My first iOS/iPadOS app has been accepted by Apple! The app is powered by Embarcadero Delphi. You can read more about the app in this blog post. You can find the app in the store at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ashland-oregon-news-dispatches/id6670345777.
Table of Contents
Features:
The Ashland Oregon News Dispatches app provides:
- Curated News Feed: Easily browse through a comprehensive list of articles from multiple Ashland-area news sources, keeping you informed about what’s happening in your community.
- Date Filtering: Stay current with today’s news or explore past articles by choosing your preferred date range. Find exactly what you’re looking for with just a few taps.
- Customizable Sources: Personalize your news feed by selecting the specific news sources you want to follow. Tailor your experience to focus on the topics and outlets that matter most to you.
- Easy Sharing: Found an article you want to share? With a simple tap, you can send articles to friends, family, or colleagues via messages or email, making it easy to keep everyone in the loop.
Device Platforms Currently Supported:
- iOS – iPhone/iPad
- Additional platform versions of the app are still in development. I will update this section as they are accepted.
App Help Information:
The Ashland News Dispatches app allows you to read articles from several news sources in the greater Ashland Oregon area. To share a page (by email, text message, etc.) in the Browser tab, click the sharing button in the upper right corner. The Settings tab allows you to: 1) Select News sites, 2) Choose to see “Today’s News” or “All News”, 3) Set the app’s style, 4) Use the “Save Settings” button.
Technical Details:
This app was created using Embarcadero Delphi and the FireMonkey (FMX) cross-platform GUI framework.
The app displays a list with the title and date for news articles from a curated list of southern Oregon news sources. Selecting one of the articles from the list displays the article in the Browser tab. At the top right of the Browser tab title you can use the button to share the article link.
Under the cover, the app uses the XMLDocument component to parse each RSS feed to populate the ListBoxItem’s Text property with (Todays or All) news article titles and dates. For each feed, I create a ListBoxGroupHeader containing the name of the feed. The URL for an article is stored in each ListBoxItem’s TagString property.
The onClick event for a ListBox item uses the TWebBrowser component’s Navigate method to load the URL and activates the Browser tab. In the upper right of the Browser tab there is a TSpeedButton that uses a ShareSheetAction to let the user share the article URL using compatible sharesheet apps including Messages, Mail, etc.
To support cross platform email, I use Woll2Woll’s wwEmailWithAttachment unit (Copyright (c) 2020 by Woll2Woll Software).
Product and Technical Support:
The app’s Help tab allows users to send me an email with questions, issues, suggestions and other feedback.