My XBL Achievements iPhone Web App
// January 30th, 2009 // 7 Comments » // General, Technology, Video Games
So part of my new years resolution was to build an iPhone version of my XBox Live Achievement site that you could update the achievements you’ve unlocked, as well as view whatever achievements you’d like from the games you’ve played. Sadly, this data can’t be achieved through any Xbox Live API, so there is the whole thing where you have to specifically tell my system what games you are playing…and if a game you’ve played hasn’t been entered by myself yet, it won’t show up at all. Boo on that. But, if there are any games that you would like me to add, I’ll gladly get the achievements added for it!
Listen to me talking like the system is 100% ready for launch — sadly, it is not…yet. And it will only be available to Myself, Alicia, Jason, Megan H. Daryl, Brandon, and Megzirra (that’s how I’ve kept the 2 Megan’s seperated in my database lol). Anyway, I know that the system isn’t quite ready yet, but the desire to work on an iPhone web app was killing me, so I decided to start it anyway. That task was actually a lot easier than the main site, so it went along pretty quickly. I’ve taken some screens for you to see it, and no it’s not all fancy AJAX and stuff, but I think it turned out pretty nice. If there are any other features you think need to be implemented, please give me your feedback.
Keep in mind, the whole point of this lil web app is to allow you to have a “checklist” of a game’s achievements in front of you while you’re playing the game.
Ok, on to the screen shots.
This is the first screen you come to after you log in, it's the full list of all the games you have marked that you are playing. If no games are showing up in this list, just click on "Manage Your Games" to see the whole list of any game I have in my system (screens for this are a few images down).
Once you click a game, you're taken to the list of achievements for that game. When you unlock an achievement, just tap on the gray achievement point box on the right of that achievement to mark it as unlocked.
Once you've unlocked an achievement, they will go to the bottom of the page, with a different style applied to them to stand out from the rest of the achievements in your list. And if you accidentally clicked an achievement you didn't have, just scroll down to the bottom and click on the green box to turn it back into an achievement you haven't unlocked yet.
I have also given a way to toggle between only seeing achievements that are for "Online" and "Offline" or for seeing All Achievements for a game. Notice the circled area, when under the Online Setting, it shows that there are 14 achievements, and I've unlocked 50 out of the 140 achievement points available in online play.
Same thing goes for the Offline Setting. It shows the amount of points you've gotten out of the total offline achievements for that game.
Up above, I mentioned that once you log in, if there are no games showing up in your list, or if you're looking for a specific game that isn't appearing in that list, you can go to Manage games. When you click the link to manage games it takes you to a list of every game that's in my system. Just click on a game's title, and then you can click the checkbox on the right of that game to toggle it on/off. Once you "Return to Your Game List", that/those games will show up in your list. Might be a little confusing (I'm in no way the best person to explain things...), but since I can't pull from the XBL API, this is the only way I can do this : ( Anyway, the next 2 screens show the toggling checkbox.
Unchecked, this game isn't showing up in your list
Checked, and now it's showing up in your list.
