Yes, it’s another iPhone post.


The Apple site has a directory of iPhone web apps, but it's full of toys and games. It's difficult to find the useful web apps.

So this post is a list of good web sites that leverage web functionality, and tailor the interface for the iPhone:

News & Feeds

Google Reader
http://www.google.com/reader/i
A great way to read multiple feeds rather than bookmarking many different blogs and reading each separately.

Ninemsn
http://m.ninemsn.com.au

News
http://iphone.news.com.au

Google News Australia
http://www.google.com.au/m/news

Reuters mobile
http://us.mobile.reuters.com

Yahoo
http://au.m.yahoo.com

Zdnet
http://m.zdnet.com.au

The Age
http://m.gfg.theage.com.au/HomePage.aspx

Social

Facebook
http://iphone.facebook.com
Yes, we’ve talked about this before. I think the iPhone app is better, but the web app was the first.

Twitter mobile
http://m.twitter.com

LinkedIn
https://m.linkedin.com

Tools

digg
http://m.digg.com

Google Translator
http://translate.google.com

Wikipedia
http://wikipedia.comoki.com

Other Google stuff
http://www.google.com.au/m/products/

Banking

ANZ
http://www.anz.com
ANZ bank have been advertising their iPhone friendly site, which includes personal banking features.

Commsec
http://commsec.com.au/iphone
I haven't got an account to test this.

Bank of America
https://www.bankofamerica.com/mobile
Has some nice location based stuff that gets picked up by the iphone mapping.

Property

Domain
http://m.domain.com.au
The header could be smaller, but the functionality is nice.

Transport & Flight Information

Qantas
http://www.qantas.com/mobile
Check flight times. No e-commerce.

Melbourne Transport
http://iphone.itransit.com.au
Tram and train times. Bookmark this if you use public transport.

Fashion

Chloé
http://www.chloe.com
Nice site for the women's fashion label.

Local Information

Docoloco
http://www.docoloco.com/iphone

Australian Weather
http://i.ozpda.com/ozweather/

Google Movie times
http://www.google.com.au/movies
Not really optimised for iPhone but still very cool.

Magazine

Womans Day
http://apps.womansday.com/womansday_iphone

Cleo
http://cleomobile.ninemsn.com.au/mobile

To Be Categorised

Bright Kite
http://i.brightkite.com
Ah, not really sure what this is good for yet, but I know it’s cool

Get Leaflets
http://app.getleaflets.com

Thanks to Carl and Dan for sending through some great links.

Post comments with your favourite web app URLs, and I'll add them to the list.


Matt Watson, Technical Director

Labels: iPhone, Technology, Web App

The iPhone is selling well. Many people consider it to be the first real mobile web device. And now marketers are getting interested in the iPhone’s user demographic because these people tend to be more active online, more affluent and open to spending online.

There are two ways to develop applications for the iPhone. If you have a project that you want to target at iPhone users, it is important to understand the differences between the two so that you choose the correct solution.

iPhone Apps

iPhone Applications are programs that you download to your iphone through the iTunes store. They are installed as an icon onto your iPhone home screen. They consist of code and assets, and they can access the phone’s internal features such as the camera, motion sensors, GPS and local storage (database). They can talk out to the internet to get/send data, and they can perform complex graphics/computations for eg. Games. Yesterday Steve Jobs reported that 60 million iPhone apps have already been downloaded.

Some good examples:

• Facebook Application
• Supermonkey Ball
• Bloomberg
• Twinkle
  

iPhone App Developer Centre
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/

Key points about iPhone Apps:

• Require your users to search the app store to find your application
• You can charge your users for installing the application
• Can access the phone’s built in functionality
• Can perform complex graphics for animations/games
• Requires a developer skillset in Xcode/Objective-C/Cocoa/Open GL
• Can be a mix of offline and online functionality
• Can reduce the amount of data that you need to download to the iPhone compared to a webapp.

Webapps

iPhone Web Applications are just iPhone friendly web sites. They are built specifically for the iPhone’s browser, resolution and features. They are essentially HTML and CSS with JavaScript to provide interactivity. No Adobe Flash Support.

Some examples (you can interact with some of these in your normal browser):

• Facebook http://iphone.facebook.com
• Nikelab http://nikelab.com
• iOlympics http://iphone.toughturtle.com/olympics/

Webapp Developer Centre
http://developer.apple.com/webapps/

Key points

• Your users need to visit your site via a link on the web, in an email, or enter the correct URL in the iPhone’s web browser.
• Uses standard web developer skillsets (XHTML/CSS/JavaScript, server side scripting and database (eg. .NET/SQLServer/PHP/Java/MySQL/Oracle)
• Require the phone to be connected to the web (at least for the initial load, and perhaps more)
• Doesn’t support anything like Flash, Silverlight or Open GL, so advanced animations/interactivity are not available.

Thoughts

If you want to target iPhone users you need to consider your user’s point of view.

An iPhone App is something they have to search for to install, or install via a link in email or on a web site. There is the intermediate step of downloading and installing, so you need to offer your users value (especially if you’re charging for the app). Users aren’t normally going to install a program onto their phone unless it provides some of the following types of features:

• Information which they need quick access to
• Information which changes often (at least daily)
• Functions to put or send information somewhere
• Toy/Gadget or game features

Users will post reviews and ratings of your iPhone application on the iTunes app store, so a lame or buggy app isn’t going to get very popular.

An iPhone App is sticky. An icon on the home screen is going to be front-of-mind for users who install it, so it’s good branding and can be a good touch point, especially if you can offer the user a good experience.

Webapps can be built as a separate interface to an existing web site eg. Facebook for the iPhone runs on a sub domain. So it doesn’t necessitate a completely separate application, it can simply be a cut down interface to the current web site, with a tailored interface. Consider offering your iPhone users methods to browse your site through both the traditional interface and the cutdown interface.

An iPhone user who doesn’t install your iPhone App may still visit your web site, so it is still worthwhile to make your web site iPhone friendly regardless.

Matt Watson, Technical Director

Labels: Technology

China is now the biggest internet market in the world (by number of users). As the China economy grows and their ability to spend online increases, we will find that many web sites will need to consider, or even cater to the Chinese demographic.

Here are some interesting insights into the internet usage in China that I read on the Thomas Crampton site:

William Bao Bean from SoftBank:

Growing up in a one-child household makes Chinese children lonely and keen to connect, hence the obsessive use of the Internet by China’s young generation.


http://www.youtube.com/v/B5JUpJ355-M&hl=en

China’s young Internet users interact more online
Nearly 70 percent of Chinese youth use social networking sites and they have a lot more Internet friends than in the US. Chinese have 37 friends whom they have never met before, whereas US youth have 18 online-only friends

And they download more music
Nearly 60 percent of youth in China download music, compared with 32 percent in the US.

Yet, online spending remains relatively low
While the total adspend of China will be $25.8 billion in 2007 only about 4.3% of total goes online (compared with 12% in the USA). That said, online spend is growing strongly, with 55% growth in 2007. Search ad spending in particular is expected to grow 64% in 2007 and 2008.

http://www.thomascrampton.com/uncategorized/adtech-william-bao-bean-on-chinas-internet-youth/
http://www.thomascrampton.com/china/william-bao-bean-china-internet-one-child-policy/

Matt Watson, Technical Director

Labels: Web Culture and Trends

Something has always bothered me about tag clouds. All my life I have listened to music from independent record labels, independent radio, sought out Avant Garde art, made it my mission to understand Baudrillard, Chomsky and McLuhan. Basically tried to think for myself. As a consequence, I have only ever taken on board recommendations when it is provided by those who have proven to me, their impeccable taste.


So tag clouds are a great idea but to me they only serve to highlight what is popular... to everyone. Their mechanism for highlighting content (enlarging the word which represents the topic) only creates more demand for attention and further propel the topic into further popularity. This, by natural logic pushes the more obscure topics (those which I might find more interesting) into further obscurity. It's the perfect democratic system; a process of design by community that fails miserably to provide an impartial coverage of content.


But the system has its place. And I like how the online world has accepted such a basic design device (typographic hierarchy) to mean a more elaborate navigational system. I like how it sucks people in to traversing a site laterally. I like how it allows users to create a navigatable Folksnomy. And I like how when tags are created by users of a site, it allows them to generate their own nomenclature which is meaningful to them.

Tim Kotsiakos, Creative Director

Labels: Design and Usability, Web Culture and Trends