RunPee is an Adobe AIR mobile application that runs on both Android and iOS devices. Read more: What is Adobe AIR? ( a guide for potential clients )
You can download the RunPee app – FREE – from the following marketplaces: iTunes – Android – Amazon – nook. Or visit the RunPee.com website to learn more about the app and it’s origins.
Because of the funny, yet useful, nature of the app it gets a lot of media attention all on its own. I’m very pleased to see how many people blog, tweet and post Facebook updates that tell me that RunPee is their favorite app and how well made it is. I put a lot of work into making it as useful and easy to use as possible.
The RunPee app is more complex than the simple idea that the app represents – letting people know the best time to run and pee during a movie without missing anything. Here is a quick breakdown of what’s happening under the RunPee hood.
Local Storage
I can’t assume that users will have access to a data connection inside a theater. Therefor the app is built to work offline. The entire list of movies is stored on the device – about 50k total. Each time someone starts up the app it checks for updates – if possible. When someone selects a movie it requests the peetimes from the database and then stores those locally as well. That way if the user goes into the theater and loses their data connection they can still use the app.
Admin
What you see in the RunPee app is only half of the equation. There is also a robust administrative app – browser based – that I use to update the database. It gives me full control to and new movies and peetimes and also edit anything I need to at any time.
ItemRenderers
The ItemRenderer for the movies is optimized to perform smoothly on mobile devices. That is important because the list can be quite large and users will very likely be scrolling through the list. However the ItemRenderer is a little more complex than normal because it can represent two different sets of data instead of just one. You can see in the list that movies are broken up by the month they came out or by the first letter of the movie title. That little separator uses the same ItemRenderer as the movie info does.
Data Services
The RunPee app also provides users with access to RottenTomatoes ratings, tweets about specific movies, movie trailers from youTube, and there’s more to come. While none of these are overly complex to add to an app it does represent the full range of connection options that are possible with Actionscript.
