Digital Leash

Hello to my fellow googlers, developers, tech heads, and bored friends looking to fill the time. You are all readers of my blog and therefore I love you equally. Back this week, as promised, to tell you about the, slightly controversial, "Parent-Child Apps."

So we've all seen (and have opinions about) parents walking down the sidewalk dragging their unruly child(ren) on a leash. There's no judgment here. We have one for my 15 month-old when we're in Manhattan. It allows him to walk around, explore, and feel that autonomy that he craves without actually giving it to him. It keeps him from hugging strangers and running into traffic because he sees a rat and thinks it's a puppy.

Now imagine an adult putting a leash on their teenager. I'm sure many of you might like to but they could probably figure out the velcro. The alternative? The Parent-Child Apps. A digital leash on your child making sure they don't stray farther than you desire. If your child wonders outside of your preset radius you are notified.

Many new concepts are required here: storyboards, location services, alerts, and HTTP posts, patches, and get requests using a JSON API. I'm happy to say those acronyms used to be terrifying to me but now they're only slightly disconcerting and I know with more practice I'll become more and more comfortable. I was instructed to use NSURLConnection. Though deprecated, it's still important to understand this technique should I come across it in an existing app that I am working on. I'll learn about the current method, NSURLSession, in a future project.

Website with which the apps communicate.

Final layout of Parent App.

My favorite part of this project was working with the storyboards. I liked placing the elements on the pages and arranging each piece with the User Experience in mind. The location services weren't nearly as difficult as I thought they would be and I enjoyed running around the room to test that the latitude and longitude were changing. Alerts were even easier and it was fun to see the familiar blue bubble pop up on my own apps. With all pieces combined I had two, fully functioning apps, communicating with one another via a website. The methods learned were difficult but I could think of how they are used in countless apps on my own phone and knew that they were integral to my mobile developer tool set.

Varying opinions aside, there's no doubt there's a market for this app. On to the next project: LCD Clock.