Apple iPhone School » Web Apps

Temporary Fix For Gowalla & Jailbroken iPhones

Douglas — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:54:32 +0000

When the jailbreak came out for the iPhone 4 I was very excited. I was even more excited when a lot of my favorite jailbreak apps became available. Then I noticed Gowalla, an App Store app for check in to locations, had stopped working. When you opened the app it would just crash right away. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling but it just kept doing it. Eventually I found out it was a problem with having my iPhone jailbroken and specifically having Winterboard installed. Here’s a recent @reply from @gowalla:

What’s good about this is there an update coming soon. Until then there’s a easy workaround. Just visit m.gowalla.com and then add it to your homescreen. It makes an icon and one of those sweet fullscreen web apps. Here’s some screenshots:

ScreenShots

A quick shoutout and thanks to my buddy Justin shared with me about Gowalla’s mobile site. Just just recently switched to an iPhone 4 after a long time using BlackBerries. Congrats man! And thanks!

YouTube Mobile Redesign

Douglas — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:02:34 +0000

YouTube has updated their mobile webpage for the iPhone & iPod touch. The new layout is much cleaner and issuing HTML 5 technology. Updates include speed, larger buttons, search suggestions, ability to create playlists, ability to favorite & like. Here’s a video demo and some screenshots.

Video

ScreenShots

Available In: Safari

Price: Free

WPtouch 2.0 Update Preview = Updated AIS Web App

Douglas — Wed, 12 May 2010 13:59:08 +0000

If you didn’t know, when you visit our website from an iPhone or an iPod touch, the site changes it’s design automatically to fit better and speed things up. You can always switch it back to the full view but many like this more simple view to help make things faster. Here’s what it looks like right now:

The company that develops this is Brave New Code and they have announced some updates coming in the future to the plugin for WordPress.

Themes – This means that not all blogs with this plugin will look the same. We can customize the look how we want it.

Web-app mode – This will affect our readers the most. Check out the details from Brave New Code:

For iPhone/iPod touch visitors this means they can bookmark your website to their home-screen and your website will automatically be saved as a self-contained application which will run in fullscreen mode.

This means no address bar at the top of the screen, nor navigation bar at the bottom. Just your mobile site, in full and glorious view.

All posts, pages, comments, etc., are handled with Ajax, and assets and resources for your mobile site will be saved and stored locally on a visitors device using HTML5 cache technology, whether in web-app mode or not. This means a super-fast and highly-optimized, custom website experience for your website visitors, as native as one can get to a native application on the iPhone/iPod touch.

Other features for website owners include a new admin panel, a paid options with more features like real tech support, not just reading their forums and easier for current plugins to work along with being easier to create plugins for WPtouch specifically. You can also create a loading page for your web app like the one below:

Loading Screen for Web App

Links

Blog Post from Brave New Code: http://www.bravenewcode.com/2010/05/the-big-changes-in-wptouch-2-0/

Don’t expect this too soon. The Beta hasn’t even been released yet. We’ll let you know when we change things.

Guide: Creating a Web App From Scratch

Douglas — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:21:06 +0000

If you’ve been looking for a complete guide to creating a web app, look no further. The guide is called Creating a Web App From Scratch by CSS-Tricks.com It even comes with the complete source code files and Photoshop documents. The 8 part guide is written by both a coder and a designer so you’ll learn how to fit your site to mobile devices and still use the rich content from a full website. Through the process they show you each step of building their demo site, Colored Lists.

If anyone has used this guide or ends up using it to create a mobile of their own, let us know what you thought in the comments. Or, if you know of other guides, share them too.

Part 1 – Planning the App: Basic Idea and Design
Part 2 – Planning the App: Database Architecture and Development Approach
Part 3 – Designing the App: Workflow Map and Photoshop Design
Part 4 – Designing the App: HTML and CSS
Part 5 – Developing the App: User Interaction
Part 6 – Developing the App: Adding AJAX Interactivity
Part 7 – Developing the App: List Interaction
Part 8 – Security & The Future

Google Wave Web App Now Working

Douglas — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:44:15 +0000

I recently received my invite to Google Wave. The recent video we posted showed a preview of the web app but claimed it wasn’t available yet however I was able to get it to work. I was using a laptop on a data card and my iPhone on EDGE and it only took a couple seconds for it to update both ways. Here are a couple screenshots from the iPhone.

Google Wave iPhone Web App

Douglas — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:18:06 +0000

Google recently started to release Google Wave. During their demo video a few months ago, they tried to show the iPhone web app but it wouldn’t work. Engadget recently made a video showing a little bit of the app. Here’s the video.

Available In: Safari

Price: Free

WunderMap – Fullscreen Radar Web App

Douglas — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 03:47:24 +0000

I’ve had a bunch of people ask me lately how I got this full screen weather map on my iPhone so I thought I’d share it with you all. First, it’s a web app. Don’t be scared, it’s still really nice. Go to http://i.wund.com from your iPhone and pic the city you want the radar to start on. You can either search for it or Safari should ask if the app can use your current location. Once you do that, scroll down to the radar option and click on “View Full Screen WunderMap” located just under the radar image. Once this screen is open, tap the plus sign at the botton of the webpage. Tap “Add to Home Screen” and rename it to “Radar” or something short.

The kewl think about this map is that you can pinch and zoom just like Google Maps. You can zoom way out to see the whole country or way in down to county and city levels. You can also tap “Options” in the top right corner of the site to turn on animation and severe weather overlays and change to different Satellite views.

Another thing you might want to do is make a different web clip with a different city and name them by each city. To do this you have to start over at the i.wund.com and enter the new city. You can’t just zoom to the location and add to homescreen.

ScreenShots

Available In: Safari

Price: Free

Google Maps in Safari

Douglas — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:17:13 +0000

So I got this Tweet last night about a web app version of Google Maps for the Palm Pre that works on the iPhone. Actually it works in my computer’s browser. What the computer browser doesn’t do is track my location. That’s right, I got this pop up when accessing the page in my 2nd Gen iPhone 3G running iPhone firmware 3.0 Beta 5 while in Safari:

I tested it on Brooke’s iPhone, which is a 2nd Gen iPhone 3G running iPhone firmware 2.2.1, and I got this:

It has all the other features like list of map directions, map routing, traffic, satellite & map views, search, and more. You can pinch, zoom, double tap and use in landscape mode too. You can try it out by going http://gjm.google.com/mwm.

ScreenShots

Gmail

Douglas — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:55:36 +0000

If you’re like me, you use the iPhone’s Mail app all the time. But if you use Gmail you should take a look at gmail.com using Safari. There’s been a lot of updates recently and Google is using HTML5 which makes the app really sweet. The video below shows you some of the features and how they look while in use.

ScreenShots

Available In: Safari

Price: Free

Google Reader

Douglas — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:18:06 +0000

This is a web app that I use every day. It’s a nicely iPhone optimized website for Google Reader. Google Reader is one of the best RSS readers I’ve ever used. It’s web based but has a lot of features. You have access to all your feeds indivudually or all at once. You can also star items, share them, email them, add notes, etc. It’s very fast easy to navigate on the iPhone. Tapping the title expands the article with out refreshing the page.

You can also add feeds from the web app. You can just type in the website address and it will automatically find the RSS feed. Google also has prepackaged RSS feeds based on topic that you can add if you don’t have any in mind. To get the site, just go to google.com/reader from your iPhone and it will adapt automatically.

ScreenShots

Available In: Safari

Price: Free