Over the summer I spent a few good weeks on my app for finding online classified ads and ended up with a mostly usable app. However, there are a few reasons why I have decided not to go further with the idea--for now at least.

The news site whose RSS feed I was planning to use is just not useful enough as is. I'm guessing this may be by design to keep people from hijacking their traffic. Specifically, the RSS feed is limited in four ways: it only shows the last two days of posted ads, it does not include item images, it does not include the item's location, and it does not list the item categories. I feel like this information is required in order to have a halfway decent smartphone app. I am not interested in scraping the site's HTML for this data because that is way too fragile. The first time they change their site layout or anything, BAM! The app is broken until I can update the code, which would quite possibly include re-submitting it to Apple and waiting for a week for approval. Ouch. I have sent several emails to the site's webmaster but alas, not a single one was even answered. I'd be happy to come back and finish my AdFinder application in the future when I have a better interface to work with.

I have to admit that since I got about 80% done with this app and then realized all the above shortcomings, I have not spent much time on anything for Revelary. I'm in the middle of a school class again (second to last one!) and have been busy with learning non-smartphone related programming technology in my spare time. But now that I've officially decided to put AdFinder on hold and start another idea from my list, I hope to start making consistent progress again.

I'm thinking my next iPhone app will have something to do with either combining sound effects to make audio tracks or using maps to find distances between multiple locations. I'll play around with some ideas and see what I can put together over the next couple months.