Creating a basic organizational iPhone page: Overview

Joe Hewitt, of Firefox fame, has created an easy-to-use framework for publishing web pages in a format that mimics Apple's own native iPhone applications. It consists of javascript, css and html files, all freely available.

My effort at using the framework can be found at my.acu.edu/m. It's a simple html page that links to mobile-formatted programs such as Google webmail, calendar and search, simple calls to Google maps, and links to external apps specifically created for the iPhone such as the excellent moviesapp.com and the Facebook iPhone application, also built by Joe Hewitt. There's also a campus directory script that I wrote, which is the only thing approaching programming that I did for this project.

I tried to think of information that students and employees might need when out and about. For example, college kids think about food a lot and fortunately, one of the easiest and most useful of the iPhone features is the embedded Google maps tool. There are limitations to this tool, which I'll point out in a later post, but for certain searches, it's as easy as creating a link:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Restaurants+near+Abilene+Christian+University

Touching this link switches the iPhone to the maps application, drops markers on the local eateries, and includes all the information you'd expect such as phone numbers and addresses. No more api keys and javascript to write. I'll give more detail about maps in a later post as well.

So, that's the overview. Next, I'll dig into a few details for each section.