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Massively looks at Capsuleer 2.0, an iPhone app for EVE Online
The newest generation of smartphones has begun to deliver on the ideal of having continual access to your data on the go with persistent web connections. As such, the iPhone is becoming ubiquitous, helped no doubt by its ease of use and the ever-growing number of apps available to users. In the relatively short time the iPhone has existed, it's already begun to have an impact on the gaming world. Given how stat-centric massively multiplayer online titles are, it was inevitable that there would be some steps made towards a marriage between the iPhone and our games; some developers are creating iPhone apps that extend certain aspects of MMOs beyond the game client.This can be especially useful with a game like EVE Online, where players typically have a number of things going on, even while they're not logged in to play. While the EVE iPhone apps don't act as game clients, players can, for instance, check in on the skill progression of their characters, check their wallet balances as market transactions and contract sales take place while away from the client, and in general keep tabs on their virtual involvements in New Eden. Capsuleer 2.0 is one such iPhone and iPod touch app for EVE Online that aims to be a portal into New Eden for whenever players are away from their computers and on the go; in some respects, it's a persistent real-world analog to EVE's in-game Neocom used to keep tabs on your characters. Capsuleer 2.0 was approved by Apple just this week, so Massively caught up with its two creators to find out more about what they've been up to. Marcus Dickinson is known in EVE as Roc Wieler and is likely a familiar name to many players from his Roc's Ramblings blog. The other half of the Capsuleer duo is Chris Whiteford (PyjamaSam in EVE Online), and they were both kind enough to take some time out to speak with us about their work on Capsuleer as well as their plans for its future. Read on for Massively's Capsuleer interview and our impressions of the app in a brief visual tour.%Gallery-49697%
Massively looks at Capsuleer 2.0, an iPhone app for EVE Online part 2
I was dreading having to manually enter that long API string linked to my EVE account, but Capsuleer's system made it quite easy. Can you tell me about the Import Control System?Roc: The Import Control System was Sam's brainchild. Nobody wants to manually enter that string, myself included, but I also don't like applications "scraping" my game login data from the EVE Online website. The entire point of an API is to be able to access it without using your game login credentials. Since the iPhone doesn't do copy/paste (prior to OS 3.0), Sam came up with this method for effortlessly and securely importing your data to your device.Sam: As Roc said, the API is all about security. CCP introduced it so that 3rd party applications didn't need your username and password anymore. It's a secure and simple way to provide access to a limited subset of data without exposing the credentials needed to log into your account. My initial prototype had you typing in the big long API key, and man I don't think I got it right more than twice in a row. I knew that we needed a better alternative. That's when I came up with the Import Control System. We have been foiled a bit by a few email clients that don't like the evechar:// url syntax that we use (they try to validate it and can't because they don't recognize the prefix), but with 2.0 we have an alternative http:// based url that can be used as well, so that should hopefully clear up the issues that people ran into.
