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!

It’s not too late to check out the New Horizons in Teaching & Research Conference taking place on Central Grounds right now. Though focused on teaching and research, this event has plenty to offer to Web-heads like yourself—the only problem may be in deciding which event to skip in order to see another.

Recent weeks have brought not one but two media file conversion services to the Web: Media Convert and Zamzar.

As you quickly find out when preparing raw audio or video to podcast, file conversion is a critical step; I frequently need to take .wav or .mov or .avi masters and render them readable by portable players, and you’ve probably had the same experience. iTunes is great when it comes to converting from .wav to .mp3 or .m4a (iPod native audio), or .mov to .m4v (iPod video); but it doesn’t work with some of the more Windows-specific formats.

There are a number of file conversion desktop apps available for sale or free download, but I’ve never found one I’m completely happy with. Most of them deal with a fairly limited list of file types. So I decided to take the new online services for a spin and compare the results.

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Steve Stedman hooked me up with a new product called Levalator, that you can use on a sound file in order to equalize volumes across the recording. So if you have a recording with some loud parts and other parts you can hardly hear, Levalator will smooth out the difference.

Those of you who have diddled with a long sound recording in Audacity or some similar product, using the adjustment tools to amplify the valleys and round down the peaks, know what a time-consuming and not-altogether-rewarding task it can be. So I was pretty anxious to try Levalator, especially as it came with an endorsement from Jon Udell.

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