Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp’s Web 2.0 blog

So yeah… the new version of Google Reader for the iPhone (http://www.google.com/reader/i/) is 10,000x better then the old one.  This makes me SUPER happy because I basically live off of Google Reader.

iPhone users, check it out and tell me what you think.

At WidgetDevCamp, I floated the idea of doing a iPhone SDK Dev Camp. Seems like there was some interest for it then.

Now that the Apple iPhone SDK is out, I’ve already gotten a few folks asking about it. One of the reasons I thought this would be cool is because it’s so new we’d all be starting at the same place.

Drop me a comment if you’d wanna attend this event.

On Friday, I was walking out the door on my way to work and I realized that I hadn’t seen this week’s episode of LOST yet.  I stopped what I was doing ran over to my computer, bought LOST on Apple iTunes, and waited 15 minutes as it downloaded.  I then put it on my iPhone and went about my merry way.

Seems like things just aren’t where they need to be.

I’d get a season pass to LOST on iTunes but I only use laptops and I’m always running out of space on my hard drives.

I want some type of easy media server type of solution that will hold all of my media but when I sync my laptop and my iPhone I can pull media off of the server and put it on my iPhone.

It’d also be nice if there was a way to buy TV shows on the fly from the iPhone so that while I was walking to the subway it could have been downloading.  It’d also be nice if my phone could pull TV shows off of my media server.  I know with current cellular technology this isn’t possible but it’d be nice.

So it seems like everyone and their brother is talking about the Amazon Kindle E-Book reader.  Well, I’m not a fan yet.

1. It’s something else that I have to carry.  Do I wanna carry one more device?
2. It’s expensive.  It’s $400 (well $399).   Is carrying paper books with you that much of a problem?  A big enough problem that it’d be worth $400.
3. If I lose a hardback book, I’ve lost $25.  If I lose the Kindle, I’ve lost $400. (This is speaking from someone who was mugged and got his iPhone stolen.)

I think the future of e-books is the Apple iPhone.  It’s something more people already have.  It’s the most popular device with the biggest screen.  It has a good battery.

The Apple iPhone is also launching it’s SDK in February.  Who’s going to write the e-book reader app come February?

One of my favorite new Apple iPhone apps is Meenster (http://www.meenster.com). You can select your Washington, DC Metro Line (Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, or Green). You then select your station. It will tell you how much time you have before the next train moving in each direction.

If you’re at the pub grabbing a drink, you can check Meenster. If it says the next train isn’t coming for 20 minutes, you have time to grab a quick drink. It’s super convenient.

It’s built with Joe Hewitt’s iUI.

As I had mentioned before,  there is a pretty vibrant community of developers who are excited about making Web applications for the Apple iPhone.  This is awesome.

These applications are great but I have to admit that they can never replace actual applications.  iPhone applications just don’t have the same responsiveness and feel that actual applications do.  Maybe it’s just that EDGE and WiFi in my area are just not snappy enough.

It’s not that the Web apps can’t work.  It’s just that they aren’t good enough.  If I need information from an application right now, I don’t wanna wait that little bit of time for it to load.  I want the information right now.  If I’m surfing on my phone because I’m waiting for someone, that’s different.  I’ll wait the extra time.

Even with the release of Blue Flavor’s Leaflets, which gives all of these applications a really great streamlined design and ui on the iPhone,  it just feels clunky and not as responsive as i’d want it.

Steve Jobs, when will people be able to develop applications that are running off of the client side and not loaded completely over the Web?  Tell me now.

Kevin Rose and the crew at Digg.com have just launched an iPhone optimized version of their site (http://www.digg.com/iphone). It’s really really cool.

It’s one of many sites that take advantage of Joe Hewitt’s iPhone User Interface template. This means that it uses the inherent interactions found in the iPhone.

It only shows the recently popular stories but, unlike Digg River, when you click on a story you get to see the story description and the top 5 comments. It looks really nice.

They did the whole site in 48 hours. Kudos to them!

This gives me a few ideas for my own iPhone optimized apps.

When you live in Washington DC, you go out to eat a lot.  There are so many great restaurants and eateries.  Inevitably,  the dinner bill comes and everyone sits around trying to figure out how much tip they should add on.

The problem is now solved with my iPhone.  With the Web app Tipr (http://www.tipr.mobi), you just enter the dollar amount, the percentage of tip you want to give, and it will say how much tip you should pay.   This is all done in an iPhone optimized environment.

I will be using this app.

A big community of developers are starting to form around the idea of developing Web applications for the iPhone. There was even iPhoneDevCamp last weekend.

One of the best apps that i’ve seen come out for the iPhone is Movies.app (http://www.moviesapp.com). It’s great for looking up movie times at your local theaters. The whole application uses the inherent iPhone interactions really well.

You can search for listings either by movie or by theater.

Once you’ve found the movie of interest, beyond seeing just the times, you take a link to the movie trailer or get a map to the movie theater, using the iPhones Google Maps application.

It’s pretty slick and I’ll probably use it a lot.

In Washington DC, we aren’t lucky enough to have city wide wireless Internet.  So… I thought i’d try and shut off the WiFi on my iPhone and see what happened.

It dramatically increased the battery life on my phone.  This wasn’t a very scientific study but just an observation that I had today.

Have you had similar experiences?  Any iPhone tips you wanna share?