Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
New York on Tap iPhone App
Category: iPhone, JavaScript
It’s a bar and subway finder for New York City, and I implement a number of techniques to overcome some of the short coming of AT&T’s edge network. Virtually the entire site is composed from a single javascript file of just under 25k. By reusing components and keeping server refreshes to an absolute minimum while pulling data in via ajax, I was able to create a pretty responsive component that feels like it belongs on the iPhone (i hope!).
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3.6 rating from 21 votes
Well done! I like that the iPhone is pushing more people to build apps which treat performance as a competitive differentiator, and this is a great success case.
Nice, but go lighter on the requirements to register. I understand you want to harvest as much info as possible from the users, but at least I won’t register until the only required fields are username and password. Of course you can still give the rest info later, _if you want to_.
About user registration. It was a hard choice. I’m trying to integrate the iPhone version with the non-mobile version which expects certain user requirements because it’s a social networking site . I think the social networking could be a big asset – so and so likes the same bars as me, so maybe I’ll like other bars they like. If users don’t have a minimum of info then I don’t think that can ever really get off the ground.
What really annoys me though is that an internet enabled camera phone allows no way to upload a picture – short of emailing it, which is a headache I don’t even want to begin dealing with.