TEDxTehran’s Open-source app for all the TEDx’es around the globe!

Introduction

In line with the spirit of “Ideas Worth Spreading,” TEDxTehran decided to open-source its mobile app code source for all the TEDx’es around the globe.

Fellow TEDx organizers can now build their mobile app for the iOS & Android platforms and prepare it to share with their audience in the most customized way.

This post will discuss how we came up with starting the open-source project, its infrastructure, and how to use it.

Why did we decide to open-source the application?

We know how hard and time-consuming it is to find both iOS & Android developers to code an app voluntarily with a powerful back-end which can be hard to be delivered at the right time with high quality.

You may first design the project’s UI & UX, design its infrastructure and then start the development process, which can take a lot of time, from months to a year. Some non-native ways to implement mobile apps (such as React Native or Xamarin), which we don’t believe will deliver the best result for our audience at TEDxTehran.

According to Clearbridge Mobile, developing apps in the native process has the five key benefits below, which convinces us to stay on the native approach:

1. Native Apps Have The Best Performance
2. Native Apps Are More Secure
3. Native Apps Are More Interactive And Intuitive
4. Native Apps Allow Developers To Access The Full Feature Set Of Devices
5. Native App Development Tends To Have Fewer Bugs During Development

We love our community, so we use all opportunities ahead to help other TEDx organizers improve their event experience. Open-source code is publicly accessible, that is why TEDx organizers can efficiently study it as they learn to make better apps or even fork it to customize and improve the code and publish their apps in just a few weeks.

We’ve tried our best to prepare this environment for you and your team to build your app as quickly as it can be.

What features does it have?

After organizing successful events for more than eight years, we had developed several apps for our audience throughout these years. We’ve changed our user experience, implemented what we thought will be best for our audience, and used their feedback to improve several parts of the app.

We think it has reached a stable status and decided to share it with all TEDx organizers around the globe.

The current version has five parts.

1. The main tab contains a summary of the latest event, including the cover photo, the date and time, the location, the map link, the sponsor button, a separate segment for speakers, and timetable of the event, etc.
2. The talks tab, which contains all the talks separated by events in a horizontal view that has a detailed view containing a video player, title and description, and a related talks row (with the power of machine learning).
3. The gallery tab that contains photos from all events is filtered by events. Each event has a cover photo, and in the detail view, they can be as many as photos an event has (with an ability to zoom in each picture).
4. A news tab that contains all the latest news by event or sponsors for our audience throughout an event or year.
5. An online networking feature in the development process will enable your TEDx event audience to engage throughout the year with the power of AI and gamification (we will discuss this feature in our upcoming blog soon).

You can download and test our current Android application via Google Play.

How to use it?

To get started and have your app, please visit our GitHub organization to find separate repositories for the back-end, iOS, and Android projects, and start building your app.

There is smooth documentation about running and customizing your application in each of the mentioned platforms in their GitHub repository readme file.

If you want to test the user view of the app, you can also use our demo server as the backend.

In the end, since the purpose of open-source software is to grow by peers’ contribution, we welcome all of you to contribute to this project to make this app better, faster, and more exciting. Please support us by starring us on GitHub and sharing this blog post and our GitHub repositories with your fellow TEDx communities.

Written by: Tadeh Alexani, TEDxTehran Technology Director

Edited & Published by Asal Ghamari 

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