The Day Today

I finally got my hands on an iPod Touch the other week and one of the more interesting things I have come across is a variety web based applications appearing designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Facebook was one of the first applications to utilise this feature basically creating stripped down pages with Ajax functionality to give the appearance of an application. Most of the functionality is still in Facebook for the iPhone, except thankfully the custom applications.

Since then Apple have created a web application portal at http://www.apple.com/webapps/ and new applications are appearing everyday - some incredibly impressive considering they are completely reliant on HTML and JavaScript.

For anyone interested in developing their own web applications, Apple have released a very informative developer guide. I’m going to have a go at developing an application in the next couple of weeks, so I’ll let you know how I get on!

Additional: Further to my post last week about JavaScript frameworks, I’ve since found this useful tool, called SlickSpeed, developed by the makers of MooTools showing the performance between the main frameworks. The tool runs tests on each framework to see which is faster under different tasks and you can then select the framework you wish to use depending on the advantages you need.

I have recently started writing a Facebook application - and although I’m not yet ready to announce it, I did want to share a number of sites that have helped me pull it together so far.

The Facebook developer site has a lot of information, but lacks somewhat in the tutorials. Nevertheless it is an essential reference. I did find this this guide at the Tucows Developer Blog handy in getting started. Possibly the most important aspect is marketing your completed Facebook application, and this series of articles is another essential read for this.

When I get some more time to work on the app I will most likely be posting some mini-tutorials and guides to help you write your own application. I also hope to launch version 1.0 before too long and will announce it here.