Half Staff App

The Jed Mahonis Group launched its second app today: the Half Staff App.

We decided a few months ago that in order to build our portfolio up, we should focus on core app technologies that companies would like to have in their own apps. Coincidentally, for Christmas this year, my girlfriend bought me an American flag.

After some simple Googling, I found a few websites that offered a service like this, but they mostly a) served to sell flags and b) looked like garbage. In addition, none of them offered direct push notifications (although there were a couple that offered e-mail and Twitter notifications).

The biggest challenge in this app was implementing the server API. After monkeying with tools like RestKit, I just opted to use some standard Apple methods to send a basic POST command to my API.

Besides that, it's a relatively simple app: we have a custom CMS that we can add new days in, then push the changes to a static JSON file. On launch, the app loads that JSON file and migrates changes into an internal SQL database.

There are a few changes I'd like to make (specifically, I'd like to combine the push token call and the database call into a single call), and we are working on a way to implement state-level notifications, but for now, I'm very proud of the way this app turned out.

It's only 99¢ on the App Store, so get it today and let me know what you think.