iPhone Web Apps: monitter.com

Experimenting with iPhone web apps

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Ok. so monitter.com has received a few incremental updates since I first wrote it (see previous post).

The monitter site gets a pretty steady stream of visitors, which is somewhat gratifying - although it makes no money (just like it's counterpart: twitter). However, it has served as a great engine for me to test and experiment (without those experiments being totally pointless).

So what's new with monitter?

As the post title suggests, I've created an iPhone web app for monitter. It's in very early alpha. The motivation behind this? Firstly, I want to build a native iPhone application and i figured that the best area to start in is one that I already know well - in this case, live twitter monitoring. However since I have almost no free time at the moment, I decided to build a web app first, to try and gauge whether people would be interested in a dedicated twitter monitor for their iPhones.

Also: through Gruber, i learned that the latest revision of the iPhone software supports fullscreen, chromeless web apps. Which means that on a 2.1 iPhone, the new monitter web app will in fact feel like a native application.

At the moment, the app doesn't even support all the features of the monitter.com site. You can't add columns (in fact you only get one). It doesn't currently remember your searches (the cookies are turned off - although I'm working re-activating this now.. so it might already work by the time you are reading this). I'm sure there are also a multitude of other bugs, which is why I'm calling it alpha testing.. so please, if you're an iphone user, give it a whirl.

Just type in: http://monitter.com/iphoneapp/ into Mobile Safari and then use the + button down the bottom to make it into a Web Clip on your home screen (this allows you to experiment with the chromeless application).

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