If you're developing an iPhone application for yourself or for a client, devkits.net can save you weeks of development time. We provide self-contained, fully documented development kits to kick-start your development. All of our Kits have been fully tested in our own commercial software projects, and come with sample applications to demonstrate the Kits in action.

devkits.net is created and managed by Agant Ltd., developers of the UK National Rail Enquiries application for iPhone and iPod Touch.

If your iPhone app needs to retrieve content from an external server, you need XML Kit. It's an industrial-strength HTML / XML retriever, cleaner and formatter for iPhone developers. It can retrieve any HTML or XML source from any location via SOAP, HTTP GET or POST, and can tidy and transform the retrieved source via XSLT into your own custom XML.

Unlike Mac OS X, the iPhone OS does not have built-in XML foundation classes such as NSXMLDocument. This makes it very difficult to tidy and validate an XML document, or to transform it via XSLT. XML Kit makes all of this possible for any retrieved HTML and XML.

XML Kit gives you the following features out of the box:

• Asynchronous HTML / XML retrieval
  • fire multiple asynchronous retrieval queries
  • trigger timed reloads for server-side processing waits
  • hook into custom delegate calls to receive notification when retrieval has failed or succeeded
• SOAP support
  • retrieve SOAP queries via standard web services
• HTMLTidy support
  • use the HTMLTidy library found on every iPhone to tidy and format your retrieved code
  • convert untidy HTML into standards-compliant XHTML for post-processing via XSLT or your own custom processing
  • remove control characters to ensure valid XML
• XSLT support
  • transform your retrieved XML via XSLT 1.0, using the libxslt library found on every iPhone
  • create XHTML or XML output via your own custom XSLT transformations
  • pass in your own XSLT parameters
• Apple plist support
  • transform your retrieved XML into Apple's native plist format, and convert it to CoreFoundation NSNumber, NSString and NSData objects for direct manipulation within your application
• Flexible and extensible
  • XML-based template definitions for easy set-up and customisation
  • build retrieval chains to download subsequent files based on the contents of the previous file
  • fully sub-classable to create your own HTML / XML retrieval classes
  • custom error reporting for network problems and failed downloads / failed processing
  • create custom user-agent strings, including OS version and model details

To find out more about costs and licensing for XML Kit, or to see XML Kit in action, please contact Dave Addey at contactus@agant.com.

Location Kit brings you the GPS and Core Location engine from our top 3 iPhone travel application, National Rail Enquiries for iPhone. Location Kit's key feature is super-fast SQL sorting by distance from a known location - the result of many weeks of optimisation and research.

If you want to find the nearest anything to a user's iPhone, or take advantage of any location-based database, then Location Kit is for you.

Location Kit gives you the following features out of the box:

• Incredibly fast SQL sorting by distance
  • takes 0.12 seconds to to find the nearest 20 locations to a given latitude and longitude, sorted by distance, from a database of 2,865 locations, on an iPhone 3G
  • specify a maximum number of results to return
  • cache search results for lookup speed
  • specify a typical radius of search to increase lookup speed further
• Guaranteed-nearest location
  • use the iPhone's GPS horizontal accuracy to deduce if one location from a database of thousands is definitively your nearest location
  • custom error reporting for searches with old, inaccurate or imprecise current locations
• Core Location extensions
  • find the bearing in radians from one CLLocation to another
  • find the location a specified distance away from a known location along a known bearing
  • find the location a certain distance between two known locations

To find out more about costs and licensing for Location Kit, or to see Location Kit in action, please contact Dave Addey at contactus@agant.com.

We are always interested in taking on custom iPhone, iPod Touch and Mac OS development projects. If you would like to contact Agant about a future development opportunity, please contact us via email at contactus@agant.com.