New apps

First of all, thank you to everyone who's been sending in comments and suggestions. I have a really good feature list for OneTrip 2.0 - the problem now is finding some time to do it. I've been busy with other projects and in the last few months, I've had to plan a move to a new house, a big holiday trip, and my wedding in April 2008.

I have more for you today than excuses, though: for those of you who happen to be guitar players, I've been commissioned to make some music apps for iPhone. Here they are:

Guitar tuner
Chord library

I'm working on more web apps for iPhone, and I'm ready to dig into the SDK come January. Exciting times ahead!

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.