Boom.

The iPad is a better inflight entertainment system because…

• The touchscreen actually works. And when you touch it, you don’t disturb the person sleeping in the seat in front of yours.
• It’s lightweight.
• The captain cannot interrupt your movie or your picture to tell you some useless facts about the temperature outside or the altitude.
• You get to choose the music and the videos that you want to watch. You should just remember to get them prior to boarding, of course.
• You also get to choose the games you want to play. The choice of games is much larger, and it’s called App Store.
• You can even read newspapers, books, magazines, in the same screen. Reading the latest issue of the Economist on my iPad is priceless. It’s good to avoid being limited to the “in-flight” magazine provided by the airline (“your free copy!”), which tends to be quite lame, no matter which airline we’re talking about.
• You can answer e-mails while you fly (for the moment you cannot sent them, unless you fly in some airline that has a wifi network, and as far as I know, there are only a few with such a feature.)
• You could write a novel in iA Writer or Ommwriter for iPad, for that matter, all while you listen to Liszt’s “Evening Harmony in D Flat Major”. Or you could prepare a blog post, like this one.
• Coupled with noise-cancelling headphones, the quality of sound is years-light ahead of what those crummy airline headphones are able to provide.
• The battery. A whole 10-hour flight on a single charge is absolutely possible.

‘Nuff said.

Anyway.

I used Pages during the flight to keep track of all those insomniac, bilingual tweets, while the plane was a going through the Atlantic and Canada towards San Francisco. Some are about the flight itself, others about the Argentine film “El Secreto de sus Ojos”, and finally some about the Football World Cup. Project yourself in the situation, and enjoy the rants. I certainly did :)

During and about the flight

• The iPad is the perfect onboard entertainment system. Pages as an offline Twitter client, Kindle and iBooks as ebook readers, some movies, and lots of music. 57% battery after 12 hours.
• As the stewards would say: “brace, brace”; lots of tweets coming.
• Outlook is a city in Saskatchewan, not far from Saskatoon and Moose Jaw. After this revelation to remember the next time you play Trivial Pursuit, you can resume your normal activities.
• Saskatoon officially gets the 2010 akosma award for the best city name ever.
• As you could imagine, the only interesting thing in this inflight entertainment thingy is the 3D map indicating our current position. #fascinating #boring
• I forgot to mention that my seat’s sound system is broken. I could watch any movie I want but my lip reading skills are not *that* good.
• The names of the cities in northern Canada are just amazing. Can’t remember any of them tho. Are they Innuit names?
• Our vision of the world is as distorted as a map of Novaja Zemlya in Mercator projection after the explosion of the Tsar bomba.
• Why do they still print the “smoke” section in boarding passes? Is there any airline out there still offering smoking seats?
• Given that most airplane tickets are electronic, why aren’t boarding passes? #iphoneappidea
• Let’s calculate the CO2 emissions caused by airlines still printing the word “smoke” in boarding passes. No, let’s better not.
• The keyboard of the iPad has this character: ₩ (tap and hold the dollar sign). What currency is it? Korea’s won? If Korea won, then the pun is intended.
• On the plane with @mediaatelier and @dcondrau, probably even more Swiss devs, but without wifi and Twitter, difficult to know.
• There were fewer devs using Xcode on this Swiss flight than in last year’s Lufthansa flight. I will leave the elaboration of any conclusion thereof to my dear followers.
• Why do flight attendants akways decide to serve beverages at precisely the same moment when planes go through turbulences? #complot #midwest #twister
• Now I understand why Swiss is Lufthansa’s cash cow: pricier tickets and crappier service. Only selling point: the nonstop ZRH -> SFO flight. #swissairwherearethou
• I remember when they added phones to Swissair airplanes, back in 1996; calls used to cost 10 dollars per minute. Now, in 2010, in Swiss… they cost the same. #WTF
• In the airport of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia) there was free, fast, open wifi in 2006. Most airports in the northern hemisphere, in 2010, charge a lot for a crappy connection. #WTF
• And still, no wifi in planes. #WTF
• No, I haven’t been involved in Nazi activities during from 1933 to 1945. Thanks for asking. #visawaiver
• Swiss people not traveling often outside of Switzerland are easy to spot. I let you imagine the rest of this tweet.
• The Swiss version of Homer Simpson is sitting beside me, and is kinda fascinated with my iPad. Yeah, I’m talking about you, moron.
• Oh no my dear Homer, the armrest between us is mine for the rest of the flight. See? I don’t push *my* elbow on *your* side. Wasn’t *that* hard, now was it?
• The “Skytrain” in ZRH airport, is a subway, actually. You can hear yodel and cows and other Swiss sounds inside while you go from terminal to terminal. #typisch
• Whoever said that the iPad is a consumption-only device should have stop consuming some substances before writing nonsense.

Sobre la pelicula “El Secreto de sus Ojos”

• El otro día fui a ver “El Secreto de sus Ojos” con Clau, y me quedaron, obviamente, muchas cosas picando, pensaturrias.
• Me imagino la Argentina de mis padres como un lugar con una dosis mayor de inocencia de la actual. Debe haber haber sido un lindo lugar.
• Vivir en la Argentina de los 80 no estuvo mal. Aparte de las hiperinflaciones y crisis crónicas, yo tengo lindos recuerdos de aquella época.

Sobre el mundial

• Si Drogba se fracturo y quedo afuera del mundial, entonces se queda con las Ghana. Y el resto del tweet es superfluo. #mundial
• Si te fracbturas, necesitas una drogba para conbtener el dbolor. #mundial
• Primero Beckham, después Rooney, ahora Drogba… que otros jugadores se quedaron afuera? #mundial
• Atacante norcoreano inscripto como arquero… te imaginas? El técnico lo tendría que probar al arco, por ahí después se lo recordaría como el Higuita coreano. #escorpión #taekwondo #mundial
• El conocido árbitro paraguayo Carlos Amarilla no participará en el mundial. Tampoco asistirán el reconocido juez de línea francés Marcel Orsay ni el legendario hincha de Camerún. #burumbumbúm #mundial
• Burumbumberia, burumbumberia, yo soy el hincha, de Nigeria. #mundial
• Burumbumbana, burumbumbana, yo soy el hincha, de Ghana. #mundial
• Burumbumbafrica, burumbumbumbafrica, yo soy el hincha, de Sudafrica. #mundial
• Burumbumbar, burumbumbar, yo soy el hincha, de Madagascar (las hinchadas de Zanzibar y Escobar cantan similares canciones) #mundial
• Burumbumbique, burumbumbique, yo soy el hincha, de Mozambique. #mundial
• Burumbumipto, burumbumipto, yo soy el hincha, de ………………. (enviar respuesta correcta en un reply) #mundial
• Burumbumbina, burumbumbina, yo soy el hincha, de Argentina (el que diga “efedrina” es boleta). #mundial
• Burumbumbal, burumbumbal, yo soy el hincha, de Codesal (cantito alemán) #mundial
• Burumbumbola, burumbumbola, yo soy el hincha, de Angola. #mundial
• Burumbumbasta, burumbasta, yo creo… que ya basta.
• El otro día dieron en la TV Suiza (en italiano) la película de Kusturica sobre Maradona. Muy buena.

Here’s a test that proves this assertion:

1. Create a server-side web app with your preferred language, and print all the request headers; for example, in PHP: [source:php] $v) { if(ereg(‘HTTP_(.+)’,$h,$hp)) { echo “
2. $h = $v
\n”; } } ?> [/source]
3. Launch MobileSafari.app in either the iPhone Simulator or in your iPhone or iPod touch, and access the server-side script you created previously:
4. Add the application to your home screen, tapping the “+” button on the toolbar:
5. Now launch the application from your home screen, and this is what you see:
6. Compare the outputs (above, those from the latest iPhone Simulator, and below, those from my iPhone 3G with iPhone OS 3.1.2):

   Safari:	HTTP_USER_AGENT = Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16
   Home Screen App:	HTTP_USER_AGENT = Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/7D11

   The texts in italic show the differences between the two outputs.

This difference (in italic above) is only visible when the HTML generated by the server-side script contains the <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" /> tag, which triggers this change of behaviour. Otherwise, the outputs are exactly the same. Most annoyingly, this behavior is not documented (at least not that I am aware of). This problem has already been spotted elsewhere (scroll down until you see the comment by DVO published on Jul 3, 2009 at 7:34 AM; thanks to my friend Bertrand for the link!).

This is not only weird, but it also might break libraries used to generate iPhone-ready websites out of existing web apps (by redirecting the browser using the information in the USER_AGENT header; for example, this is what happens with the current version of the Rails iUI plugin (which is why I found this behaviour :)

The lesson of all of this mess is this: if you have to test for Safari on the iPhone, do not use the word “Safari”, but rather use “AppleWebKit” and “Mobile”, to be sure of catching also the users who installed your application in their home screen.

Update, 2009-10-30: In particular, the line of the Rails iUI plugin that causes problem with this particular behavior is this one.

Here it goes:

• First of all, remember that you can always create web apps. It’s worth mentioning that you can avoid the App Store and its quirks altogether; it’s up to you ;) This opens up the possibility of using your preferred server-side technology + JavaScript, and there’s quite a few libraries and tools that will help you create a killer web app: Joe Hewitt’s excellent iUI (yes, he’s the same guy behind the Three20 project), the Tank Engine Rails plugin Rails iUI plugin (Tank Engine does not work very well unfortunately), iPhoney or Eclipse are just some of the alternatives.
• If you like C++, you can choose between the official SDK (yes, you can create iPhone apps with just C or C++), or other alternatives like nui, POCO, Boost or haXe. And apparently, soon you’ll be able to use a Symbian C++ toolkit as well (and who knows, maybe even we’ll get Juce on the iPhone one day too!).
• If you are a Flash and ActionScript developer, you are most probably aware that you can create native iPhone applications using Adobe Flash CS5…
• For C# and .NET developers, there’s MonoTouch, which has received extensive press coverage lately.
• If you want to use Lua, you can use the Wax framework.
• If your idea is to “write once, run anywhere”, and “anywhere” in this context means Android, iPhone, BlackBerry and other mobile platforms, you might want to try rhomobile, Corona, PhoneGap or QuickConnect. The XMLVM project might also interest you, as it consists of a cross-compiler toolchain which can be used with Ruby, .NET, Java and can generate code for many platforms at once.
• Finally, if you are into game development, the quantity of libraries allowing you to create iPhone games is simply astounding, many supporting alternative programming languages: SDL, Unity, SIO2, Torque2D, cocos2d and Game Haxe.
• And of course, there’s the official SDK, with Objective-C and Cocoa Touch all the big buzz around it.

What do you think? Is there any library or programming language that I’ve forgotten in this list? Just leave the name and URL in the comments below.

Update, 2009-11-05: Just found the Swebapps service which allows you to create (very basic) iPhone apps without coding.

Update, 2009-11-24: Here’s a new entry for the growing list of alternative frameworks: Crystal SDK by Chillingo.

Update, 2009-11-25: Another one, in C++ and cross-platform: Airplay SDK.

Here we go:

App Sketchbook by Square Position, LLC (USA), @appsketchbook on Twitter, sold via PayPal for USD 12.99, in both a perforated and non-perforated version.

iPhone Application Sketch Book originally by Kapsoft (USA) but recently sold to Apress Publishing, sold on Amazon for USD 9.99 (while supplies last!).

Notepod by Inventive Labs (Australia), @notepods on Twitter, sold via PayPal for USD 17.95.

The Developer Sketchbook for iPhone Apps by Electric Butterfly (USA), @ebutterfly on Twitter, sold on Amazon for USD 19.99.

Finally, the UI Stencils Sketch Pad (for USD 7.95) with its iPhone Stencil Kit (for USD 17.95) by Design Commission (@designcom on Twitter).

I’ve ordered some of these items, and I’ve seen some others in the hands of some colleagues, and I can tell you that they are really handy and useful. I look forward to using them soon! For more information, here’s a recent article on TUAW comparing some of the items featured in this article.

Happy iPhone app designing!

Update, 2009-11-12: The iPhone Application Sketch Book (recently bought by Apress) has been revamped and now features a plastic stencil too!

This is a small review of the event, organized by the incredible teams of Trifork and Keynode with links to the material I’ve provided in my own presentations.

Raven Zachary needs no introduction. Known by the masses as the “Obama iPhone App Guy”, he’s a brilliant entrepreneur who’s jumped onto the iPhone wagon without restrictions. His company in Portland, Oregon, provides not only iPhone app development services, but also marketing and business information for companies in the field. His presentation was insightful, interesting and fun; Raven has a unique style for presenting data and he captured the audience with incredible information. His presentation provided a unique and broad perspective to the whole market, preparing the audience for the more technical presentations later.

<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/akosma/3992510002/" title="Raven Zachary: great speaker and entrepreneur, founder of the iPhoneDevCamp and builder of the Obama app by akosma, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3470/3992510002_d8b1948e5a.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Raven Zachary: great speaker and entrepreneur, founder of the iPhoneDevCamp and builder of the Obama app" /></a></p>
<p>Jonas Schnelli is a dear friend of mine, founder and <span class="caps">CEO</span> of <a href="http://www.include7.ch/">Include7</a>. He followed Raven on stage, talking about the all-time famous <a href="http://mct.sbb.ch/mct/reisezeit/news/sbb-mobile-iphone.htm"><span class="caps">SBB</span> iPhone Application</a>. Jonas talked about how he came up with the idea (as you can imagine, he solved his own travel needs, which is the best way to start a project anyway) and how he developed a business relationship with the Swiss train company. He also provided 5 fundamental tips about iPhone development, coming from an experienced iPhone developer, thus closing a brilliant session with lots of interesting details.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/akosma/3991861189/" title="Jonas Schnelli on stage; he's the maker of the most successful Swiss iPhone app ever: the SBB/CFF app! #JAOO by akosma, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2441/3991861189_c35a82588a.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="Jonas Schnelli on stage; he's the maker of the most successful Swiss iPhone app ever: the SBB/CFF app! #JAOO" /></a></p>
<p>Jonas also showed a new open source project his company is creating, an <a href="https://projects.include7.ch/projects/show/dialoginterpreter"><span class="caps">XML</span>-based <span class="caps">DSL</span></a> used to generate complex user interface interactions on the iPhone, which certainly looks promising.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/akosma/3992660932/" title="Jonas Schnelli shows a portable, XML-based DSL used to build UI elements for very complex workflows #JAOO by akosma, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3034/3992660932_9eeb82aa52.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Jonas Schnelli shows a portable, XML-based DSL used to build UI elements for very complex workflows #JAOO" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexcone">Alex Cone</a> is the founder of the <a href="http://www.iphonedevcamp.org/">iPhone Dev Camps</a>, and he has been working with NeXT and Apple technologies for almost 20 years now: he knows Cocoa as if he had coded it himself. He has even worked in the iTunes Store team at Apple! He provided a thorough insight on the architecture of iPhone applications: code organization, the use of notifications versus delegation, and many other interesting subjects related to the creation and maintenance of big Cocoa Touch projects. All in all, an amazing presentation which closed an exciting morning.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/akosma/3992739002/" title="Alex Cone talks about iPhone apps architecture. No, he doesn't work for IBM and I couldn't agree more with him. #JAOO by akosma, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2655/3992739002_8c09bd40b9.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="Alex Cone talks about iPhone apps architecture. No, he doesn't work for IBM and I couldn't agree more with him. #JAOO" /></a></p>
<p>His visions are extremely interesting, and not only because the word &#8220;architecture&#8221; sounds strange in the context of small mobile apps: software is software, and architecture is key for quality, maintainability and happy developers.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/akosma/3992776546/" title="iPhone app architecture by Alex Cone #JAOO great summary of ideas for better maintainability! by akosma, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2646/3992776546_92c9289254.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="iPhone app architecture by Alex Cone #JAOO great summary of ideas for better maintainability!" /></a></p>
<p>After lunch I had the pleasure of giving a talk named &#8220;10 Commandments for iPhone Software Development&#8221;, a tongue-in-cheek presentation about do&#8217;s and dont&#8217;s for creating long lasting, best-selling applications, both from a development and design points of view. I hope everyone enjoyed it! You can find below the slides of the presentation I used. Interestingly, this presentation has been featured last week on <a href="http://slideshare.net/">SlideShare</a> as one of the most popular ones on Twitter!</p>

Right after came Patrick Linskey, who provided the audience with a first hands-on tutorial about how to build an iPhone application in 45 minutes. Great stuff, particularly given that most of the people in the audience were new to the platform, and his introduction showed how to add features using both Xcode and Interface Builder, highlighting the most important elements of the workflow.

Finally, Patrick Bönzli from netcetera talked about continuous integration on the iPhone.

Finally, Alex Cone and I split the audience in two, featuring two simultaneous hands-on tutorials on creating iPhone applications. Alex undertook the task of providing an excellent advanced tutorial, while I guided my audience into creating their first iPhone application. Unfortunately, the task took longer than expected, but you can find the final application, including the complete step-by-step log, in the Backlog project in Github. Feel free to clone the project, explore the log, and see how an simple application can be created in just a couple of hours.

• Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference or WWDC, held every year in San Francisco, CA (USA), usually around June, and featuring presentations from Apple employees; if you’ve never been to one, believe me, you should;
• Voices That Matter iPhone Developer Conference to be held in Boston, MA (USA) next October 17th and 18th, with (among others) Erica Sadun, Aaron Hillegass, Stephen Kochan and Marcus Zarra;
• NSConference, to be held from January 31st to February 3rd next year near Reading (UK), and from February 21st to February 24th in the Georgia Tech Institute, GA (USA), featuring (among others) Matt Gemmell, Marcus Zarra and Aaron Hillegass;
• The 360|iDev conference that just finished in Denver, CO (USA), which featured (among many others) Bill Dudney, Brent Simmons, and Marcus Zarra (definitely, Marcus Zarra is everywhere!);
• The iPhone Developer Summit in Santa Clara, CA (USA) next November 3rd;
• The iGames Summit, a conference targeted to iPhone game developers, held last March in San Francisco, CA (USA), featuring (among many others) Neil Young (from ngmoco), Andrew Lacy (from Tapulous) and Mike Mettler (from AdMob);
• The Macoun Entwicklerkonferenz which happened last September 26th in Frankfurt (Germany);
• The iPhone developer conference in Köln (Germany), in December 1st and 2nd;
• And finally, the JAOO iPhone Dev Day in Zürich (Switzerland) next October 8th, featuring Raven Zachary, Alex Cone and… many others ;)

Also noteworthy, but not so much about software development I think, is the Mobile Enterprise Conference in Amsterdam (Netherlands) on November 3rd, which has a couple of tracks about the iPhone in enterprise.

Feel free to add links to other similar events elsewhere in the world!

Update, 2009-10-02: Here’s the link to Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch’s C4 Independent Developers Conference.

Update, 2009-10-03: The Øredev 2009 Developer Conference in Malmö (Sweden) next November has iPhone / Mobile tracks too. And so will the Scandinavian Developer Conference 2010 in Göteborg (also in Sweden).

Having documented iPhone URL schemes for TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Tweetie and Twittelator, I’ve created a project, available in Github, called TwitThis, which helps users choose their preferred Twitter client, and makes it easy to remember the user choice, and to launch the associated application with a single command:

This application has the following features:

• The class TwitterClientManager loads a list list of supported Twitter clients is loaded from a plist file, which can be extended to support more clients in the future;
• Each Twitter client is represented by an instance of the TwitterClient class;
• The user can choose his preferred Twitter client at any time, and launch the application by a simple touch; the TwitterClientManager class stores the selected value in the user settings.

If you have to support several different Twitter clients, feel free to use these classes in your own project! The project, as usual, is available in Github with a liberal BSD license. Enjoy! I’d love to hear your comments below.

Having said that, I’m also announcing that the slides (and sample application) of yesterday’s JAOO geek night presentation in Zürich are also available in the Projects section of this blog, and here goes the SlideShare player with those slides: