iPhone SDK released


Apple released their developer kit for iPhone yesterday. I watched the presentation off their website this morning. Yowza. That whole market is just gonna explode. I will be very surprised if Apple's iPhone doesn't end up dominating mobile. Even now, they're impressive.

It's interesting that Apple has made iPhone development only possible via a Mac running Leopard. Hell, I can't even use it! Gotta get Leopard. It was kind of like Vista with me. BFD. I was also happy to hear them to tout the Model-Controller-View philosophy. I'm all over that, having been messing with Ruby on Rails for the last few months.

For big companies, the news that Exchange Server will be accessible via iPhones must be good news. The demos that various companies showed were worth watching: EA Games, Epocrates, SalesForce.com, AOL. The premise of that game Spore from EA was funny. You start out as a paramecium, a slime mold, or something like that and work your way up. Kinda like you and me. Karma Heights. Available upgrades: spinal column, gills, opposable thumbs, massive Chess Club brain, etc. I don't know. I'm making most of that stuff up. I did see a spine in there though.

Anyhoo, the bottom line is that iPhones are probably going to do what everyone hoped PDA's and Blackberries would do. As I've said before, Apple gets it. Sure, they're like Microsoft, control freaks, yadda yadda, but unlike Microsoft, they get it. And that's why they're successful. What is it they get, you ask? Aesthetics, simplicity, logic, coolness. Something Microsoft can't buy. Even Microsoft's wanna-purchases are uncool. Yahoo? Come on.

So, what can libraries do with iPhones? Practically any report you run can be made paperless and mobile. Straight to PDF is the simplest, but for interaction, I've been toying with Ruby on Rails. Using Rails, you can omit items from your list once you've found them, tag problems, upload changes back to the ILS. Talking to the ILS is the biggest problem.

I've been working on a method to run our pull lists, so that a staff member using an iPhone can do it all, eliminating the need for a paper copy. We still need to generate the list within Horizon, then export that text file. From there, it's uploaded to a Rails app that slices and dices the report for us. If I could get the last activity date info out from the ILS, then we could give up printing it entirely. I'm envisioning that this pull list formatter/archiver could reside at the central site, and all agencies within our consortium would use it.

I have an iPhone library success story of my own: I was working the reference desk, and a patron needed to make some color copies, which we don't offer. So, I told him about Staples, FedEx/Kinko's, etc. I was about to look up the location of a Kinko's on the web for him, when it dawned on me that I had my iPhone. I went to Google Maps, searched on Kinkos, and it displayed all the locations in my area. I tapped on the pin closest to my location, and up popped the phone number, URL, etc. of that location. I tapped the phone number, and when their answering machine told me they were closed, I was able to tell the patron to save himself a trip. Not as cool as searching for all the Thai restaurants in my area, but still. I was impressed. The patron was too.

If you're a reference librarian or a systems librarian, I would recommend getting an iPhone.

Posted: Fri - March 7, 2008 at 01:14 PM      

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