When we start working with a new customer, the first thing we often do is a small prototype project that is very limited in scope, time and budget. It’s a low risk way to prove the concept, the technology, and our expertise. Once we get this initial project successfully under our belts, the road ahead becomes more clear.

The project we’re doing for Scott Larson from Stadium Apps is just that. We’re prototyping one specific use case – the ability to search nearby concessions and merchandise while you are at the stadium. It will serve two primary purposes:

• Get some of the technology pieces in place (Esri, Micello, etc)
• Have something awesome to show during presentations

Based on our conversations with Scott (and after doing some competitive research), James and I created paper sketches for the needed screens. We’re incorporating some of the best UI design practices used by popular mapping apps while taking advantage of the rich cartography capabilities that are unique to the Esri platform.

Next, James created a new XCode project and brought in components via CocoaPods: ArcGIS Runtime SDK for iOS, CocoaLumberjack, TestFlight, SWRevealViewController, etc. He then began laying out the user interface and handling transitions between screens.

Scott agreed that we should focus on designing for iOS 7 and James will be taking full advantage of the new platform features that come with it. We’ll be able to provide more technical details once iOS 7 becomes publicly available later this week.

We’re also evaluating sample data we received from Micello – a newly digitized stadium in GeoJSON and Shapefile formats. James will fire up ArcGIS for Desktop to see if he can create a nice tiled map service with Micello’s data using ArcGIS Online. If he runs into any obstacles, we have a backup plan ready to go: an ace GIS analyst friend who can digitize a stadium for us in a jiffy.

But a story without any pictures is kinda boring… right? Soon we’ll have a few screens that we can share, to show you the work in progress. Stay tuned…

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