beTech :: Evolve Already

Sure the iPhone is a slick piece of interface and hardware design. Yeah, I want one real bad. But, sorry, I just can’t justify the initial cost plus the monthly service agreement with AT&T. (the University didn’t want to help me out there either, drat!) Furthermore, even though there was an initial burst of buzz and tools for developing applications suited to the iPhone’s 480×320px screen (e.g., the Aptana iPhone Development Plugin), it just didn’t seem prudent to take the leap as a Web designer/developer yet.

Yesterday’s Apple Special Event announcements changed all that. The entry price for the iPhone was dropped to $399 in time for the holidays—and that was nice. But what’s really got me turning from naughty to nice for Santa’s list is the new iPod Touch. Holy Smokes! For $299 I can have the internet in my pocket! And not some mobile version of the web*—nay!—I’ll have the real McCoy! That’s right. A Wi-Fi-enabled (802.11b/g) mobile web browser (Safari) that actually renders pages as they’re seen on the laptop/desktop, only smaller (until you zoom in!).

And if I’m planning a future with my little iPod Touch buddy, my gosh, I bet the rest of you are considering the same. Holy smokes! There’s an imminent iPhone/iPod Touch critical mass approaching. It’s time to start developing!

What applications are you contemplating or already developing for the iPhone/iPod Touch? What site design changes will you make to better suit this duo? Will affect your approach to the mobile Web?

* BTW: The Office of Web Communications has a great resource for the mobile Web at UVa. It’s worth checking out!

At the Adobe MAX 2006 Conference in Las Vegas last week everyone was going hog wild about the new Flex Application Framework and IDE for building the next generation of Flash based web applications. Something that I got pumped about was the fact that you can push data from the server to the client. Also, some other cool items to mention are:

• The Flex Builder 2 on Macintosh Beta is available for free
• If you don’t want to spend any $, no trouble… the Flex SDK is Free!
• It runs on a J2EE environment, and the IDE runs on Eclipse. The Java folks are hyped about it.

Uploading files to design, develop, and test Web pages on a remote server takes up valuable time and it interrupts the creative flow. Wouldn’t it be great if we could do all of that on our own machine and then upload a completed project?

What we need is our own Web development server, preferably something like we’re used to working with in the real world. Apache sounds nice and MySQL and PHP would be icing on the cake. Also, while we’re making outrageous demands, we’d like to do it the Mac wayâ??with minimal muss and fuss. Ooh, and we’ll get bonus points if we can do it all for free!

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Thanks to all of you that made it to the Mac Web Dev presentation this past Wednesday. Y’all were great and we managed to cover a lot of ground at a fairly brisk pace. There were a couple of request for more information so I’m going put together a couple of posts that review what was covered, including a little instructional piece for setting up your Mac to run the OS X Personal Web Sharing with PHP and MySQL.

The demonstration of the Firefox DOM Inspector and the Web Developer Extension also received so much interest that perhaps a live version of the Essential Firefox Extensions posting is in order. What do you think?

Please join us this Wednesday (February 15) for next thrilling beTech presentation: Web Development on a Mac. Steve Stedman will be your guide as you encounter the unique joy of Web planning, developing, and designingâ??all within the friendly Mac environment.

Steve is presently the Webmaster for the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library and is the co-founder and chair of beTech. His Mac credentials include serving as chair of the local Mac User Group (MESS) and as systems admin for the Library’s Mac Server.

Web Development on a Mac

• Wednesday, February 15
• 2:00pm-3:30pm
• Newcomb Hall, Room 389

Since it’s also Apple Fest ‘06, plan to come early and stay late in order to take in the other activities (see the MESS site for more info).