigation system for the news, directory, and events pages, and he will be working with Ryan on mobile UI and design.

In other news “nictitate” is the technical word for “blink.” Our vocabulary expands.

Error Whale

Have you read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? Do you remember the part where a whale pops into existence a number of miles above the surface due (a very improbable event)? Now, imagine that whale falling on top of my computer and smashing it into little pieces.

Ok, so it’s not that bad. I can’t just run my templates against my virtual server, and thus I can’t accomplish much right now. I’m uncertain as to why the server isn’t working, other than that it possibly has something to do with a misnamed module, and I’ve searched every nook for the typo with no success. Normally, I could just download fresh, new, better files from our backup/live box, but we’re running into some issues with that as well.

The strange part of this Error Whale is that my server was working fine yesterday, but upon starting it up again this morning it suddenly “discovered” this impassible fault in the programming and has decided to hide away all of its usefulness.

—Dan the Annoyed

We’re Mobile

As we continue our march toward launching a beta version of Epistle, a working product has begun to coalesce from the foundation of effort that we have put into this project. Peter has a test server up and running (no small feat) with some randomly generated data, and Ryan has pointed the mobile app to that server and installed it on an iPhone and an iPod Touch.

Michael Sherer is traveling with one of these devices and hopes to demonstrate the functionality of Epistle to generate interest as we move toward the pubic testing stage of our project.

To that end, Dan is finishing converting the church subdomain html to Django templates, pulling information from databases to simulate the dynamic content that will be generated in the future. Ryan is continuing to hunt memory leaks so that Epistle can work efficiently with the limited memory of mobile devices. Email registration is now functional, and Peter is working on associating registering users with specific churches.

It’s been an exciting few days. Watch out, Epistle will be online soon.

Tis’ Thursday

Working in a basement office durring the summer has its benefits. Our climate is cool, controlled, mostly untouched by the pollen, pollution, and humidity outside. My allergies are pleased that I have decided to stay indoors durring these months of sinal decimation. We also have few distractions other than the internet access we use as an extended brain so that we achieve results far more quickly than our capabilities as a small, young team like ours should allow. But I suppose the internet could potentially be a huge distraction, since that is what its function seems to be in ordinary life.

After getting an Apache server running, Peter has been moving our work from the test server onto the real one. A next step in the launch process is setting up a test deploy server to get ready for when we go online in a few weeks.

Peter has also been modifying the admin tools to make them more user friendly and generally useful. Among other things, this involved cleaning up some unnecessary options, and limiting the power and access of lower level users within the admin tools.

Ryan has added a map and the option to get directions from the user’s current coordinates to the mobile application. It’s a great way for new and returning users to make their way to church from any location, and it eliminates the tedious task of searching for a church address and plugging that address into a digital map/gps in order to get directions. As someone who dreads visiting new places without a navigator or gps, I can personally attest to the importance of this feature.

In addition to the map/directions, Ryan has been looking through memory leaks and fixing user credentials so that they are both encrypted and stable when stored and accessed.

Dan is almost finished coding the theme and template for local church subdomains. Many communities struggle with making a chique, user friendly website, and Dan’s work should help take care of that problem for our clients. A large part of his work was writing and rewriting clean, logical CSS that can easily be adapted for user generated content or adding new pages to the website. Today though, he is going to write new content for the Epistle business page in order to better communicate the goals, purpose, and features of signing up.

The Bi-Weekly News

Now that we’ve launched our tumblr, we would like to share the Epistle Development team’s epic deeds and moments of progress on a bi-weekly basis. Think of it as free high quality television, except more classy and more free of cable costs.

We’ll start out with our leader, Michael Sherer. Last week he made the long trek to Pittsburg, PA, where he shared information on Epistle at the Mennonite Church USA convention. This was a key mission to give Epistle a bit of product visibility. We want everyone to benefit from our work, but they will not be able to do that if they don’t know about it.

Peter and Ryan shifted their work from XML to JSON, making the code more direct and compact. This will allow them to more easily change, understand, and debug their programs. While making the switch, Peter managed to optimize the serializer to run 4x faster than the packaged JSON serializer. Speedy data storage and transmission is both impressive, and important to Epistle’s mission to maintain a fluid user experience.

Daniel, our newest team member, joined us on Tuesday last week. He is currently working on creating a standard website for the subdomains of churches who register with epistle. Thanks to additional design input from Jon Savage at Studio Ace of Spade we are on our way toward making an elegant theme for our clients and beta testers.

Speaking of beta testers, we would love to hear your input on how we can make Epistle best work for your church. If you sign up for the beta you will, as I understand it, get a nice discount when we launch the finished product.’

That’s all for this Monday, episode 2 should be released later this week. *cue intense music as credits roll*

Dedication

The weather is fine here in the climate controlled room where we work. The only window is tiny and does not open, we prefer it that way. We are the monks of app development, isolating ourselves from the temptations of the outside world, working tirelessly in a spartan environment in our quest for perfection. Outside the door there is posted a small sign: “Here there be dragons.”