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?
If your life dream has been to make great Web applications for the iPhone, you’ll like this. Apple has just released the iPhone Web Developers Guide. I’ll be pouring over it today and will get back to you.
So I’ve had the Apple iPhone for a few days now. I’ve really started to put it through its paces. Here are some more thoughts…
The User Interface
It’s just so damn responsive. When you touch something, it does something. It’s the way you expect a touch screen to work. Go into an Apple or AT&T store today and play withit. You’ll be blown away. This is good because the touch screen is so central to the way the who iPhone works.
Now into some things I don’t like about the phone…
You can’t view message threads. This is annoying. I don’t want to have to scroll super far to see where a message started.
Google Maps
It seems like there should be some way for me to put in where my default location is and then it will have a base location to start looking for stuff. Right now, if I look in there for sushi, it will search the whole country. This isn’t helpful.
If you get directions from one spot to another and then decided to jump to another application and then come back to the directions, the directions you originally got will be gone. It’d be nice if it prompted me and asked if I wanted to get rid of my current directions set.
Calendar
It doesn’t have support for the different calendar types which you can in iCal. For example, right now I have all of my church events separated out onto a different calendar than my geek events. On the iPhone, they all look the same.
Photos
The iPhone would be so so so much better if there was some way to send pictures right from the phone to Flickr. I realize they probably want us to use iPhoto for everything related to photos but… yeah. I hope a Flickr exporter is one of the first third-party apps that get built when Apple opens the iPhone up.
Multi-tasking
I’ve had some problems with asking the phone to multi-task. I’ll be listening to music and surfing the Web and all of a sudden the music just stops. It’s very weird.
Conclusion
Fortunate for all of us, most of the problems i’ve had with it are software issues. It’s something that can be fixed with an update. I wonder when Apple is going to release the first round of patches?
The first thing I thought about when the iPhone came out was, how can I develop kick ass Web applications for it?
First, you have to figure out how to take advantage of the great features that the iPhone has to offer.
Well there happens to be a community of people who are hashing out development for the iPhone. Check out the iPhoneWebDev Google Group.
Next weekend (July 6-8th) San Francisco is holding an iPhoneDevCamp.
Would there be interest to do an East coast iPhoneDevCamp in Washington DC? We could make a hot Web application.
Drop me a comment.
