Campaign Monitor from within your Cocoa app

This is the first of my ‘Giving back’ posts. The idea is that I’ll give something back to this wonderful Cocoa coding community at least once every couple of weeks. I mean, what’s the point of going indie if I can’t do what I want once in a while? :)

Of all the marketing avenues I continue to investigate and read about, mailing lists seem to be something that the rest of you recommend time and again. I missed a few boats when I launched Hyperspaces — were I to do the launch over again, I’d make sure that a mailing list was in place and easy to join from my website and within my app. I’ve always admired the way the Panic apps ask you to join their mailing list the first time you start them — it’s simple and unobtrusive.

As part of my work toward future versions of Hyperspaces, I’m looking to do the same. I’m still deciding which mailing list package/​provider I will use in the end, so please don’t take this as a “this is what The CocoaBots use” post, however I did meet the Campaign Monitor guys at Web Directions South 09, and their product has a nice web service API. So I put together a small example project that will sign a user up to your Campaign Monitor mailing list from directly within your app.

The code is heavily inspired by Uli’s UKCrashReporter and Wolf’s JRFeedbackProvider projects (this is like a mutant offspring of the two). I may not end up using it in my apps, but hopefully someone else finds it useful.

The GitHub project is at http://​github​.com/​t​o​n​y​a​r​n​o​l​d​/​C​B​M​a​i​l​i​n​g​L​i​s​t​S​ignup, and the code is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.