Web Apps portal at Apple.com

There we go - Apple has put together a portal for links to web apps for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Onetrip at Apple - Web Apps

Huzzah!

OneTrip and Quip on iPod Touch

Though the new iPod Touch features the same Safari browser as the iPhone, it presents itself with a different "user agent string", so pulling up my "iPhone apps" (what do we call them now?) on an iPod Touch didn't work (probably - I haven't yet tested this on one).

In any case, starting tonight this should be remedied. Fire up your iPod Touches and let me know how it works. Thanks!

iPhone Software 1.0.1. brings JavaScript performance improvements?

Ok, I haven't properly benchmarked this yet or anything, but today's 1.0.1. update to the iPhone software (available via iTunes) seems to have made JavaScript runs noticeably faster on my iPhone.

As you can imagine, I've been testing and using OneTrip on an iPhone for a month now, and I'm pretty familiar with the way it "feels". The slowest operation is checking and unchecking an item from the shopping list; this used to be mildly frustrating. After today's update, though, it feels faster to me.

Now, I'll throw a heap of a salt on this because Apple doesn't claim any performance improvements for this update - it's just a security patch, as far as we know. But, the darn thing runs faster - I swear.

What do you think? Have you noticed the change? Am I just making it up?

P.S. Sorry about the lack of updates in the past few weeks. I'm considering some new strategies for OneTrip, and you might or might not see some big changes soon!

Full-screen mode

OneTrip will now fake a "full-screen" mode, i.e. it will disappear the address bar. This gives you more room for more items in your list, and it makes OneTrip look more like a real, all-grown-up iPhone application.

The address bar is still there at the top, just a flick away if you need it.

JavaScript animation on iPhone

Two words: avoid it.

I had originally written iPod-menu-style sliding menus for OneTrip (well, my friend Adriano did a lot of it), and it worked really well on the desktop. As we got closer to iDay, however, I figured it would probably run slowly on iPhone so I removed it.

I've gotten quite a bit of feedback since asking why the slide animation was missing. To be honest, I hadn't actually tested this on iPhone; I just assumed, based on its JavaScript performance in other areas, that animating large blocks wouldn't be exactly snappy.

Boy, was I right. Tonight I played for about two hours with different animation speeds and methods, and the simple truth is that there's no way to animate things on iPhone in JavaScript so that they're pleasant to the eye. This only gets worse with OneTrip's menus which in most cases take up the whole screen; when something that big is jerkily crawling across the screen at about one frame per second, it's not good. You could say it's... bad.

So, no menu animations for now. Sorry about that. The good news is OneTrip is still fully usable. I guess I'll have to add eye candy elsewhere to make up for this missing feature.

This morning's update, by the way, featured a number of smaller improvements - for instance, you can now click right on a shopping list item to check and uncheck it (instead of aiming for the little checkbox).

Email your shopping list, edit your Saved items

Two big OneTrip updates today:

- At the bottom of your shopping list you will find a handy-dandy email option. Not only can you email your OneTrip shopping list to another lucky iPhone owner, you can also send it as a plain ol' email to anyone else.

- You can now edit your Saved items, removing them individually instead of having to clear them all out.

These have been the two biggest feature requests, and I hope you make good use of them. A few notes:

- Emailed lists are stored on the OneTrip server for one week (if you don't email a list, it never leaves your iPhone so we won't see it). They are not encrypted or password-protected, since there is no registration or log in for OneTrip. Anyone who has the URL to your emailed shopping list (something like onetrip.org?l=y6rxpu) can view it; it's a random URL, so the chances of someone stumbling upon it are slim to none. Still, I suggest you don't store any sensitive information in lists you email. This is a simple, free service, so use it as such!

- Choosing to load an emailed list will currently also wipe out your existing list, including your saved items. I'm working on a list-merging feature, but I don't want to overcomplicate things. I hope you'll understand.

Thanks for all your feedback!

State of the app

What a crazy week. I've barely used my computer at all - iPhone gets all the love these days. Need to find a river trip in the Willamette valley? Hey, let me grab my iPhone! Yeah, I know my notebook is right there - I'll do it on my iPhone anyway!

I've received lots and lots of feedback about OneTrip - thank you all. I'm spending most of my coding time now thinking about all the new things having an actual iPhone has taught me, but I'll soon be doing actual work on OneTrip. Here are the features you've requested the most:

- Sharing shopping lists between users
- Editing Saved Items
- Better categories

The last one is easy to implement, but hard to plan. I want to keep the lists short but all-encompassing. Maddening!

I'm also trying to keep OneTrip small and ad-hoc, in the sense that you don't need to register, log in, blah blah. Click it and use it is my goal. A lot of this account-management type of stuff would be easier if you had a login on the server, but I'm really trying to avoid that.

Keep the feedback coming, and keep making only one trip to the store!

Success!

I just tested OneTrip and Quip on my iPhone and they work perfectly. I couldn't be happier with the performance. It's amazing.

Apple underpromised on the iPhone, people.

Well, looks like we have the first sign of Apple's commitment to developing actual web apps for iPhone. Head on over to:

http://reader.mac.com/

In case it gets taken down, it looks like this:



If you visit with a faked iPhone user agent string, you get a blank page. Looks like having a .Mac account might become handier soon.

iPhone's potential vs. its feature-set at launch

When iPhone hits our pockets in June - pun intended - we'll all have our complaints about lacking features. No GPS. No instant messaging. No installable third-party apps. No video capture (it seems). No iTunes Store (again, most likely).

The reasons for dropping these features are different; some of them would have displeased AT&T, others would have eaten into sales of other Apple products, and some are probably either impossible to implement well because of technical limitations, or the implementation would have changed the device form, specs, or price significantly. It's a delicate balancing act, putting the Internet, iPod, and telephony in your Levi's.

There is, however, at least one common thread to all these missing modules - they're not necessary right now to make iPhone an impressive product. Common diagnoses heard in the cynical layers of the blogosmear include accusations of Apple wanting to "rape" their customers - though I can't figure out how not including a profit-driving feature like the iTunes Store would do that - or, worse, cries that Apple is "dropping the ball" either by not realizing that these are desirable features or by being too stupid to put them in. This is when a cliche from the world of design comes in handy: "Perfection is achieved not when there's nothing else to add but when there's nothing left to take away." (Antoine de St. Exupery)

Look at it this way - Apple has had to put together a twenty-minute demo of the device just to show off its main features. Given that, two keynotes of the phone, TV ads, and a web page including tech specs, our number one pre-release complaint is still that we don't know enough about the phone. Perhaps we should admit that even with the feature-set we now presume iPhone will have in June, there's a heck of a lot for the average and above-average user to play with for quite some time.

I consider myself a well informed and technically savvy iPhone buyer, and I can tell you that I'll spend most of that weekend tapping around my iPhone, learning its UI. It'll probably be a few weeks before I run out of things to be delighted (or at least surprised) by.

Now keep in mind, I'm the developer of probably the very first iPhone web app. I should be spending my Friday making sure that OneTrip runs smoothly on iPhone - and I'll do that as well, to be sure. Imagine if Apple had announced a proper SDK on June 11 - Mac developers would have been pretty caffeinated for a few days after the launch, rushing to get the first apps out. Is it unreasonable to think that this would have resulted in some pretty crummy iPhone apps, seeing how none of these developers would have had a chance to get a feel for the phone's (computer's?) interface, form factor, and performance? Of course, it was still a little goofy of Steve to "announce" that we can make - "can" as in, iPhone allows it - web apps for iPhone. Duh, Steve. But he had to pull that band-aid off quickly.

In any case, that was a disappointment for developers and for those users who wanted their Skypes, Yojimbos, and Terminals on iPhone. But my gut feeling is that those who buy one anyway will spend most of July oohing and aahing over this and that iPhone feature. The desire for more features will eventually set back in, but by then, who knows what updates Apple will be pushing to iPhones? At least this is one thing we can be fairly confident about: like AppleTV, iPhone may grow as a device without pulling on your wallet.

My conclusion, then, is that Apple may in fact be leaving out some features (or at least that they may be ok with leaving them out) because they don't want to overwhelm the user from the first day. If you're not one of those who think they would be overwhelmed by, say, having the addition of GPS on iPhone, remember that there's probably a lot of people who wouldn't be overwhelmed by the addition of some other feature. You try to please all of those and pretty soon the iPhone experience feels a little cluttered. Apple picked the features they consider crucial and impressive, and their bet seems to be paying off if consumer interest is any indication.

Be patient and put things in perspective - it looks to be a fantastic device, and it will learn new tricks if only for the fact that it will be easy for Apple to do so (compared to, say, iPods, which were harder to update with new functionality for accounting reasons, and because developing software for their OS wasn't as easy).