The Ushahidi team is proud to announce the long awaited Ushahidi iOS app!
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The Ushahidi mobile apps play a crucial role for gathering incident reports for a number of reasons. One, gps-enabled devices can gather exact latitude and longitude helping provide an accurate incident location. Two, camera-phones allow the user to take photos on the spot of the incident. Three, 3G enabled devices can upload the incident report as they happen, which is critical during times of crisis. Four, when internet is not available, multiple reports can still be collected and uploaded at a later time when the device is connected.
We currently have mobile apps for the Windows Mobile, Android and J2ME platforms. The iOS app has been in the works for awhile now, so we’re excited to finally add iOS to that collection and have it available for the community.
The iOS app is available for both the iPhone and iPad, with a few optimizations for the iPad’s larger screen size. As expected, it supports both Portrait and Landscape modes. The app allows viewing and submitting of reports to multiple Ushahidi deployments, which is becoming increasingly important since the launch of Crowdmap. Since the list of deployments or reports can grow quite larger, the app offers filtering and sorting allowing the user to quickly access the information they need. The application also remembers the last deployment or report visited, returning upon relaunch. The user can toggle between the report list and report map, to view incidents near their current location. Incident reports can also be shared via email or SMS. User’s will also find the user experience similar to the Apple Mobile Mail app, with a Compose button in bottom right ToolBar and Next/Previous buttons in the NavBar to easily move through reports and photos. Like the other Ushahidi mobile apps, the iOS app can create incident reports in a disconnected state, and upload once the internet becomes available.
A few interesting settings worth mentioning. Enabling the Discrete Mode On Shake will allow the user to quickly flip the current view to a web browser hiding their current activity; this could be useful while entering sensitive information, for example during election monitoring. Enabling the Download Maps For Offline Viewing will take advantage of Google Static Maps so map images can be downloaded and viewed when the device is in a disconnected state.
We’re proud of this first version, but this is just the beginning. We plan to roll out an update soon adding multi-lingual support, improved location selection, push notifications, optimized iPad interface and Twitter sharing.
As usual, your feedback and suggestions are always welcome. Big thanks to Erastus Njuki for all his help during the development process.
Download Ushahidi iOS at http://itunes.apple.com/app/ushahidi-ios/id410609585.
31 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
Tremendous development this. Would be great to get a Retina version for iPhone 4′s better graphics, compared to iPad. On the iPhone 4 the icons and graphics look distinctly blurred. Design aside, loading the live Haiti instance slows down the map to a crawl given the number of incidents. Like desktop UI, wonder if it is possible to aggregate incident info and only close to ground level (i.e. higher zoom levels) disaggregate incidents and geo-locations. Else, it’s a sea of red pins and the response time for the app slows to a crawl on even an iPhone 4. Once you’ve selected a home location, the map always defaults to a zoom that includes it. There’s no way I found to deselect home to enable the map to zoom to a more incident friendly level. With more than one instance, the maps always show incidents from all the instances (plus green pin for home if selected). Is it possible for map to only show incidents from selected instance? This also applies to categories – going from one instance to another does not seem to load categories specific to that incident.
Correction – just noticed that the demo version loaded by default is actually based on Haiti – so scratch that comment about the replication of categories and incidents across instances on the app. That said, perhaps a demo with far less incidents would still make the point, sans the lag?
Thanks Sanjana for your feedback!
I’ll investigate the performance issue when loading high number of incident pins, and also include high-res images for the Retina display with our next app update.
Bug in the ipad app. after entering 1 or 2 deployments, the next time you try to add a deployment the entry fields disappear beyond the top status bar…cant pull it down to enter anything. also when the keyboard hides it cant be re-displayed to add a deployment
Thanks JR for reporting this keyboard issue, we’ll investigate and include a fix in the next app update.
Well done folks. I will have to upgrade my iPhone OS to version 3.2 to use this. So will do so ASAP. Looking forward to use ushahidi more for our work at Amnesty.
I tried to install on my iPhone 3G, but could not. It asks for iOS 3.2, and there is no such animal for the iPhone, only the iPad. Is that a mistake??
(iOS4 doesn’t work well on my iPhone, so I won’t upgrade to that.)
David, unfortunately the Ushahidi app currently requires iOS 3.2 to run.
I can try to lower the minimum OS on the next release, but I believe there are 3.2 specific features we’re currently using.
Thanks for the fast response, Dale.
How are you supposed to enter a location when creating a report on the iPad? I can get the map, but there is no way to select a position. Current location does nothing, and you can’t enter a lat/lon like the desktop app. I tried typing in the name of a city, but search did nothing. I really want to use the app!
Hey Stan, thanks for the feedback, which version of the iPad are you using? The CLLocationManager library should be available on the Wi-Fi + 3G model, but I’ll do some investigating regarding alternative ways to detect the user location.
Note, I’ll also include a location search lookup in the next app version targeted for mid February.
Dale, Thanks for the quick response. I’m using the iPad w/WiFi +3G and the latest iOS. However, I just realized that the location service was turned off for Ushahidi. I can now use my current location.
It would be useful to specify a location on the map (like the desktop app), because you might want to report something a block or two away.
Stan, thanks for the update, glad to hear it’s working now
I agree, being able to specify a location on the map that’s not the user’s current location or another existing location would be very useful.
Thanks again for your feedback, I’ll implement an address search into the next version, which allows the user to drag and drop the pin to a more accurate location.
It seems the app is ‘temporary unavailable’ in the appstore today. Do you know what’s happening? We’ve got a userbase (http://bushfireconnect.org) rearing to go!
Maurits, the app apears to load fine on the App Store, can you try the URL: http://bit.ly/ushahidi_ios_app
Thanks Zak, it’s been unavailable on iTunes for about two days, but can be donwloaded again this morning.
However, where we used to be able to connect to our instance (http://bushfireconnect.org/ushahidi), this now has stoppped working. We’ve upgraded to the latest Ushahidi instance last week (stand alone, not crowdmap).
Who’s the right person to talk to for assistance?
Thanks heaps, we’re in the thick of bushfire support right now….
Maurits, unfortunately there is a bug in the current version which is dropping sub-folders from the URL (in your case the /ushahidi).
I already have a fix for this problem and aiming at submitted an update to the App Store this Friday.
In the meantime, is there anyway to use a URL that does not have a sub-folder in it? For example:
http://ushahidi.bushfireconnect.org
Thanks Dale, I’ll ask our webmaster (mistress). Given that we’re advertising the URL widely, may not be wise to change in mid stream. So we may have to grin and bare it till the WE…
Dale, this is really great and between the mobile version and Crowdmap we have a great solution for a project we’ve been working on. So thanks.
In testing the iOS version, it looks like the pictures are highly compressed before submitting, and they end up very small in the actual report on the site, even after adjusting the “resized image width” setting. Is there a way to get bigger pictures from the mobile tool? The photos are important for us in the project.
Thanks again.
FYI, Ushahidi iOS 1.3 is now available on the App Store:
Add Map now detects deployments near you
Fixed bug with deployment URLs with sub-directories
Fixed problem pasting URL into Add Map dialog
http://bit.ly/ushahidi_ios_app
Hi Dale, I found another little bug. I updated/changed the categories on my site, but the mobile version simply added the new categories, without removing the old deleted ones. So I have a bunch of unwanted categories in my mobile tool.
Thanks.
Mark, good catch!
I’ll build in a fix for stale categories in the next version.
I’ll also investigate the photo resize issue, hopefully can find a better algorithm.
Dale this is fantastic. I’m using it for a humanitarian simulation exercise this weekend in the US. Is there a way to lock in a zoom location? It would be great to have the students to not only enter data but to visualize in real-time their information rather than hopping over to the iphone’s web browser for our crowdmap
Dale, I noticed several updates in recent months. Unfortunately I’m still experiencing the issues with stale categories and small photos. I did see that I can turn on/off new categories but there are a couple that don’t even exist in my site anymore that continue to show up on the app. Sounds like it may just be a remnant I have to live with.
Mark, my apologizes, somehow those two features slipped through the cracks. I’ve created issues for them, and targeted for the next release.
http://dev.ushahidi.com/issues/show/2220
http://dev.ushahidi.com/issues/show/2221
Hey Mark, you’ll be happy to know that I just committed a fix for the optional photo resizing:
http://dev.ushahidi.com/issues/show/2221
It will be included in the next release.
Hi Dale- thanks for the effort. I clean installed v. 1.12 and still having these issues with categories and photos. I turned off the resizing but photos in new entries still show up on my crowdmap site at 332×248.
Defunct categories are still there even after uninstalling the app and (supposedly) dumping all data. The categories are also listed out of order so that the choices of categories and sub-categories don’t make sense.
I’ve tested all of this on two different crowdmap deployments as well, primarily https://oceanfriendlygardens.crowdmap.com/ Wonder if the categories might be related to crowdmap vs. standalone deployment.
I’m on Iphone 4, iOS 5.01 on wifi. I don’t get notices when updates are posted on this blog post, but I’m willing to help out via email if you want to hit me up. mrauscher at surfrider dot org
I tried submitting a new report to my new map (https://informatics.crowdmap.com) and I get 3 x “upload error” error popup and the report is not submitted.
I can successfully submit to http:/demo.ushahidi.com using the same app.
This is a great project and the app will be a lot more useful than forcing mobile users to use the web version of the site.
Hey Brian, thanks for reporting this, I’ve created an issue and will investigate the problem.
https://github.com/ushahidi/Ushahidi_iPhone/issues/35
i tried submitting a new report to my map (ficaficus.crowdmap.com) and i get so many times the error pop up, even from ipad, “upload error bad server response” and “upload error os dados não foram enviados por meio de post” (in Portuguese)
how can i submit a new report from iphone using the app???
Hey Carolina,
Can you try re-adding your map as https://ficaficus.crowdmap.com?
I believe the problem is related to http:// vs https://
I’ve submitted Ushahidi iOS 3.2 to the App Store which includes a fix for this problem.