This is my first iOS project I worked on using Objective-C. This app fetches articles from n4g.com and views them in a mobile friendly format. N4G doesn’t have a mobile layout yet and so I figured I could build an app that used the n4g RESTful API that I have written before.

The mobile app displays the first 10 articles listed in the n4g homepage. When a user taps on an article to view it, the app sends the backend a request for the article. The mobile app receives the article in an HTML encoded format which is then passed to a UIWebView where it can be properly displayed.

The HTML that was encoded contains a ‘read-mode’ version of the article that is just stripped down to the article title and body. The way I achieve this is I send a request to Readabiltys API to parse the article and receive a stripped down version of the article with only the article title and body. This takes some time on Readabilitys end so I had the backend cache articles that are requested from the mobile app and all the articles one page ahead of the current page the user is browsing in the app.

n4g_ios