Some of you may have heard, but PhpNut, Nate, and myself all have iPhones. Nate and I both stood in line for hours, so we naturally felt a strong bond to our little piece of sweetness. After spending a day with the device, we were hooked and PhpNut soon felt left out so, he drove an hour to some city in Tennessee to get the last 8gb iPhone available there. Anyway, while I was playing around, syncing my life, and getting to know my new way of living, I noticed that there was no easy way to get RSS feeds on my iPhone.

I need RSS on my iPhone. The EDGE network is not all that fast at the moment. None of the other sites I found really had an easy and clean user interface that would fit perfectly with the iPhone apps. So, I set out to create a app that would allow other users to add RSS feeds and I could go look for some and add them to my collection. Strangely enough, my iPhone is now my preferred way of reading all my feeds. I have it connected to wifi at home, so speed is no issue and reading the feeds by tapping and flicking my fingers around makes me feel like I am reading a newspaper.

For whatever the reason, iPhoRSS was born and exists to aggregate and make reading RSS easy. Obviously, using CakePHP would make iPhoRSS happen fast and allow me to get the feeds on my iPhone today. Nate and I kept talking about all the cool things on the iPhone and I told him about the idea behind iPhoRSS. He wanted RSS too, so I put together a quick 3-table database with feeds, users, and feeds_users. Baked the project, database config, then baked the Feed and User models with all the associations, baked the Feeds and Users controllers with the CRUD methods, and baked the views for the two controllers. Next I set about adding Authentication. The requirement was something ultra simple, so Session was all that was needed. I sent this over to Nate with an initial user interface that was simple and clean based off the cake.generic.css and a custom css to make a few more changes and additions to the style. In an hour, we had a working application to start building out.

From there, Nate helped me test some things, add some features, and make the interface look like it belongs on an iPhone. I added a deleted_feeds table, so if there are some feeds another user added that you will never need you can delete them. They will still be available to the other users, but you won't see them when you choose to add more feeds. I decided to allow two ways of adding feeds to the system. You can use "Choose," which brings up a multiple select form field. The interface for multi-selects on the iPhone is slick, so it was a nice by-product that the multi-select works so easily with Cake's hasAndBelongsToMany relationships. The other way to add feeds is to tap on "New". This allows you to name a feed and input the feed URL. Then, I check to see if that URL already exists, and if so, grab its ID so we don't end up with a ton of duplicate data. Unfortunately, I have not located the cut and paste for the iPhone and surfing around and finding feeds is not all that pleasant. It will be much more pleasant if I could get iPhoRSS to automatically add a feed from the header of the current browser page. Maybe the next version. Instead, I solved this problem by making the interface usable from the web. Its still big, but it fits just fine in my browser now. I used the RequestHandler to check if the request is coming in through a mobile device. If it is, I have a different style. Now, that I could add feeds easily and the interface was coming along, I had to parse the RSS feeds and display the information back to the user. I didn't do anything special, except use the HttpSocket and XML classes in the Feed model. HttpSocket calls a raw GET and passes the data to the XML class. Then I just pass the resulting XML object to the view, so I can display the data from the feed. Now I could create and read feeds with ease. Nate added some of his favorite feeds and I added mine and we started really using the application. While we were doing this the sessions kept timing out and login back in became a real annoyance. So, the last thing I added was the Cookie Component to keep track of the session, so I did not have to login all the time. Typing is never fun on small keyboards with one or two fingers, and we need to limit any requests to the server since the EDGE network is not too speedy. The Session gets created with the login and stored in the Cookie. If the Cookie is available and Session is not, then the Session will be created from that, otherwise it will redirect to login.

After about 6 hours of on and off coding on it, while we waited for the domain to propagate, we had finalized the first version and published it. We have been testing it for the last few days and hope that others enjoy RSS on their iPhone. Well, actually you can use iPhoRSS from any web enabled device. If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to leave a comment. We plan to add some more features over time as they become necessary to us, and I dont see why we can't release the code.

Check out http://iphorss.com to see the working application.

Bake on.