Today I looked at the new iPhone features built into Dashcode, Apple’s development environment that was originally created for Dashboard Widgets. Upon loading the application, I was presented with three new iPhone development options: Custom, Browser, and RSS.

Development

While Custom is going to give you a blank template to work with and Browser gives you a basic list view for you to fill in with your own content, the RSS template provides you a pre-coded environment to add your RSS feed and publish to your website. Today I decided to make my own iPhone version of this website.

Just like creating a Dashboard widget, you have the ability to change fonts, colors, image, and much more. Using the predefined template, I modifed the colors and background to match the look and feel of the full site you’re probably viewing this on right now. Having only used Dashcode once before to create a Podcast widget for OS X, I found no issues creating a mobile website for the iPhone. All the menus and toolbars are the same, though the library of items you can add to your mobile site are different (for good reason, of course).

As you develop your iPhone mobile RSS page, you can test it inside of the Aspen Simulator — an iPhone running on your computer (I mentioned this in the last entry). Each time I made a major change to the operation of the mobile page, I would click on the Run button, view it inside the Simulator, and operate it just like it’s on my mobile phone.

Deployment

Once I was satisfied with my changes, I went to the file menu inside Dashcode and clicked on the Deploy option. I then chose to save it to my desktop where I would be able to take it and upload it to my website.

After upload it to the labs.blackice912.net site, I decided to launch it on my actual iPhone to see the results. It turns out the results were pretty bad. No news loaded at all. I then tested it inside the Simulator and got the same results. Why was it working on my computer but not once I published it to the internet?

Well after activating the debug mode inside of Mobile Safari, I found out why. As I should have remembered, you cannot have JavaScript on one site grab data from another site. It is cross site scripting and can be considered dangerous. Realizing this, I moved the code over to blackice912.net and launched it with success.

So are there ways to use a RSS feed that is hosted on another site and use it? With the addition of PHP, yes you could do this and not run into that issue.

Conclusion

Apple has really done a lot of things right with this new SDK. While I still need to do some more investigation into the native application side of it, I am impressed with what I have seen today. You can really create a powerful web application with the SDK today and an even better one once the 2.0 firmware hits phones in June.

If you’re interested in seeing the mobile site I created, visit blackice912.net/mobile on your iPhone/iTouch or in Safari. It will not load properly in any other browser!

So I was going over my statistics on a few websites I run, and ran into some interesting information:

Above: January 2008 Stats for IPFOO.COM

Those numbers are quite impressive for a website that is designed to show you your IP Address. I was pretty stoked about it and was thinking about what I can do to improve the site, until I got down to the detailed statistics:

Above: Darn, it's all XML!

So nearly all of my traffic is being directed to my XML output page that is used in a popular Firefox extension. While the traffic is still pretty impressive, there really isn’t anyway I can tap into the potential behind it.

However, I would like to thank the ~1500 hits a month that are visiting the actual website and using it. Those visitors just got an improved layout with additional data and features.

So if you have a minute, check out IPFOO.COM: The Mr. T inspired IP Address website!