Dori Smith, long time Apple advocate and JavaScript expert, responds to my post last night about Apple’s absence at the iPhoneDevCamp that I’m attending. Funny enough I’m not allowed to tell you whether or not I’ve met any Apple employees here because if there were Apple employees here they aren’t allowed to talk to the press. Since everyone is the press now I guess they aren’t allowed to talk to anyone. Sigh.
Joey DeVilla takes the alternate point of view and says “Scoble’s got a sweet job: he’s the only person outside the Bush Administration who can be wrong a lot of the time and still and reap the rewards from it.” Heheh.
Anyway, there’s a growing theme here on the floor of the iPhoneDevCamp: developer pain.
Here’s an example of the developer pain. You know that the iPhone senses when you turn it, right? If you’re in a browser the browser changes from portrait mode (skinny and tall) to landscape model (fat and short).
Now, the iPhone internally has an API for getting data from the sensor. The browser even knows when you turn it upside down.
The problem? They don’t have an API that you and I can get to. So, we can’t make our Web pages really accurately reconfigure themselves based on whether they are in portrait or landscape mode. In fact, there’s no way for you to tell whether the phone has been turned at all.
Or is there?
A smart dev realized that there’s a hack. I’m not sure who found this first, so sorry for not handing out credit, but Christopher Allen told me about it.
The hack? Well, each time you turn the iPhone it causes the browser to resize. So, all you have to do is watch for a resize event. Then you can sense whether the phone is in landscape or portrait mode.
But, because this is a hack it means you really don’t know which way the phone was turned. Is it upside down? Rightside up? You don’t know.
Now there are some game developers here who would LOVE to know that. If they did, they could make games that work by turning your phone one direction or another.
But they are feeling the pain. They are hitting walls.
Another wall?
The iPhone can’t play sounds while surfing the Web. So, you can’t play sound for people based on Web events. Again, makes making a game very difficult.
Christopher has a whole list of iPhoneDevPain that he’ll get up on the iPhoneWebDev site.
On the other hand, the list of apps is getting longer and people are having a great deal of fun trying various things. One group built an app that if your iPhone gets knocked off of its dock it’ll “moo.” Useless, but fun.
UPDATE: A guy named Phil Collins says he’s going to unsubscribe from my blog if I don’t stop talking about iPhone.
Scobleizer 