Today, at 5:55pm I rolled up to my local AT&T retailer and hopped in line (~30th place) to pick up an iPhone.
I waited about an hour in line, mostly because their POS systems failed after the first two transactions and they had to write everything down on paper, but I did get my iPhone.
This is mainly because I really would like to see what I can develop for the platform – closed platforms where everybody is on a level playing field really intrigue me. Innovating in such a confined space, especially one with the constraints of the form factor and touch controls, is thrilling to me – just makes it more of a challenge.
I hope to have a really nice iPhone application ready for alpha testing soon – and for once I’m focusing on UI look and feel, rather than capabilities, I think for the iPhone, especially if you want to be a commercial deal, you need to think about presentation rather than abundance of features first.
Anyhow, on to first impressions:
1) I like it
2) Wow
3) My application looks teeny in Safari. Oops.
4) Sounds great (iPod and Phone)
5) Drag and Drop is broken.
6) Needs to follow Apple Mail rules, especially Junk mail. I’ve spent more time deleting junk than anything I think.
I also found this site which is a great resource for Webkit stuffs, specifically catered towards their use on the iPhone.
I will of course be using PHP as the backend for my applications, with Prototype/Scriptaculous for the clientside stuffs. I’ll be interested to see the ratio of Ruby to PHP apps for the iPhone considering the overabundance of Apple users in the Ruby community.
Oh, and EDGE is pretty speedy, even here in BFE Florida. I tested with Digg, 7 seconds till the menu bar started to load, 23 seconds for the entire frontpage to render. I noticed my app is kinda slow so I’m going to work with content compression tomorrow. I also was able to watch YouTube videos over EDGE without much lead time and no buffer under-runs.
– Davey
P.S.
Apple, a free graphics library would be great if you want to integrate the look and feel 