Life With Alacrity

iPhoneDevCamp and Hack-a-Thon

I feel privileged and honored to have been part of the iPhoneDevCamp this last weekend. Over 380 iPhone developers came out to the Adobe Campus in San Francisco to help each other make the best possible web pages and webapps for the iPhone.

I was the keynote speaker on Saturday and Master of Ceremonies for the MacHack-style Hack-a-Thon Demo on Sunday.

At the Hack-a-Thon almost 50 iPhone web applications were demonstrated to an enthusiastic audience. Take a look at Tilt, a game that takes advantage of the iPhone's motion sensor, PickleView, which is a same-time live baseball game enhancer, and The Pool, an attractive social game of water droplets hitting a pool. What is remarkable about these applications is not just the quality, but that each of them was written over just the weekend by a small team of 3-4 people who hadn't met each other before Friday!

Prizes were awarded after the Hack-a-Thon based on the spirit of openness, contribution, sharing, and participation. Prizes included 3 iPhones and some very expensive Adobe software. In particular Joe Hewitt, of Firebug fame, was honored for his positive contributions, generous spirit, and wonderful iPhone UI example code. During the demonstrations, more than one person praised Joe, saying that his assistance, his code, or his debugger made their apps possible. Personally, I think about one-third of the web apps presented used some of his code.

Building on my experience with the same-time collaboration tool SynchroEdit, and the Skotos web-based games, I worked remotely with Kalle from Sweden and Erwin from Kansas to present an AJAX chat application called iLace. I am particularly proud of how well this little web application performs and how well it works using the iPhone UI. In particular, I think its melding of text entry and chat message receipt and its response to changes between portrait and landscape modes are very good examples of what can be done for chat on the iPhone. Source code is available!

My keynote presentation slides are now available in .pdf and .mov. I'm told a live recording of the session and an .mp3 will be available soon.

Over the last few weeks an online developer community that I started at WWDC called iPhoneWebDev has grown to over 650 members. It's now the best place to get online support for building iPhone web pages and webapps. I'd like to keep the momentum from the iPhoneDevCamp going forward on this list, so if you are interested in developing for the iPhone, check out the example code and join the discussion today!

Getting Ready for the iPhone

I've been excited about the web capabilities of the upcoming iPhone for some time. As a reluctant laptop user ("oh, my aching shoulders"), there is real appeal to me in a better portable web browser. I have tried most of the PDA and cellphone browsers to date, and none offer more then a poor cousin to the web that we experience on the desktop.

Instead, the iPhone offers a desktop-class browser. There is no transcoding, nor any subset of HTML such as WML. Full web pages are rendered in the small display, and when you "double-tap" with your finger the section you touch is expanded to a more readable size. The video available at the Apple website shows this capability in use.

Because of the iPhone's upcoming July 29th release, I decided to participate in this week's Apple WWDC conference for Macintosh developers. There a number of announcements about the iPhone were released, and a number of technical sessions on the iPhone and iPhone-related technologies were held. Together the iPhone demonstrations at the public keynote and other demonstrations throughout the WWDC offered some real promise for when the phone is released on June 29th.

The biggest announcement at the public keynote was that there will not be an SDK for building native iPhone apps; instead, the only way for third parties to get involved is to create web applications optimized for the iPhone. This came as a big disappointment to the majority of developers participating at WWDC. However, as someone who has been involved lately in creating AJAX/Web 2.0 apps, I was less unhappy.

The other significant announcement at the keynote was that a Safari 3.0 beta for both Mac and Windows was being released and that a third Safari platform would be released on July 29th—inside the iPhone. This means that web 2.0 applications created to work with Safari on the Mac will likely also work on the iPhone.

Since SynchroEdit, an open-source simultaneous web editor (in the style of SubEthaEdit) for Firefox that I produced last year, is one of the most sophisticated AJAX/Web 2.0 applications, I dug deeper at various WWDC sessions to see if it might be possible to make SynchroEdit work on the iPhone.

One of the biggest things that SynchroEdit needs in order to function is DOM Mutation Events. At a party for WebKit (the open source code underpinnings of Safari's web renderer) and in questions after a session at WWDC it was confirmed that these are available to Safari 3.0 and presumably the iPhone.

The other key ability that SynchroEdit requires is WYSIWYG editing. This was terribly broken in Safari 2.0, but I saw many demonstrations of it working in Safari 3.0, so I don't anticipate any problems with this.

SynchroEdit also requires AJAX and in particular the XMLHttpRequest function, and the keynote clearly said that this was available.

The final thing that SynchroEdit needs is the ability to keep the browser at readystate==3, i.e. not "finish" sending the page, so that we can continue to interactively pass updates to users as they arrive, without creating a new connection for every message. It is not clear if this will be supported on the iPhone, but there are ways to work around it.

So, in principle, it appears that we should be able to make SynchoEdit work on the iPhone. I am not sure that many iPhone users need SynchroEdit, but as an example of a very sophisticated web technology that should work on that platform, it shows the potential for what might be possible.

Because of this technological capability I've decided to begin investigating what type of social software apps could be highly useful on the iPhone and that aren't being served by the existing web 2.0 community. I am also going to continue investigating the technical issues of developing web apps for the iPhone

If you are interested as well, I invite you to participate in the new iPhoneWebDev community. It should be a great resource for everyone interested in getting in on the ground floor with this new web technology. I have also begun tagging relevant web pages in del.icio.us with the tag iphonewebdev—I hope that others will begin to use this tag as well.

I have quite a bit more I'd like to write about specific iPhone technology, but unfortunately I have to wait until the WWDC confidentiality expires on June 29th with the release of the iPhone, so keep an eye out here for more details.