I’m proud to announce that we’ve just crossed this significant milestone. After weeks of crunching bugs and rolling out update after update, Pickleview is officially a 1.0 release.
What started as a simple itch to scratch has turned into a full-fledged iPhone application, used by true honest-to-goodness people. Really!
The feedback has been nothing short of spectacular. We’ve received tons of praise and we’ve listened to your feedback, sometimes pushing out updates within hours of suggestions. A gigantic thank you to everyone who pushed us to keep upping the ante.
An extra amount of thanks to Major League Baseball and Twitter, the entities responsible for providing us data. Without them Pickleview would not exist.
To commemorate this milestone, I’m happy to say that we’re releasing the Pickleview code under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. You are free to learn from it, distribute and modify (as long as you share alike). View the source here. Thanks to the good folk at iPhoneWebDev for hosting our files. We’re hoping it becomes the repository for open-source iPhone web applications.
Lastly, stay tuned. We’ve got things in the works, gears are grinding, and overtime is being spent.
A quick screenshot from Pickleview’s Mint. If only the world agreed.
So, Mint. It works beautifully on iPhone, but having two columns on a 320px wide screen leaves much to be desired. Mint’s preferences has an option to “Enable single-column mode”, but I’d like to keep Mint’s great multi-column view on my desktop Mac. Wouldn’t it be great to have Mint display full multi-columns on browsers, but have a single-column view specifically for iPhone?
Update: Shaun Inman’s packaged all this into a one-click Pepper install, so ignore my inane ramblings and get to downloading!
Update #2: Now with fancy screenshot! (via)
After some poking around, I’ve optimized my Mint install to make it iPhone friendly. Works a treat (tested w/ default style). Here’s how to do it:
Open: yourdomain.tld/mint/app/includes/head.php
Find:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
Add After:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" />
Find:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/<?php echo $Mint->cfg['preferences']['style']; ?>/style.css" />
Add After:
<link href="app/styles/mint-iphone.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" charset="utf-8" />
Now grab this here stylesheet, and upload to:
yourdomain.tld/mint/app/styles/mint-iphone.cssThat’s it! Now I have multi-columns in my browser, and single-column goodness on iPhone. 
I want to talk a little bit about a side project that’s gleefully taken up most of my free time.
Over the weekend I attended iPhoneDevCamp, a gathering of web geeks from around the globe with one purpose: to create applications for iPhone.
I went into the event with little-to-no expectation of anything happening. It being my first BarCamp I didn’t know the atmosphere, how we would mingle, etc.
What happened that weekend was something I won’t forget for some time. It was a great feeling to walk through the Adobe Town Hall and see energy popping from 300 minds at once. You could feel the electricity as people discovered loopholes and solved riddles that had puzzled iPhone developers since its release.
My story was rather interesting. After a canceled flight and barely making the 6:00pm start time (United: Never Again), I was sticking with my usual schtick: talk to no one, avoid eye contact. Twenty minutes in, I suddenly realized the magnitude of the event and was determined to talk to someone– anyone.
It was then I spotted a couple of individuals at a corner table, mingling away. I took a chance, and introduced myself. Ryan and Seto were their names. A short while later, Estelle joined the small table, and we started brainstorming.
I’d been developing a small web app I dubbed LiveScore for a Dodgers’ fan forum that I run. It gave real-time updates of Dodger scores, as well as some vital stats of each game. On a whim I opened up the app and showed it to the group. The gang really took to it, and from that point brainstorming focused around LiveScore.
Minutes later, we had a prototype: A web app/mashup that would combine live game tracking with the ability to chat along with friends on Twitter.
And so, Pickleview was born.
In the span of 36 hours, we four furiously coded together the required bytes to get the app off the ground, and wrapped it around a native-looking UI. It was thrilling to say the least, if not completely overwhelming. I don’t believe I’ve ever coded so much in so short a time.
We had our small moment in the sun, making some top ten lists and being interviewed by the San Jose Mercury Press. But the real payoff was being able to release a very useful app for others to enjoy.
That, and comments that would make anyone jump for joy. Thanks again, Joe.
Since the camp, we’ve been working hard to improve our little app that could. We’ve added features such as play-by-play, visual cues on score, balls/strikes tracking, and lots and lots of bug fixes. I have to say I’m enjoying the ride. All for an app I’m proud to be a part of.
I should reiterate that neither I nor Ryan nor Seto nor Estelle had ever met each other before Friday. It was a great experience to be able to accomplish so much with virtual strangers. Pickleview, however, is quickly making us closer acquaintances.
Shamelessly stolen from iSee:
[Dramatic reenactment]
Adobe: So, you want the flash player on your new phone, eh?
Steve: Yep.
Adobe: OK, that’ll be 5% of retail sales.
Steve: Ah, no.
Adobe: OK, 2.5%, bottom line.
Steve: Look, we can release this device without the Flash player at all.
Adobe: No way, we rule dynamic content on the web–if you want to give people the “real web” you’ve got to play ball.
Steve [to the public]: Develop using Web 2.0, Flash Player will suck your battery so it’s really better that you don’t have FP. [applies Reality Distortion Field].
Public: [Buys 1,000,000 phones in the first week]
Adobe: Ah, Steve? Steve? Are you there?
Steve: Hmm, oh it’s you. Can I help you with something?
Adobe: Ah, how’s about $5/unit.
Steve [Applying RDF]: *You think it would be strategic to offer the Flash Player for free on the iPhone.*
Adobe: Ah… We’ve decided it would be strategic to offer the player for free on iPhones… [blinks a few times, regains focus]. But you’ve got to pay for the development and maintenance.
Steve: Already done.
Ok, this is too awesome not to share. You know the annoying way you have to tab into the punctuation layout to type a period? This required no less than three keystrokes (Tab into layout, hit “.”, Tab out (or hit space)).
Save those keystrokes! Just hold down the “.?123″ button, and slide your finger over to the period, and release. The layout will then return to the Qwerty layout. Neat!
This works with any punctuation.
Update: Looks like David Pogue got to this first. Credit where it’s due.
Update 06/16/2009: With the release of iPhone OS 3.0, this tip is no longer necessary. With 3.0, simply tap and hold any link to bring up an option to, among others, “Open in New Page”. I’ll leave this up for posterity, and for those of you that have not upgraded yet.
After experiencing and thoroughly enjoying the iPhone for the weekend, I’ve found that one of my biggest gripes is that there’s no “Open in New Tab” command, which makes all the sense in the world since there is no right click anywhere in the OS.
Still, one of my favorite hobbies is to peruse Daring Fireball for the latest in Apple news, and open each linked article in a new tab behind my active tab so I can finish reading the site. It got to be too tedious to do this with iPhone, since every time I clicked on an outside link, it took me completely out of the site, and completely out of the experience.
So I took it upon myself to jerry-rig up a solution. I’ve created a small bookmarklet that grabs all links in a page, and forces them to… um, open in a new window. Wait! Don’t throw that tomato at me yet! Normally this would be absolute madness to unleash this upon the web, but iPhone in its infinite simplicity treats target=”blank” as a trigger to open a new tab. Tiny annoyance solved!
The easiest way to do this is to open safari, and drag the bookmarklet (linked below) to your bookmarks bar. Then just sync to your iPhone. Now you can trigger new tabs to your heart’s content.
Imagine that, a useful application of target=”blank”. Watch out for flying pigs.
Update: I’ve added a bookmarklet that does the exact opposite, in case you need an undo. (I needed an undo):
