What does this mean exactly? There are three major components of any given application, be it a desktop application, mobile application, or a web-based application. These three components are the Controller, the View, and the Model. Now let’s get a more concrete idea of what each of these three components actually does within an application.

The Controller is essentially the traffic cop of the application, directing traffic to where it needs to go, figuring out which view it needs to load up, and interacting with the appropriate models. For example, when you go to login to your email on a website, the controller is going to tell the application that it needs to load the login form view. Upon attempting to login, the controller will load the model that handles logins, which will check if the username and password match what exists within the system. If successful, the controller will then pass you off to the first page you enter when logging in, such as your inbox. Once there, the inbox controller will further handle that request.

In a web-based application, the view is exactly what it sounds like: the visible interface that the user interacts with, displaying buttons, forms, and information. Generally speaking, the controller calls up the view after interacting with the model, which is what gathers the information to display in the particular view.

The Model is where data from the controller and sometimes the view is actually passed into, out of, and manipulated. Keeping in mind our last example of logging into your web-based email, the model will take the username and password given to it from the controller, check that data against the stored information in the database, and then render the view accordingly. For example, if you enter in an incorrect password, the model will tell the controller that it was incorrect, and the controller will tell the view to display an error message saying something to the effect of “Your username or password is incorrect.”

Now that you know the basic concepts of the MVC pattern, you’re probably wondering what makes it so special? Essentially, it allows for the programmer to isolate these very separate pieces of code into their own domain, which makes code maintenance and debugging much simpler than if all of these items were chunked into one massive piece. If I have a problem with an application not displaying an error message when it should, I have a very specific set of locations to look to see why this is not happening. First I would look at the “Login Controller” to see if it is telling the view to display the error. If that’s fine, I would look at the “Login Model” to see if it is passing the data back to the controller to tell it that it needs to show an error. Then if that’s correct, the last place it could be happening would be in the “Login View.”

Using this development pattern allows for very easy maintenance, as well as independent development of pieces of the same system by different programmers, which makes for quick turnover of applications all while still maintaining a very high standard of quality for the application.

So while we’re sitting around twiddling our thumbs, not being able to really use anything on Google Plus via the mobile app on Safari, we wait patiently. Alternatively, we fire up our desktops or laptops and use it normally, which I’m sure is what the great majority of us iPhone users have had to do. Personally, I use my laptop or desktop as little as possible. I bought an iPhone because I liked the fact that I could browse the web and use many services with it. Therein lies the rub—while the Google team have done a fantastic job of developing their mobile version of Google Plus, it lacks in some key features like being able to edit your profile, being able to manage albums, or even upload a photo to an album. The full desktop version of Google Plus on Safari in iOS4x is almost impossible to use to update your profile or…really use at all, as there are far too many UI issues with it to even bother to use it over the mobile version.

So that’s the bridge I’m hoping to help some people cross today (though I can’t help much with not being able to edit your profile). I’ve found a neat way to work around having absolutely no way to upload photos via mobile. It seems the Google Plus team figured it’d be a great idea to sync your Picasa albums automatically to your Google Plus albums. Great! It also just so happens, there are many already-approved iPhone apps available in the app store to manage and upload your photos to Picasa.

I was never a user of Picasa, so I had to create an account using my existing Google account, but that was really no big deal. The app I’m using in this example is “MyPics – Picasa Web Albums Manager”, and is available for $2.99. I assume there are other free apps that do the same thing, but this is the one that I got, so this is the one that I know how to work with!

It’s really quite easy. When you’re out on the go, and want to share a picture you just took, you just use MyPics to create a new album (or use an existing one), add a photo from your phone’s camera roll, and add it to the upload queue. When you’re done adding images to the upload queue, you can just simply tap the upload button in the app, and it will automatically add these photos to your Picasa albums, and thereby adding them to your Google Plus albums as well!

The app also allows you to add captions to photos quite easily, and manages to save all of the EXIF data along with each image. There is even a way to manage the image’s Google Plus privacy settings, however it is not as intuitive as Google Plus itself. Basically each image (or an entire album) can be set to public or private. There is no way to manage which circles can see it and which can’t, because obviously this is a Picasa album manager—but it just so happens that Google Plus automatically pulls these albums for you.

So there you have it, it’s all quite simple really, and right now it’s basically all we have available to us if we want to add photos to our Google Plus accounts while on the go. Now I will politely and patiently keep twiddling my thumbs waiting for Apple to stop being such meanies and approve the G+ app!