PlanetNTF

In the past years (almost 15 years…oh, my goodness), I’ve always developed in parallel to my infrastructure projects some system or migration tools based on LotusScript. But no real application development and not object oriented at all.
End of last year I felt a little bit tired with my job and all the “boring” Notes/Domino stuff, so I came to the conclusion to start something completely different (at least in my free time, not a new job). When I’m looking around at home, well it looks like an Apple Store, so why shouldn’t I try out also iOS development…?
After walking through the great Stanford course Developing iOS Apps and playing a little bit around with some examples in the course, my interest was awoken. I spent many weekends and night hours in my Xcode projects and had a lot of fun in doing this… Sad but true, but it is many years ago since I felt such an enthusiasm.

But my roots are Notes/Domino based, so I didn’t went too far away from that and decided trying to create an iOS app for our internal team calendar. This Notes database collects all non private calendar entries from our team and provides a single point of information when looking for available times or just to see where my colleagues are around and what they are currently doing. Yes I know, that may be a “privacy concern” in many companies, but most of my colleagues find it very useful and so I do.

The app is not yet finished (maybe it will never be), it has not a really nice and fancy UI and I’m still undecided whether to release it to the App-Store or not. But I want to share some early thoughts and screenshots, maybe someone would like to give me some feedback.

All you need is a small Notes database which collects and updates automatically all configured calendars.

• The app synchronizes automatically in background with this database or manually
• You can define the range of synchronized data in the app, but also in the Notes database
• Login credentials will be stored encrypted in the app

Some points on my implementation list, but not yet done:

• Include Apple Maps to show the location of your colleagues if possible
• Direct connection to the REST API to allow same functionality without a separate Notes database
• Select the Users you want to synchronize on your device
• Include more information about the users to allow mailto or call functionality
• Localization for different languages and time zones
• iPad version

Any feedback and recommendations are very welcome! More details on http://teamcal.info