TourneyCentral.com announced today that the web sites that deliver real-time information about youth soccer tournaments are 100% compatible with iPhone. The mobile devices ship with MacOS X’s Safari web browser and allows the user to view the full web site instead of a specially formatted one as used by other popular so-called smart phones such as Blackberry and Treo.
“We have always developed on the the MacOS platform,” says Gerard McLean, president and CEO of Rivershark, Inc., TourneyCentral’s parent company. “The Safari web browser is a standards-compliant platform and it makes sense to make sure our web-based application reaches as many people as possible without requiring they use any particular web browser.” McLean adds that the display is adjusted to make sure the software also works on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Since it began development in 1998, TourneyCentral has used Mac-based software to design the web-based interface of its web site as well as organize, correct and catalog photos quickly for the tournament web sites using AppleScript, an Apple software product designed to automate repetitive tasks. With the release of MacOS X and the UNIX underpinnings, development was accelerated even more as programmers were able to test in a UNIX/MySQL environment locally on an Xserve, Apple’s server platform, before moving the software to the production-ready servers.
“What this really means for tournament directors,” McLean adds, “is that they will be able to manage their web site in real-time at the venues or en route without worrying about whether or not they have an Internet connection.” Since TourneyCentral sites have web-based scoring and news modules, including email broadcast, a tournament director is now always in touch with the guest teams.
For more information about Apple’s iPhone, visit Apple.com