iPhoneDevCamp

What was evident at this past weekend's iPhoneDevCamp, was the sheer energy displayed by the close to 400 attendees. Organised by Raven Zachary -- one of the authors of O'Reilly's iPhone hacks -- and Chris Messina, it was hosted in Adobe's plush San Francisco office. Sitting at rows of desks were developers and designers gathering together to overcome the limitations of the iPhone.

Christopher Allen summed up a lot of the gathered knowledge in his keynote. Around 60 applications were developed over 3 days, a large amount of them resembling the kind of applications developed in the WAP heyday. The one App that I really like that distinguised itself from the pack is Tilt, a motion-controlled game. Coded by Joe Hewitt, it uses a clever hack that manages to gather the motion data from the iPhone. Apple of course has this data but provides no API to it.

Telling was that Apple did not sponsor the event, there were Apple employees there, but no official presence. Apple's decision to release a phone that is completely locked down, and with a minimum of documentation, is what was fueling a lot of the effort this weekend. One wonders what would have happened if the participants--instead of unlocking the phone--could have spent their time unlocking its full potential.

The Apple developer documentation site has a promise of an ability for your web app to integrate with the iPhone. Or rather, it documents the brave invention of the "mailto:" URI scheme and the promise of a broken implementation of the 7 year old RFC 2806 spec of the "tel:" scheme . Most offensive is, however, Apple's claim to integrate with Google Maps, which means Safari intercepts requests to "http://maps.google.com/" and sends them to the Google Maps application. No other high-end phone manufacturer even comes close to this level of arrogance.

If you don’t wrap phone numbers in a link, Safari automatically converts any number that takes the form of a phone number to a telephone link. If your page contains a series of numbers that could be interpreted as a phone number, but isn’t, you need to break up the numbers using span elements (my emphasis), for example.

O'Reilly's Hackszine is continuously covering the iPhone in depth.

I noticed that the iPhone supports PDF. Since I don't have one, I do wonder if someone out there could check if it supports the Adobe PDF Javascript specification.