I can blog about train delays now – except of course if I’m stuck in a tunnel with no mobile coverage.

I’m also getting pretty sick of typing this post on the soft keyboard. In three paragraphs! Still, it’s far better than my old Palm and it’s grafitti… Enough for now!

Oh, and a photo of Dino is attached because I can!

On the DECO1200 front, Minisite 3 is progressing nicely. I’ve just got to decide where to put what… Not fun. But the design is done, and it’s looking exceptionally shiny (Apple eat your heart out!).

Speaking of Apple, there are rumours floating about of new MacBooks being released tomorrow… With faster CPUs and better graphics cards courtesy of Intel. The only problem for me is should I a) buy now, have a cool toy for the holidays and figure out how to use MacOS X before uni goes back; or b) wait until just before uni goes back, wait until other people work out the bugs inherent in 1st Generation Apple hardware (not to mention Leopard), benefit from the 9 cents of interest I can earn until February and then grab myself a Mac? Decisions, decisions.

In other news, I’m still waiting on bloody Australia Post to deliver my copy of Half-Life 2: Orange Box. I’ve finally got my desktop stable (my Radeon x1950 Pro killed motherboards). It apparently shipped last Monday from Brisbane. I want Portal dammit!

Apple have given in, there will be a real iPhone/iTouch API coming out next February. On the Apple Hot News page, Steve himself (or one of his minions claiming to be Steve) states:

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

Initial desktop-style interface. At this stage I was still thinking “Mobile Photoshop”

Trying to emulate the interface of iPhoto, but given the size of the screen it didn’t work when mocked up in Photoshop

A boring drawing of using “cover-flow” to browse photos in landscape mode.

The almost final implementation of the mobisnap homepage. (note Mobishop replaced [photorealistic huh]!)

A toolbar layout idea. I’m still working out how best to make “finger-width” icons.

An idea for cropping images, I like the idea of using a standard bounding-box. But the toolbar needs work.

1. Vanessa asked what the colour button (on the edit screen from the prototype) does.
   • Good point. I don’t think the prototype makes this obvious enough. In a working application, you’d be able to poke the colour button and see what options are available. So you could actually explore the options.
2. Rob suggested making the blogging/e-mail integration more clear.
   • Again, I’ve been planning to do this, but the prototype doesn’t address it at all.
3. Emma suggested rotating the iPhone to rotate photos.
   • This was one of the first ideas I came up with, but I think (given the fact I can’t test this on an iPhone), the accelerometer doesn’t have the accuracy to detect the degree of rotation to be fine enough to do this. And secondly, how would users react to rotating their phone and have the picture remain “level”.
4. Rob also bought up another issue I hadn’t really thought of. That is by reducing the features, I may have gone too far and removed what made it interesting.

While I’m aware that most of the other DECO students see my app as “Photoshop in your pocket”, I’ve tried to keep the app simple by really focussing on basic photo-editing tasks. Here, having a large, relevant, survey audience would be handy. I’d like to know what my target audience really want. I’ve been making the assumption that people who need Photoshop will have a desktop or laptop with it already, the iPhone app would focus on more basic low-level tasks.

Right now, I’m going to quickly modify I have updated my prototype to address points 1 and 2. Hopefully, this will also address Rob’s main point. It hasn’t done that yet. Still some more flash hacking to do. Hooray for weekends!

It’s also, hopefully, going to show how my ideas have changed to better meet the requirements of my non-tech-savvy audience.

Early Stages

In the first week of the course, I researched the iPhone and compiled a list of what I perceived to be its pros and cons. These came to change my project idea pretty dramatically – mostly for technical reasons.

I quickly discovered the iPhone Safari browser couldn’t upload photos, had extremely limited capabilities for on-board processing and was the sole development environment. Initially, we were of the belief that Apple would eventually release a native API, it’s since become apparent that they won’t – at least not for the 1G iPhone.

Because of these restrictions, I sorted through my project ideas and ultimately culled the ones which were infeasible:

• iPhone video editor – on-board processing power is really, really limited
• Photoblogging client – Safari can’t upload and both Flickr and WordPress allow you to post by e-mail.
• Train delay announcer – CityRail is crap, therefore letting people know might help. Unfortunately, iPhones aren’t coming out in Australia in the near-future…
• Social networking – dubbed Stalkbook, combined friend groups with positioning technology and geoblogging. It was scary and everyone else is doing GPS to death.

Ultimately, I decided to settle on a mobile picture editor. From my original notes, “Picasa for Mobile”, it would allow cropping; zoom; resizing and basic image adjustments. As part of these notes I wrote:

Allow bloggers, etc. to use the iPhone camera without having to edit photos on their PC/Mac before they uploaded them to their blogs, or e-mailed them to their friends.

As I thought more about the project, I realized that it would in fact, be feasible to develop and use. The only real problems came down to:

• What features were most necessary for a mobile app (keeping in mind I’m trying to convince people to use their iPhone rather than use a computer)
• How to fit a clear, easy-to-use interface in 4 diagonal inches.

Coming in the next post: the horrors of feature creep, pencil-drawn scribble and some realizations! Stay tunes! I mean tuned!

It will enable offline Web 2.0 apps, similar in concept to Google Gears, so you don’t need to have EDGE or WiFi connectivity to use an app (provided the data has been cached locally). It also exposes more of the iPhones features to developers. It will come a bit late for us, but it would go a long way to making my app possible through the web-based development environment.

In other news – stolen from the same article – Apple have released an iPhone Human Interface Guidelines document late on Friday (US time). For any of you wanting to make your app as “native” as possible, I’d recommend reading over it. It’s a bit of a shame this wasn’t released a few weeks ago, my Minisite 2 prototype is based on OS X guidelines. Oh well.

I’ve also posted a copy of a report I’ve written regarding my thoughts on the iPhone application — now dubbed Mobisnap (as Mike suggested, I’m following a logic path from Mobishop → Mobisnap → Snappy Tom [sounds like a voyeuristic photographer?]).

You can also view my conveniently posted Mobisnap Prototype and comment on it, your feedback is vital for the final submission and Minisite 3.

Cheers!

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Also, on the mobishop project, I’ve been looking at the MacOS X Leopard tour videos and screenshots and integrating those shiny ideas with my interface. It should help to make the experience more familiar for Mac users.