Overview
Amul's 'topical' cartoons have been around since the 1970s are now an Indian icon themselves. This is a simple project that offers an easier way of browsing through the cartoon ads than the Amul site currently does.
STATUS: v2.0 iOS app is available on the iTunes App Store! >>
Background
This started with a simple iOS app that displayed Amul 'topical' cartoons over the years, and was first built over a weekend in early 2010 while I was learning Obj-C and playing with Three20. The app was downloaded way more times that I'd expected - several thousands every month and from iPhone users all around the world. However, I didnt get a chance to update it since then as I'd been caught up with several other projects.
That's until now. This is a dedication to Dr Kurien, who passed away two days ago (September 9th 2012) at the age of 90.
I've rewritten things with two components -
- a backend heroku worker that scrapes the ads off Amuls site to export a JSON dump that's easier to digest, and
- a cleaner lightweight iOS app that enables easy browsing across the years.
I'm opening up the code so that other contributors who like the Amul cartoon ads can join in to help enhance it, or possibly use this for something else.
App
The iOS app that lets you browse the cartoons, and provides a nifty picker to go back and forth across the years all the way back to 1976. The new 2.0 update has been posted to Apple and is pending review.
The app requires iOS 5.0+ and XCode 4.3+, uses ARC and Storyboards. It probably also serves as a basic working example of consuming a JSON feed, extending UITableView to build custom cells entirely using StoryBoards, and managing jumps in the navigation using a picker.
The app's repo is here: https://github.com/arg0s/amulios
Scraper
Worker task that scrapes the image and caption data off the Amul site, and dumps it in a JSON feed. Workers currently run off Heroku, and dump the feed on Amazon S3. I'm using BeautifulSoup to parse the content & work through a linked list of pages to propagate data upwards for consolidation. Since the Amul ads get updated fortnightly, it didnt make sense in creating a more complex front end for this.
The scraper's repo is located here: https://github.com/arg0s/amulet
TODO
- Improve the grainy icon, artwork and palette
- Add sharing capabilities -
ShareKitwork is pending - iPad support
Note: Amul owns the copyright to all the cartoon ads & images. This project is meant as a tribute and is not associated with them in any way. Source code is provided "as-is".