Feldon If you have attended past Fan Faires and are an iPhone user, then you are likely already familiar with Greg “Rothgar” Spence‘s Fan Faire iPhone app. Greg developed this app in his extremely limited spare time and has maintained it over the past two years. If, however, you are an Android or Windows Mobile user, you’ve been waiting for your own app for going on 3 years now.
Greg developed his Fan Faire Schedule app for the iPhone because that’s the device he owns. He’s always been eager for others to step up and make their own apps for Android, Windows Phone, Palm, BlackBerry, etc. Our own Dethdlr, Chief Architect of EQ2U, took that challenge and in just 2 days of development, was able to choose “all of the above”.
jQuery Mobile
The EQ2Wire SOE Live Schedule “web app” is really just a skinned website that uses same data as the official SOE Live app, but was designed to work in offline mode as well. And because it was built using jQuery Mobile, it works on a large number of mobile devices. There are some limitations to jQuery Mobile however. Performance and smoothness of the app, especially on older devices, isn’t perfect. Further, the “My Schedule” feature has not been replicated as it would have required more time to build and test the on-device storage code than was available.
How to use SOE Live Schedule?
There is no app to “install”. Simply visit the EQ2Wire SOE Live Schedule website on your phone and the data will be cached to your device. The site was designed to function both online and offline which means once you’ve visited the site once, it should continue to function even when your mobile device is in airplane mode.
We recommend saving a Bookmark and adding that Bookmark to your Home Screen. This will add an icon to your phone that lets you view the SOE Live schedule immediately. (On some devices, unless you save it as a Bookmark first, you won’t get the proper icon added to your Home Screen.)
If your phone has a QR Reader App, you can simply point it at the graphic below and you’ll be taken to the appropriate website:
If you have any questions or comments about the SOE Live Schedule app, please post a comment below!
My first stab at a mobile “app”. Be gentle. 🙂
keyword: stab 😉
(singing) When a monster comes along, you must stab it! And when you face the evil throng, you must stab it!
Awesome. The Android community thanks you. Sadly, Zanadi and I wont be going to Fan Faire this year to make use of it, but I’m sure others will.
Great job, works wonderfully on my Samsung Galaxy S3. 🙂
A big thanks here, it is very nicely done, works fine on windows phone 7 (Lumia 900), just counting down the hours to the plane flight now 😀
Glad to hear about the devices it’s working on. We only got a chance to test it on an iPhone 5, a first generation iPad, an HTC Evo V and a Samsung Intercept. It limped along on a Samsung Intercept but I think just about everything limps along on that thing these days. It *should* work on all sorts of devices but still good to hear that it actually *is* working. 🙂
BTW: It crashed on me a few times last night on my iPad. Turned out it was running low on memory. That would explain why it had been running things kind of slow lately. I rebooted and it worked fine after that. Just a tip in case anyone else experiences the same thing. But then again, for iPad, you should probably run the actual iPhone/iPad app anyway. 🙂
Bravo sir, bravo. The sliding navigation is slick. The QR code link is a nice touch too because typing urls into a phone seems unnatural ;P
Speaking of the QR code, that same QR code is on the “About” screen within the app. I thought it might come in handy for people who want to share the app with someone else at SOE Live.
The latest updates to the schedule have been posted by Greg “Rothgar” Spence and my app should now be displaying the latest info. You will need to launch the app twice before you see the latest info. The first time, it grabs the latest info, the second time, it displays the latest info. (That’s how offline web apps work, go figure.) Latest version should say v0.40 at the bottom.
Thanks! Will do that this evening. 🙂
Just wanted to let you know that the app appears to be working just fine on my Kindle Fire as well. 🙂