Safari on the iPhone is admittedly very good, and easily the best browser on a mobile device – yes, even better than Mobile Opera. Mobile Safari handles navigation and presentation of most sites well. That said, a site formatted specifically for a resolution and speed of data is usually a much more pleasant experience.
Enter the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme. If you visit this blog on an iPhone or iPod Touch now, it will be formatted specifically for the device. (Alternatively, you can use the debug menu in Safari 3 beta and change your User Agent. That’s a lot of trouble just to see this site, though. 
) If you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you will have to take my word that the plugin does a very good job of presentation and formatting for the devices.
It is interesting that despite all of the work that Apple did to ensure Safari works so well with full-fledged web sites there are a growing number of sites moving to iPhone-optimized sites. As a long time Palm Blazer and Pocket IE sufferer user, this growth in optimized sites that aren’t just poorly beefed up WAP sites is amazing. The work Facebook put into their Web site for the iPhone is amazing. (I still don’t really get the Facebook explosion, though.)
Coda 1.4 has been released. It appears to be a bug-fix version.
If you’ve been living under a rock, Coda is a wicked good Web dev tool. Editor (Subaetha-based), SCP/FTP/WebDAV client (Transmit-based), Preview (Webkit-based), CSS editor, and Terminal – all in one app. Sounds like a kludge, neh? It’s not – it actually all works very well. I’ve been living off the preview for a while. It’s time for me to buy.
Apple has launched a directory of Web apps on their site today along with developer guidelines. Still not on par with a full-blown SDK. Even if Apple controlled the distribution of applications through iTunes, I would still like to see some sort of 3rd party application framework.
In any case, I see that http://m.newsgator.com/ is listed. That’s my most heavily used “Web app”. Gotta get my RSS feeds.
A lot of these have been covered in other blogs and magazine articles. Here’s my take on a few.
- http://www.tadalist.com/: One of the biggest missing items from the iPhone is a task list. I use OmniGroup’s OmniFocus interface quite a bit, but I don’t like leaving my power-hungry G5 on all the time at home just for this. Tadalist.com is a great alternative for quick task lists (or any list). It is accessible with any web browser and has a great iPhone interface. You can share the lists as well to enable people to edit, add, and complete items. It’s a great way to share, say, a shopping list with your spouse. It’s light and simple, and I have been using this.
- http://backpackit.com/: Another site by 37signals, this one covers notes, calendaring ($5/month subscription required), “writeboards”, reminders, and, yes, lists. Backpack is obviously a little more robust than Tada List. One especially nice feature is the ability to email and SMS reminders and calendar events to your phone. (In case this sounds familiar, it’s because 37 Signals also does the commercial-grade Basecamp). While the feature set is great, I just have not gotten around to using this. Part of it might just be my personal resistance to
- http://calendar.google.com/: Yes, you can track notes and tasks in Google Calendar. Google updated gCal last month to direct iPhone users to a site designed using the standard iPhone Web app UI. Mix that with Spanning Sync, and you’re set. I would use this a lot more, but – grumble, grumble – our Exchange server here at work is…. subpar.
- OmniFocus: As mentioned above, OmniFocus has a great UI for Web access. This is where I track most of my projects. I’d like to see the ability to sync the projects using .Mac or similar service, rather than me having to rsync the files. The other issue is that with the power consumption of a G5. Maybe this is where a hacked TV would come in handy.