White House for iOS mobile application
A native iOS app designed to fetch, cache, and display multiple feeds containing articles, photos, and live and on demand video. These are displayed in a web view. Includes support for push notifications.
This application is under active development and will continue to be modified and improved over time.
Goals
By releasing the source code for this app we hope to empower other governments and organizations to build and release mobile apps to engage their own citizens and constituencies. In addition, public review and contribution to the application's code base will help strengthen and improve the app.
Requirements
- iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch iOS version 5.1 or later
- RSS feeds for content to be aggregated and displayed by the app
Usage
Mobile developers will be able to configure the application to retrieve and display content from arbitrary RSS feeds. The developer will be able to configure the app to receive push notifications. Placeholder assets may be replaced to customize the app's look and feel.
Building the app requires the iOS 5.1 SDK or higher.
This app makes use of several libraries in source, binary, and
submodule form. All libraries live in the libs/ directory.
The following sections describe all of the libraries and any steps necessary to initialize them.
Source
The following libraries are directly included as source code:
Submodules
The following libraries are included as submodules:
To intialize submodules, run:
git submodule update --init
To build Facebook, cd into libs/facebook and run
./scripts/build_facebook_ios_sdk_static_lib.sh. This will build the
static library used by the app.
Binary Libraries
The following libraries must be downloaded and installed manually:
- libUAirship - Urban Airship library for iOS
- Google Analytics SDK for iOS
To install Urban Airship, download the SDK and place the entire
Airship directory inside of libs/.
To install Google Analytics, download the SDK and place the entire
Google Analytics SDK directory inside of libs/.
Feeds
The app's content is pulled in from RSS feeds.
A thumbnail image is displayed in feed list views when the source feed has a media:thumbnail element. The "width" attribute is required; the parser currently ignores thumbnail elements with no width.
Example:
<item>
<media:thumbnail url="http://www.whitehouse.gov/example-image-320px.jpg" width="320"/>
<media:thumbnail url="http://www.whitehouse.gov/example-image-640px.jpg" width="640"/>
</item>
The optimal size for display is chosen depending on the context (e.g. 640px for article feeds on the iPhone 4, or ~70px for photo gallery thumbnails on the iPhone 3GS) and screen density.
NOTE: Setting up the application and configuring it for use in your organization's context requires iOS development experience. The application ships with a similar design to what is used in the White House for iOS mobile application. The application ships with "white label" placeholder assets that should be replaced by the developer.
Roadmap
Have an idea or question about future features for White House for iOS? Let us know by opening a ticket on GitHub, tweeting @WHWeb, or via our tech feedback form: http://www.whitehouse.gov/tech/feedback.
Contributing
Anyone is encouraged to contribute to the project by forking and submitting a pull request. (If you are new to GitHub, you might start with a basic tutorial.)
By contributing to this project, you grant a world-wide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the conditions that any appropriate copyright notices and this permission notice are included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
All comments, messages, pull requests, and other submissions received through official White House pages including this GitHub page are subject to the Presidential Records Act and may be archived. Learn more http://WhiteHouse.gov/privacy
License
This project constitutes a work of the United States Government and is not subject to domestic copyright protection under 17 USC Β§ 105.
However, because the project utilizes code licensed from contributors and other third parties, it therefore is licensed under the MIT License. http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php. Under that license, permission is granted free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the conditions that any appropriate copyright notices and this permission notice are included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.