iPhoneDevCamp was an excellent event. Thanks to Raven, Whurley and Dom for putting it together, we really enjoyed it. Over 51 applications were started or built over the weekend including one built by the Big in Japan team. We decided to build a tiny application that would use the ability the iPhone has to determine the orientation of its screen. Based on how you held your iPhone you would signify your agreement or disagreement with the speaker. We call it iPhoneVote and ironically it was voted one of the ‘top ten apps‘ from the event.

Other cool applications included: AppMarks, PickleView, Fluther, The Pool, itunes Remote-o-Matic, Tilt and moPhaic (read about them here). The coolest hack from the event was called the Fluid Navigation Hack as described by Andrew:

Have you ever heard of Firebug? It’s the absolute best Firefox extension for developers. If you are building applications for the iPhone, it might be your greatest debugging tool. But Firebug for the iPhone, iBug.js, is not my favorite app. It’s Joe’s liguid navigation hack. Almost 25% of all apps presented at iPhoneDevCamp used it. Hewitt’s Javascript and CSS package mirror the iPhone’s iPod application, and use a fluid navigation scheme that will become commonplace to any iPhone user. This is my favorite app because so many iPhone hackers used it this weekend as a backbone for their application. This framework will work nicely for future iPhone development because it’s lightweight, elegant, and comfortable for anyone trying to navigate their Apple smart phone. The source code is available here. This would be my starting point if I were to develop an iPhone app.

Just a peek at iPhoneDevCamp:

The iPhoneDevCamp opening reception is just about over, but iPhone news is coming out at record pace.  Check out the flickrstream here.  See you tomorrow at 9:30AM.  News?  The iPhoneInterface tool is out as well as reported by the iPhone Hacking News:

We have successfully written a tool named iPhoneInterface allowing for some basic manipulation of things on the phone, and are releasing it tonight. We are including source code so you can understand the techniques we have used so far. We will be expanding the functionality of this tool significantly tomorrow. The best news is that we have prototype code that allows the ability to:

• Run any desired application already residing on the phone.
• Control what processes run on the phone (currently implementation is very hackish)
• Move files around on the phone
• Enable viewing of verbose information during the restore process
• Activate the phone without iTunes and without a token

Note: Not all of the features listed above are necessarily included in tonight’s initial release.

We are continuing significant work on this tool and will probably have similarly worthwhile updates tomorrow.

Apple and AT&T just identified 500,000 alpha geeks for marketers around the world.  What does that mean for  your brand? Piper Jaffray is reporting that Apple sold more than 500,000 iPhones this weekend according to Tom Krazit of Crave.  Here are the details:

• 95% of buyers in NYC and SFO bought the 8GB model (versus the 4GB)
• 50% of buyers were new customers for AT&T (Verizon’s CEO is kicking himself)

If you can engage the iPhone community it means you can have access to 500,000 early adopters.  How?  Start building tools specific to the needs of the ‘instant community’.  How?  Hire guys like us or come to the iPhoneDevCamp in San Francisco this week.

Have you started ‘hacking’ on the iPhone yet?  We are pushing on the development pretty hard in preparation for iPhoneDevCamp next week.  The ajaxian folks have compiled several ‘notes and quirks’ with regard to development on the iPhone:

• Poking around the DOM, I don’t see any special objects, with the possible exception of window.offscreenBuffering (set to true).
• Bookmarklets work, although you have to go through the bookmarks menu to get to them.
• Safari crashes are handled gracefully - the main screen fades back in, and you can jump right back into Safari. It will then load page you were visiting when it crashed.
• Drag and drop, and other behaviors based on picking up mousemove events, don’t work. CSS-based element drag and drop doesn’t work either. Dragging one finger around the iPhone’s version of Safari causes the window to scroll, and that’s it. I assume that scroll events do work. I’m sure somebody is already working on a version of drag and drop based on window scrolling.
• For documents with no width set, the iPhone uses a default width of 980px.
• You do not get “mousedown” when you touch the screen. You get “mousedown” and “mouseup” at the same time when you release your finger. The “mousemove” event does not seem to fire at all. There is no way to handle double-clicking because that is the action for zooming, and calling event.preventDefault() doesn’t seem to override that.

The Barcamp crew is getting together to create ‘iPhone Developers Camp‘ the week following the public release of the iPhone. Check out the wiki and get involved. If you would, Digg it for us here. The event (from the wiki):

iPhone Developers Camp is an upcoming gathering, inspired by BarCamp, SuperHappyDevHouse, and MacHack, to develop web-based applications and optimize web sites for iPhone. It is a non-commercial event, organized by volunteers, with attendance free to all. By the completion of the weekend event, a number of iPhone-ready web applications and web sites will be launched to the public. The event will be held in California, and out-of-town guests are welcome.

Attendees will include web designers, developers, testers, and iPhone owners, all working together over the weekend to improve the web experience for iPhone. Development projects will include both solo and team efforts. While some attendees will wish to work solo during the event, we encourage attendees to team up, based on expertise, to work in ad-hoc project development teams. All attendees should be prepared to work on a development project during the event. You do not need to own an iPhone to attend (although, a large number of iPhones at the event will make the development and testing process much easier).

Attendees will be able to:

• Create new web applications for iPhone.
• Optimize existing web applications for iPhone.
• Migrate Dashboard Widgets to web-based widgets for iPhone.
• Test and optimize web sites for iPhone.

The Big in Japan team let out a cheer today when Apple announced that we will get access to the iPhone via web applications.  Development for typical phones require complex SDK development, but Apple has decided to open the platform and allow firms like Big in Japan access the phone’s functions such as ‘making calls, sending emails while connecting to Google Maps.  It is not clear how the iPhone’s browser will expose the Domain Object Model to allow phone-specific functionality.  In a related move, Apple released Safari for Windows.  Presumably this will allow non-Mac developers to build applications for the iPhone without using an emulator.  Nice work Apple! [via]

Our favorite gadget blog, Engadget was taken in by a fake Apple email that claimed the iPhone would be delayed until October and Leopard would be delayed until January.

Here’s the story. A trustworthy source supplied us with an actual internal Apple email that went out to thousands of Apple employees earlier today (published after the break). The fact that this was an email sent within Apple’s internal email system to its employees is not in question. Let us reiterate: this was an ACTUAL email distributed within Apple’s internal email system to Apple employees. As it turns out, the internal memo Apple employees received was actually retracted by Apple shortly after it was sent out. (Also published after the break.) We received confirmation from Apple PR that this initial email sent out to Apple employees was incorrect, and they let us know that the iPhone and Leopard are both still on track, and should meet their expected launch timeframes. Presumably Apple is now on the hunt for whomever was able to spoof its internal email system.

This is a great example of why checking your sources is important. Just receiving a forwarded email is not the best way to ‘fact check’ your story. Get on the phone and try to get the party to confirm. If you can’t just say, ‘this story is unconfirmed, but…’

Update: It matters even more when the stakes are this high and you are dealing with a publicly traded company.  Turns out stock manipulators may have been at work as Paul explains:

This is a bigger deal than a blog getting a story wrong. Why? Because this was almost certainly done for market manipulation, with someone — Russian hackers again? — inserting this into the Apple network, knowing it would get out and hook someone, while allowing them to trade against the news.

David Smith’s article in the Guardian asks, “Why the iPod is losing its cool” suggesting Apple’s flagship product is destine for the “recycling bin of history.”  I suspect that as a fashion statement the iPod is unlikely to remain on top - change is part of fashion.  But will the change spell the end of the iPod?  Not if you consider the iPod to be a platform instead of a device as I do.
The iPod is a powerful platform for the sale and consumption of digital media starting with audio, then television and soon movies.  It has changed the way more than 60,000,000 people across the globe buy and consume digital media.  The iTunes store, part of that platform, is a billion dollar business that exists because of the iPod platform.  Millions of us have bought into this platform and it will take a little more than a chance in fashion to get us to buy the latest Creative Labs mp3 player.

Paul Kedrosky, who I sent an iPod to last year when he told me he didn’t have one, points out that the Sony Walkman sold 60,000,000 units between 1979 and 1992.  I suspect that the platform nature of the iPod will give it a stickiness that Sony could only dream of.  The iPod has transcended its need for support from “teen pop culture.”  Yes, eventually iPod sales will stop growing - they have declined over the past two quarters, but just take a look at iTunes Music Store sales and you will get understand the concept of the “platform.”

Our team is working more and more with companies seeking to launch wikis in their businesses (internal and external wikis).  This summer we spent some time with the Socialtext guys in our effort to recommend and support the best products available to our cliens.  Joshua Porter pointed out that Apple might be a direction our team needed to explore.  Boy, was he dead on!
Apple is now making push into social tools such as wikis.  With their new wiki server as described by Apple:

“Leopard Server includes a Wiki Server to make it easy for teams to create and distribute information through their own shared Intranet website. For the first time, all members of a workgroup can easily create or edit content right from their browser. With a few clicks, or by dragging and dropping, they can upload files and images, track changes, assign keywords, hyper-link pages, view and contribute to shared calendars and blogs, and search for content on the group Intranet.�

Of course the wiki server is only one great social tool included in Leopard.  Others include iCal calendar sharing (say goodbye to Exchange?), iChat screen sharing and social iTunes.  Oh, and of course Apple is going to allow “teams” to turn on these features.  Apple explaines:

“Leopard Server includes a Wiki Server to make it easy for teams to create and distribute information through their own shared Intranet website. For the first time, all members of a workgroup can easily create or edit content right from their browser. With a few clicks, or by dragging and dropping, they can upload files and images, track changes, assign keywords, hyper-link pages, view and contribute to shared calendars and blogs, and search for content on the group Intranet.�