iPhone Web App Development

I have been working through a tutorial that Jonathan Stark put together that explains how to customize a web page for an iPhone. The beauty of this solution is that the site will function and display normally for anyone accessing it with a desktop browser but for someone on an iPhone or and iPod Touch the experience will be customized. This is made possible by CSS (using some WebKit) and JavaScript (using some JQuery).

Here is my Index page of iPhone Web Apps. Note: you need to access this with Safari Mobile to see the cool iPhone App look.

Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is a complex issue that can have huge implications on the information age that we live in. Currently all information online is treated the same way by ISPs. This means that your internet service provider does not give preferential treatment to certain types of data such as email, video streams, or bit torrent traffic. Similarly ISPs do not give preferential treatment to specific domains. Without net neutrality laws there is a possibility that ISPs could block or limit access to certain domains and give faster access to others that pay them more money. For example, if my local ISP (Charter Communications) is paid by ABC to have their website delivered to me at 10mbps but NBC does not want to pay Charter then Charter could limit my connection speed to NBC to 1mbps or block them altogether.
This is dangerous! The internet has brought us into a global economy and if ISPs are allowed to block certain domains or businesses then the internet will become fragmented and it will destroy the very concept of open information that can be accessed from anywhere.
If you would like to get more information about Net Nuetrality or if you would like to join the debate go to www.savetheinternet.com/faq.

New Apple Mac Mini Server

I work for an accounting firm and we are purchasing a new Apple Mini with 2x 500gig HDDs and Snow Leopard server installed. This will be replacing 2 older dell server boxes. We will be testing this box for performance and stability over the next few months. The unix OS should be perfect for our needs. We will be running a Ruby on Rails application.

iPhone Dev Websites

A blog discussing best practices in general for web development. It also has some good points about using special css for people accessing the site via iPhone.

knol.google.com

----------------------------

Here is some good documentation from apple about how to configure the view port on the iPhone. Safari looks for a meta tag to set the view port.
<

meta name = "viewport" content = "width = device-width">

developer.apple.com

----------------------------

Here are some suggestions for working with css on an iphone.

eisabainyo.net

----------------------------

This web page displays a bunch of different components that display differently with browsers that use webkit vs non webkit browsers. It give an example as well as some instruction on how to code for it.

lipidity.com

----------------------------

iUI is a framework for developing web applications for the iPhone that look like native apps. It uses JavaScript and CSS as the framework.

code.google.com

Findability: beyond just google-binging it

According to Peter Morville at findability.org, "findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval."

This sounds like a fairly vague definition and a very hard concept to measure. Do you quantify this by how much money it takes to find an item or maybe how much time it takes? It is probably easier for a mechanic to find a wrench in a workshop than a stay at home mom who never had shop class. Does that mean the wrench is easy or hard to find? These are a few questions that I do not have answers for right now.

I do know that SEO, usability, information architecture, and accessibility are all related to findability. The goal of a website is to deliver information. The concepts of findability make it easier for search engines to crawl a website and return relevant search results. Also if a user directly accesses a site and wants to find some piece of information they want the site to be laid out thoughtfully and for it to be very usable. The information architecture needs to be clearly defined so that they can find something quickly. This is where web standards come into place. If a website is designed using web standards there should be a straight forward way to navigate the site and find information or in other words the site should be accessible with different browsers and also different technologies such as screen readers for the blind.

JavaScript iPhone Web App

We wrote our first iPhone web app in class on Thursday. It was a simple app that utilized JavaScript to register which way the iPhone was oriented. We the iPhone was turned to the right or the left the accelerometer registered the change and the text on the page was updated to show which way the screen was oriented.

I added a few lines of JavaScript to have the screen display when ever the page is first loaded. That way the user doesn't have to turn the phone to get the orientation to register.

Here is the JavaScript code to make it work: