Together with The Saints I developed a widget for Sensation for the Vodafone platform. It shows the latest video’s from Sensation’s Youtube channel. It also shows the news around their world-wide events, and the latest tweets from the official Sensation channel.

For those running the Vodafone widgets, or owning the H1 or M1: It’s available in the Vodafone widget market. http://widget.vodafone.com/dev/widgets/sensation_16528

Since most of the content of Sensation is on public platforms (Youtube, Twitter), which all have an API, the widget could be developped fairly easy without further technical support by the organisation.

Apple seems to be a big proponent of HTML5: They use it for their new iAds, as Steve proudly announced during his last Keynote. So when I wanted to maken an Ipad webapp, I didn’t expect any issues. For a client of mine, I planned to work on an iPad webapp this week. It’s even the reason I bought an iPad.

Let’s start with the only good news: Setting an homescreen image, with

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/custom_icon.png"/>

does work, and if you make the image 72 pixels wide, it looks great on both iPhone and iPad (the previous advice was 57 pixels, but this looks blurry on the iPad as it’s scaled up).

On the iPhone, there are some other properties you can set on a webpage to make it work offline: Besides the homescreen icon, you can set the status bar color, startup image, and viewport size, and make files work when not online. The result looks and works like an app instead of a webpage: No URL field, navigation buttons, a startscreen, etc. Apple invented these, and has extended their support in their OS updates. See for a good description: How to Make an HTML5 iPhone App and a great HTML5 example app is the PieGuy game. They work great, and can make it easier to build and distribute an application, without sending it to Apple for approval (the current appstore mess is a whole different blogpost).

Since Apple supports this in their iPhone OS, and the iPad runs iPhone OS 3.2, I expected this all to work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
On the iPad, the startup image and viewport size are ignored when run in webapp-mode. The viewport size is only used when shown in a normal browser window, and the startup image is never shown .

On an iPhone with OS 3.1, both do work. This makes the result, on an iPad, work more like a (broken) webpage, than an application.

Why did apple take working stuff out, when upgrading the iPhone OS from 3.1 to 3.2 for the iPad? Is this a simple omission which will be fixed, or is apple actively moving away from HTML5 webapps for the iPad, further pushing their appstore? Only time will tell.

Update:

I looked into this some more, and have more results:

If  you use a image with the right size, (1024*768), it does (sometimes) work on my iPad as startup image. My previous tests used a iphone-sized image, which is totally ignored on the iPad. However, it often takes a few tries before it shows the loading image, and sometimes shows a screenshot of the page, before showing the default loading screen. (so the flow is then screenshot->default.png->webpage).

I still can’t get the viewport tag to work in webapp mode: If I set the viewport to a predefined with, like:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”user-scalable=no, width=1024″/>
this does work in Safari, but is ignored in Webapp mode. If I set a scale:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no”/>
and test in Safari, this does work on first load. However, if I rotate my ipad, and rotate back, the scale is set differently.

At the Mobile Monday Amsterdam, which I co-organise, I did a short talk on how to build your own Internet of Things Thing, in a day. The technical process is explained in my blogpost from last year: called The MoMoMeter.
Since we videotape all our talks, it’s included here:

The slides:

More on the IOBridge I used can be found on their blog
Photo’s by Filip Bunkens.

I have been so busy working on new projects, that there is a bit of a backlog of things I worked on, and that are live now. One of them is the DWDD iPhone app I built for the Vara. DWDD is a popular daily dutch TV show. The iPhone app shows the short (5 minutes) version of the last 10 shows, as well as the full version of the latest broadcast.

You can get the app for free in the Itunes Appstore.

Last week the NOS launched the Jeugdjournaal iPhone app I built for them:

Besides showing the latest news broadcast, it also allows users to vote on the latest daily poll, which is synced with the polls on their website.

While not many children will have an iPhone, the app also works on the iPod touch, and can offcourse also be installed on the iPhone’s of parents.

The app is available in the Itunes Appstore. More about it can be found at the iPhoneclub or at the Weblog Nieuwe Media by NOS.

Since the iPhone sends it’s OS version in every web request it does, I decided to have a look at my own logfiles (in the hope that bigger apps will follow ).

I do realise this isn’t a scientific valid result: It’s just the distribution of one, quite recent, app. However, it does say something. So, without further ado, I present the results:

From this small sample, 4% didn’t already run 3.xx (it might help that this is an iPhone only app: iPod Touches apparently are updated less).

Since this is only taken from a small sample, I hope bigger apps will release their stats. Here is the small PHP code I used:

<?
define("LOGFILE","/home/panman/logs/prod.panman.nl_access_log");
$lines=file(LOGFILE);
foreach ($lines as $line){
if (!eregi("stufidates",$line)) {continue;}
//if ($i==0) {echo $line;}
    $parts=explode(" ",$line);
    if ($parts[12]!="(iPhone;"){
    $detects["noip"]++;
    } else {
        $os=$parts["17"];
        $detects[$os]++;
    }
    $i++;
}

echo "<table width=500>";
foreach ($detects as $key=>$hits){
echo "<tr><td>OS:</td><td>".$key."</td><td>".number_format(($hits/$i)*100)."%</td></tr>";
}
echo "</table>";
echo "Total:".$i;
?>

If you have an iphone app that does requests to your webserver, please run this code (or something similar, it’s just a first version) on your logs, and let me know the results.

De NOS Journaal iPhone app die gisteren is gelanceerd is vandaag aangekondigd in het NOS 8 uur journaal. Ook staat de applicatie momenteel op Nr 1 als populairste download in de nederlandse appstore. Yay!

The followers of my twitter account might have noticed that I spend some time at the NOS (the Dutch public broadcasters) the last few weeks. Now I can announce the result of my work: The official NOS Journaal app is live! It shows the last news broadcast, as well as the last 8′o clock broadcast.  It can now be downloaded in the Appstore!

It runs on iPhone and iPod Touch, both over 3G (if fast enough, depending on coverage and subscription) and WiFi.

More about the app can be read at the NOS nieuwe media blog (dutch) and the website of iPhoneClub (also dutch) who was first to notice the app.

Tweakers also wrote about it, and right now it’s #2 on the dutch appstore. Yay!

Today I gave a quick (really quick: About 3 minutes) talk on how easy it is to build a mobile widget. To show that I ported the jQuery Cats example to a mobile widget. In the talk above I go over all the steps needed to run web code on a phone. Not shown in the slides, but it was in the talk, is that this actually runs on phones .