Living the iLife

Local app developers program new
Montrealspecific uses for your iPhone

iDIY: Montreal metro and Pull This Finger

by ERIK LEIJON

When Apple finally released the flashy iPhone in 2008 to a smartphone-impoverished Canada, one wondered just how our collective lives would be enriched by the iPhone’s do-it-yourself software developer kit (SDK). The kit allows anyone with programming knowledge to make their own iPhone application for the masses, and thus far locals and non-locals alike have put it to good use: from trip planning and finding SAQs to modernizing classic toilet humour.

If the future sounds appealing, then please pull Randy Laporte’s finger. Along with two Web developer friends, Laporte founded Oneapp, a Montreal-based company that deals solely in creating iPhone applications. Their first project was Pull This Finger, which as one would expect takes the well-known “pull my finger” fart joke to technologically advanced heights by allowing users to pull the iPhone towards them and reap all the crude benefits of the smartphone’s motion sensing capabilities. It may seem like an absurd first foray into the already competitive iPhone app industry—over 35,000 apps have been released worldwide and over one billion apps have been downloaded—but Pull This Finger proved to be a hit, farting its way onto 91,000 iPhones.

“We were astonished,” says Laporte, who previously worked in Web-based solutions. “That application was a test app meant to see if it would be feasible to start a company that only does iPhone apps.”

The company also has an app designed for users who send pictures called Greet Cards, and that type of practical application was likely what Apple had in mind when they opened their prize pig to any programmer with spare time and a dream. Most of the content isn’t created by the programmers, but rather the apps are designed to present already available info in a convenient manner, such as the public transport trip planner Montreal Metro and liquor store locator SAQ Finder.

“Let’s say the Mirror wanted to do an app posting their most recent listings or articles,” theorizes Laporte. “All that information is already on the Web site, so the app would be designed to go and get the latest information from your server and repost it in the application.”

Toronto-based software developer Hussain Saleem created My Montreal Traffic, an app that uses Transport Québec cameras and maps to help Montreal motorists plan their commutes. “The app takes the public info that you can get from Transports Québec, pulls it and refreshes it,” says Saleem. Although using publicly available resources, Saleem was aware of previous notices given out to other developers about apps pulling too much info and eating into the bandwidth of these organizational Web sites. Image-conscious organizations have taken issue with these rogue iPhone apps in the past, including the STM last year begrudgingly acknowledging Montrealer Ian Cloutier’s highly successful app that streamlined metro and bus schedules called STM Mobile.

Laporte and Oneapp also discovered first-hand that Apple still has a final say in what ends up on their phones, as another joke app they had invented entitled Crack—where the iPhone’s screen pretends to have a crack running through it—was rejected. Even Pull This Finger had a shaky birth, as Laporte found out during its development that a similar app had been turned down.

“There was an uproar among users [concerning the rejection of the first ‘farting’ app],” he says. “Why is Apple controlling what people want, are they being Big Brother? It’s their right. I guess they felt, at that time, they didn’t want it to tarnish their very white, very pure kind of marketing.”