It’s always the same. I almost always find that I try and do too many things at once. As a result some things get neglected.

Hahlo

The last time I posted anything here was when I launched Hahlo, and that was almost three weeks ago. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time chasing bugs, and trying to improve it. You have no idea how much I wish I could get my hands on an iPhone, beause trying o develop for a device that you can’t get near is very difficult.

Who knows exactly when they will release the iPhone in Australia, but I don’t see it arriving until mid next year. I’m kind of hoping that we might benefit from the delay by getting an updated version. Even better would be if they release new iPods with similiar functionality (obviously without the phone bit).

Following the launch of Hahlo, I asked for (useful) feedback. I got a little bit, but for the most part it wasn’t too useful. I also did some searching (yes I googled my own app) and found plenty of ‘interesting’ comments. One person who shall remain nameless made a less than complimentary comment about Hahlo and its design… I’ll keep what I think about one of their iPhone app designs to myself…

Due to the rushed nature of Hahlo’s development there were some areas where I kind of coded myself into a corner, with no way out other than to start again. To a certain extent thats what I’ve started to do. Using the super nifty iUI library developed by Joe Hewitt I’ve started work on what will be Hahlo 2.0. A simple thing like switching to processing the JSON feed server-side has allowed me to easily add a couple of the things I had originally wanted in my original version, such as parsing url’s in tweets so they become clickable links. you can have a look at the new bea here: http://beta.hahlo.com/iui

Other iPhone related stuffs

I couldn’t stop at just one iPhone ‘app’, so I started work on another. This time I thought of something that would be truly useful on the iPhone, a mobile interface for Lighthouse App. If you’re looking for a simple online bug tracking app then Lighthouse is really worth a look. I haven’t made a huge amount of progress on it as yet, but I will eventually find some time to spend on it.

A couple of days ago Steven Frank (from Panic) released a super simple wiki designed specifically with the iPhone in mind. W2 has the basics, you can create and edit your wiki pages, you can even use markdown for formatting. Theres no login management at the moment, so everyone will have access. but if thats a problem you could always just use htaccess to restrict it.

I spent a couple of hours last night mashing together the W2 wiki with the iUI library to make a wiki that looked like the rest of the iPhone interface. Theres a few buggy bits but overall it works ok. I had to play around with the W2 source code a little, but nothing too complex. You can have a play with my work-in-progress version here: http://beta.hahlo.com/wiki/

Keep in mind that the wiki is designed to work best on the iPhone (although I can’t test that…) or Safari. However… it looks completely different in Safari 3 to what it looks like in the latest Webkit build. Check this out. I’ll have to look into why exactly that is.

Blog neglect

I’m still working on my redesign, its along time coming, but like everything else I will eventually get it finished. I’ve got all the major parts done (I think) but its all the fine tuning that takes time, and I want to get it just right before I make it live.

Also in the works is my entry for the sandbox design comp. Again the major bits are done, I just need to sit down and finish it off. Entries close in a little under two weeks time, so I guess I should get onto that pretty soon.

Well, thats probably the longest blog entry I’ve written in a while. And its probably a good indication that I should post more often.