It was the Week of the iPhone

For several weeks now, Chris has been learning about the iPhone and how it will affect the future of web programming. Among other things, he set up a mailing list to talk about it called iPhoneWebDev which is doing amazingly well and has almost instantly become the place to talk about iPhone-related web programming.

So it was still a surprise, but understandable, when Chris showed up at my house last week with an iPhone for me.

The iPhone, by the by, is a very cool little toy. Believe it or not, I've assiduously avoided having a cell phone to date, and so that aspect is totally new. But its iPodness is great and its ability to connect to the Internet anywhere is also very cool. Useful? I dunno yet. That'll take longer to see as I integrate it into my routine.

In any case one of the purposes of handing me an iPhone was so that I could start making our sites look better on the phone. Thus one of my main tasks last week was making the RPGnet Gaming Index and the Xenagia Book Index look their best. I'm pretty happy with the results. You can now easily browse both indices when in your favorite game/book store and read text about games or books you're interested in at full size, without using the iPhone's zoom functionality.

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Then this weekend was iPhoneDevCamp. I begged off on Saturday so as not to ditch my normal commitments, but I went on Sunday. It was an interesting and odd experience.

It was in the Adobe Town Hall, which is down toward the southeast corner of San Francisco on Townsend ("Towns End", one presumes). I'm always amazed how fast the blocks change in San Francisco. I walked over to Townsend on Sixth Street (I think) and it was thoroughly run-down with security screens and security doors on every building. I literally walked past a drug deal and then watched the dealer slip back into his security-doored rec hall, to wait for the next customer. When I walked back it was on Seventh Street, which was a more average neighborhood, not upscale by any means, but not totally rundown either.

Anyway, over at Adobe, there were numerous developers all quickly typing on their laptops. I'd expected a more open atmosphere, not a bunch of people working alone in a community space. A lot of them were finishing up their projects for the Hackathon--which Chris ran. There were a total of 45 iPhone projects which people had built largely over the previous few days.

Overall, it was an interesting experience, and I got a few ideas for how to make sites friendlier for the iPhone. I'm planning to do some work on our forums next, but for now I need to sit down and catch up on the Skotos, RPGnet & Xenagia things that got largely neglected last week while I was iPhoning.

Kitten Pic

The kitten is just about impossible to photograph because she's always moving and because she is all black and so offers no contrast. Here's the best picture I've gotten to date:



One of the reasons that she continues to be hard to integrate is that she's an unholy terror. In particular she refuses to leave alone Cobweb, our cat that's come to somewhat tolerate her, and so when they're in a room together she goes after Cobweb again and again, unendingly. Here Cobweb has retreated into her safe cat carrier while Lucy continues to skulk about.