Andrew Mager

Hundreds of web developers, designers, and ordinary geeks gathered this weekend to build usable applications for the iPhone. The barcamp.org event was hosted at Adobe Town Hall and featured dozens of sponsors. The hack-a-thon began on Saturday morning at 9:00 a.m. and culminated Sunday at 2:00 p.m., when each team had a chance to present their app.

Some teams included Yahoo! developers, and others included complete strangers who had just met the day before. I give credit to all teams who participated, but here are the ten most memorable creations:

10. iPhoneVote

This application was the first one presented at the hack-a-thon, and it was used as a voting system for the event. You would tilt your iPhone in portrait mode to vote yay, and tilt it horizontally to give a negative vote. There was a laptop set up in the front of the room, and it was updated in real time. Unfortunately, I don’t think the app reset each time a new team would present, so the votes just tallied up into the 80s. Even though it wasn’t used for it’s official purpose, it was a great burst of hope for future apps like this, and boosted the morale of the developers in the room. You will see the display laptop in some of my screenshots below.

9. AppMarks

If you have an iPhone, make AppMarks your Safari home page. The interface models the iPhone front door, but instead, each icon links to a web app or html bookmark. I mentioned AppMarks in this blog post yesterday. AppMarks is cool, but I want to see more functionality. If they want people to add them as their home page, they need to always be thinking of new features. There are other products like Mojits that are right on their heels.

8. PickleView

The only sports application presented today is called PickleView. Ryan Christianson from the Walt Disney Internet Group explained that in baseball, a “pickle” is a play in which a base runner is trapped between bases with fielders tossing the ball back and forth and usually ending with the runner being tagged out. Their iPhone app visualizes a boxscore view of your favorite teams’s stats, and then displays a mock Twitter feed of PickleView’s friends. I am not sure if that’s how this app works but they have a cool concept.

7. Fluther

I liked the Fluther app because they focused on modular code and fresh CSS specifically for iPhone. They basically took their normal home page and simplified it, stripping a lot of Javascript and verbose markup. I had never heard of Fluther before, but it made me interested in their services simply because they built an application with semantics in mind. They provide a community-driven question and answer hub, and their app was seamless on the iPhone.

6. The Pool

The more I think of this app, the more I like it. Imagine your iPhone screen as a pool of water, and every time you touch the screen, a ripple effect occurs. You even see ripples when you don’t touch the screen, and as you’d expect, those ripples are from other members of the community. If you happen to touch the same spot, at the same time as someone else, you will catch a fish. This app is a perfect product of a hack-a-thon because it seems useless, but some users will become addicted to it. Here is a web version of it. Mouse events are disabled

5. TeleMoose

This is not a hunting game, unless you are hunting for books. TeleMoose takes a very complex Amazon engine and optimizes it for the iPhone interface. The goal at iPhoneDevCamp was to build applications that would not only work on the phone’s wi-fi capability, but also on AT&T’s tortoise-like EDGE network. I liked TeleMoose because it was seamless on the slow network. I would like to see some creativity on their CSS though. The crowd shouted, “Userful!” when TeleMoose creator Dan Wood showcased the “Share” link. This is a tradition of MacHack.

4. iTunes Remote-o-Matic

Rob Chang took a minute to set this demo up, but as soon as he started, I knew it would work beautifully. Chang basically transformed a really expensive cell phone into a remote device to control his iTunes library on his MacBook. He was able to change tracks and move among albums with ease, and he didn’t even point his iPhone at the computer. I am still trying to figure out how this one works.

3. Tilt

This was my favorite game presented at the hack-a-thon. Javascript afficianado Joe Hewitt, along with help from Nicole Lazzaro, Colin Toomey, Kent Bye, and Felipe Ortiz, built a game that claims to be 1.5 dimentional. Flip, who likes to eat falling leaves and butterflies, will only catch his dinner if you rotate your iPhone in time for him to be under the falling food. You can try it on your desktop or laptop browser, but good luck trying to rotate your screen.

2. moPhaic

This one is kinda useless, but it received the most attention at iPhoneDevCamp:

On Saturday, they had four iPhones side-by-side on the overhead projector, and text would scroll as a marquee across the displays. At the end of the day Sunday, the developers of moPhaic gathered everybody with an iPhone willing to participate in creating the longest iPhone marquee. There is gonna be a video of this somewhere on the internet soon.

This almost looks like a religious ceremony.

1. Liquid Navigation Hack

Have you ever heard of Firebug? It’s the absolute best Firefox extension for developers. If you are building applications for the iPhone, it might be your greatest debugging tool.

But Firebug for the iPhone, iBug.js, is not my favorite app. It’s Joe’s liguid navigation hack. Almost 25% of all apps presented at iPhoneDevCamp used it. Hewitt’s Javascript and CSS package mirror the iPhone’s iPod application, and use a fluid navigation scheme that will become commonplace to any iPhone user. This is my favorite app because so many iPhone hackers used it this weekend as a backbone for their application. This framework will work nicely for future iPhone development because it’s lightweight, elegant, and comfortable for anyone trying to navigate their Apple smart phone. The source code is available here. This would be my starting point if I were to develop an iPhone app.