RapidSMS at Away Day

Last weekend at the ThoughtWorks US Away Day we were joined by Merrick Schaefer from UNICEF Innovation and a couple developers who've worked extensively with RapidSMS. RapidSMS is an open source project providing a set of libraries and apps for interacting with phones. It's been used for a variety of purposes, mostly in Africa, where cell phone coverage is far better than electricity or land-line availability. One deployment they talked through in detail allows (relatively) untrained medical workers to use SMS messages to sumbit a few measurements to assess childhood malnutrition. In addition to recording the information to keep accurate and instantly available statistics, the system performs an immediate diagnosis and texts it back to the worker in the field.

Jeff Wishnie organized a RapidSMS code jam for those not in the mood to attend sessions, and Brian Guthrie and I spent most of Saturday pairing on a simple feature addition to one of the support applications. It was the first time either of us had touched Python for more than a few minutes, and the first time we'd touched Django at all, so it was an interesting learning experience. It was also extremely rewarding knowing that we were contributing to such a good cause.

If you sometimes find yourself in the mood for some coding but don't always have a personal project burning to get out, I'd highly encourage you to spend a little time familiarizing yourself with RapidSMS and maybe find something in their issue tracker you could tackle. I promise you'll feel great about it.

Interactive Clojure-AppEngine Development

If you like (1) interactive programming in Clojure from Emacs and (2) deploying to Google AppEngine, but you haven't yet managed to bring these two together, you should take a look at this post over at hackers-with-attitude, which walks you through setting up a pretty slick workflow.

SimURLator: Test Custom iPhone URL Schemes in the iPhone Simulator

Over the last few months ThoughtWorks has implemented several "Conference Connection" iPhone applications. They provide a view of the conference schedule, the ability to save a list of sessions you plan to attend, maps of the conferene site, a view of relevant Twitter posts, and some features specific to the various conferences.

The Twitter integration includes a feature to post, launching your prefered Twitter client (Tweetie, Echofon—formerly "TwitterFon"—or Twitterrific) using UIApplication's openURL: and the apps' custom URL schemes.

Relatively late in the testing cycle for another upcoming conference, we discovered an issue with selecting a Twitter client when you have more than one of the supported clients installed. Some of our testers were testing only in the iPhone Simulator, and because you can't install third-party apps in the Simulator, that feature had been undertested.

That was no good, so we created a sort of workaround: a stand-in app that takes the place of the third-party apps you can't install in the Simulator. SimURLator is now available on Github.

You configure SimURLator to respond to whatever custom URL schemes you want (by adding or removing URL schemes in SimURLator-Info.plist) and deploy it to your Simulator alongside your app. When SimURLator is launched via a URL by your app, it shows you the full URL. Obviously that's not as satisfying as seeing the third-party app launch and do the right thing, but it's a lot better than nothing.

You can also test your app's handling of its own custom URL schemes. Launch SimURLator and type in a URL that should launch your application. One button lets you verify that the OS reports the URL can be opened (with canOpenURL:); the other launches your app (with openURL:).

If there are other features you think would be useful, comment below. Better yet, fork it and show us.