Back story

OneTrip has only been out for a short while, but I figured some of you might want to know how it came about.

Some time in late May I realized that since Apple still weren't making any announcements about a full-blown SDK for iPhone, Mac developers probably weren't going to get one any time soon. Even if they did, I'm primarily a web developer so I would've been out of my depth trying to create a Cocoa iPhone app. I figured I'd do what I can - create an app I've always wanted on my phone as a web page, and if widgets showed up on iPhone in June, oh well - maybe they wouldn't be exactly what I wanted anyway.

Taking my brother Vanja's app idea, it took about two days of typing and clicking here and there in the evening hours to put together something usable in Safari. Since I only ever intended to use this on iPhone, I "optimized" it for the device - that is, designed it with iPhone's screen size, form factor, and UI conventions in mind. It has a top toolbar and a scrollable list of items. Most of the time you just point and click, but you can type if you really want to. It doesn't talk to the server once it's loaded and it's really small overall - under 15 KB including images, stylesheets, and JavaScript.

It worked well - by my standards, anyway. I had a bunch of questions about how it would run on an actual iPhone (I still do!) but I figured I'd make some educated guesses based on what we'd heard from Apple.

I didn't bother making it cross-browser-compatible. What's the point? I could do it if I wanted to, but I can't imagine too many people would want to use it on another device. I've heard some users of other mobile devices say they liked it. That's nice; however, making OneTrip work on those is really low on my list of priorities. Right now, I just want to make sure it runs well on iPhone come June 29.

I posted about OneTrip on macrumors.com expecting to hear some feedback on whether this was a boneheaded idea overall, and whether I missed any obvious concerns regarding Safari on iPhone. It got dugg from there and soon my server was squealing under the load.

I really hope that people can make use of OneTrip on their iPhones. It would be pretty cool if I got an iPhone on the 29th, surfed over to onetrip.org, and was greeted with the app just the way I imagined it to work. We'll see - coding fingers crossed!