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 hardest part of setting up a conference is getting the right venue and then locking in the date accordingly.
In order to get the best venue possible for BarCampWashingtonDC, we have tentatively changed (98% permanently) the event date to August 10th (opening party) and August 11th (conference sessions).
We hope to announce the venue soon. *crosses fingers and toes* It’s just tough to find the right spot to house 100 geeks that has free wifi and outlets.
We have also launched an event Web site…. check it out at:
http://barcampdc.org/
Thanks to Jason and his crew for their HTML/CSS wizardy in doing the site.
The BarCampWashingtonDC site also has a paypal account. If you wanna sponsor the event, feel free to drop in some lovin’. We accept donations up to $250.
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.
So I’ve sitting around the coffee shop this morning trying to figure out how to develop an application that looked hot on an iPhone. I have a 320 pixel width screen to work with.
On the iPhone version of Safari, it’s designed to show Web sites that are made for your desktop.
If you tell the CSS to make the width of your site only 320 pixels, it will look all zoomed out, like as if you were viewing a Web site that was 1200 pixels wide.
You have to constrain the viewport in a meta tag. Like…
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=320″ />
With this, your site will only take up the 320 pixels of width that are available on the iPhone. Check out my iPhone screen size test page.
I found this by scouring the code of hahlo.com (the iPhone friendly twitter app.)
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 