Origins
Aptcast started as an Internet Listing Service (ILS) for apartment communities. The primary goal of the project was to create a native iOS and Android app that could be white labelled for individual property management companies for their portfolios.
The ILS
The iOS version Aptcast was officially released at NAA 2015 in Las Vegas, NV. It was implemented in Swift with Objective-C and C for certain components. The use of C for this project was to improve performance and reduce memory consumption on mobile devices.
The key feature of the app was generating a heat-map overlay for the Google Maps iOS SDK that displayed the price differences between various zip codes. This required writing a custom GeoJSON parser that could generate the appropriate polygons that would then be applied to the map. To reduce memory requirements and improve rendering performance, several vertex processing algorithms were used to decrease the number of vertices required to render the polygon on the map.
Residents
After receiving feedback from several of our customers, development of the Aptcast ILS was discontinued in favor of pursuing a new line of Aptcast apps that were geared towards residents of apartment communities. These new Aptcast Resident apps were implemented with Ionic and Cordova and designed to be white labeled for individual communities.
My role in Aptcast
My role in these projects varied. For the ILS version of Aptcast, I was the principal engineer on implementing both the app and the REST APIs that it was interacting with. The Aptcast REST APIs were implemented using Go, Python, and Amazon Web Services infrastructure.
For the resident apps, I worked on the REST APIs and supervised the team of developers and designers that were implementing the Ionic apps.