Where is the PoodLL Mobile App?

In the release a few days ago we added some settings for controlling the PoodLL mobile app. You might be wondering what is happening with that. The PoodLL mobile app has been in development for several months now. The chief developer on that is Jerome Mouneyrac, formerly at Moodle HQ. The iOS app will be released first, and then shortly after we hope to release the Android version.

Dealing with Rejection

We initially submitted the app to the Apple app store  about 3 months ago. But Apple were unhappy with it, because of the way it was designed to work. We had designed it so that the app would launch from within a Moodle site, when the “record” button was tapped. Apple however wanted it to work when opened from the icon on the device home screen. We argued that the recordings needed to arrive within certain pages and activities in Moodle, e.g to be submitted as quiz responses or assignment submissions. Asking users to login to Moodle from the app, and somehow tell the app where in Moodle to store the recording, was going to be a terrible user experience. But Apple was resolute that it had to work when launched from the home screen.

Back to the Drawing Board

We tossed around a few ideas about how to deal with this. The fastest way was to have the user register their Moodle site url and credentials and allow them to record files and post them to their private files area. And other variations on this. Meanwhile we would still keep our “launch from within Moodle” functionality. But we were not happy about building in bogus functionality that in reality would hardly ever be used, just to get past the scrutineers.

So we gave it some more thought. The PoodLL mobile app posts the recorded file to Amazon S3 where we convert it to mp4 or mp3 and then it gets passed back to Moodle. So we decided to make the PoodLL mobile app a general audio/video recorder for Amazon S3. This has general functionality as well as functionality for Moodle users, and we are confident that Apple will not have a problem with it. So that is what we are building, and it is coming along well. In fact we submitted it to Apple again just a few hours ago ..

It looks a bit like this …