OUR CLIENT

The client is a Romanian entrepreneur who asked for a social iOS application that enables users to chat with another person close to their location. We had previously worked together on other projects and he’d been very happy with our collaboration, so we were his first choice when he thought of a partner to turn his idea into reality.

CLIENT'S NEED

The client needed the application to be compatible with iPhone 6 and 6+. It needed to identify the users’ location after they sign in. Then each user could view others that checked into the same location and send a “hello” message to any of them. Once a user replied with their own “hello”, accepting the conversation, the two users could start chatting.

OUR SOLUTION

We enabled users to sign in to their Hello account through Facebook, for ease of access. We used Google Places API to enable their geolocation.

The project team completed the entire project (including the presentation website) within 2 months and it included:

• A project manager
• A designer – that provided custom design from ground zero
• A mobile developer
• A web developer – for the app’s presentation website

The solution involved 3rd party API integrations: Facebook SDK, Graph API and Google Places API integration. Facebook integration enables Hello members to use their Facebook account to login to the application. The user’s first name and profile picture is then used and displayed in the app.

Thanks to the Google Places API integration, users can discover points of interest around their proximity and they’re checked out automatically after they leave the location. Push Notifications using APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) enables users to receive messages sent while they were offline the next time they connect to the internet. The app is designed to work great on all iPhone devices, including iPhone 6 and 6+.

The server side is implemented using PHP, Python and Socket connections using streams plus APNS in order to reduce the time lag to a minimum, facilitating real time chat. The main challenge was implementing the horizontal scroll, so that users would swipe the screen to the left or right to navigate between multiple chat screens. This feature’s implementation was delicate because it involved inter-changeable views and multiple simultaneous events. We were up to the challenge, though, and we managed to improve the speed by using Python with sockets.