Mihai Fischer

ClujBike Map started as an experiment on how custom software can improve a process.As the name suggests, the App is a map referring to the bike sharing stations around Cluj. The App is made to improve the user experience. I want to stress out the fact that ClujBike Map is a separate entity from the ClujBike project and it was created only to help it. Moreover, the App is free of charge.

At this moment there is a variety of web services to which you can hook up to obtain useful data. For example we have the Twitter API for tweets, we have the Instagram API for images or in the particular case of this article, the Foursquare API for venues and locations. Of course you could connect to these, using the out of the box NSURLRequest or a library like AFNetworking, but you would have to write a lot of boiler plate code for parsing and mapping the response JSON. Here comes into role RestKit to help you with some of these things, and I’ll show you just how in the next few lines.

In the last couple of years, the whole mobile world, and we’re talking big names: Android, iOS, Windows, adopted the concept of flat design. The purpose is the same: offer a better experience to the user through the use of clean understandable user interfaces. With iOS 7, Apple introduced flat design to its operating system along with some new user experience concepts like the idea of “always know where you are” for a better access to different types of data. One of the best examples is the Notification Center,