Just a quick post to thank Steve Cave from About.com for his positive review of DailySkater. If you’ve never read Steve’s blog then you should and bookmark it while you’re at it. Lots of great information for beginners and seasoned veterans. If you’d like to see DailySkater on Android or any other platform then please post a comment below.

If you’d like to download the DailySkater trick tip app for iPhone then you can do so here:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dailyskater/id404713569?mt=8

If you’re into skateboarding and have an iPhone then my latest app is just for you! It’s called DailySkater and will cost you nothing, but will hopefully be invaluable when trying to perfect your street skills. DailySkater has a library of over 100 skateboard trick tips and new tricks are added daily. Each time a new trick is added a push notification will be delivered directly to your iPhone. It’s a great way to take a break from whatever you’re doing and watch a 1-2 minute vid of a trick you’d like to learn. You can download DailySkater by going to the following link:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dailyskater/id404713569?mt=8

and you can see a few screens here:

Please download and tell all your skate buddies. Hope you enjoy!

I’m testing the WordPress iPhone app’s publishing capabilities. I’ve found that it’s a great way to manage blog comments as well. For example, I just purged a bunch of spam comments as seen in the attached photo. Testing photo upload capabilities as well. Anyone tried the WordPress app on the iPad yet?

I’ve been playing around with the iPhone SDK mainly for the purposes of integrating the iPhone with the Ublip GPS tracking system. If you’re interested, you can read some of the research I’ve done regarding iPhone GPS tracking. I’ll be continuing my research and sharing it in the Ublip blog. But the point of this post is to mention that just this morning my iPhone went into emergency mode where I couldn’t get it to sync with my Mac and it was completely off the network. It turns out that Apple just released a new version of the iPhone SDK and OS today. So I started downloading the 195 MB file about two hours ago. Apparently I have 5 hours to go. Needless to say, Apple’s servers are getting hammered right now. The image below about says it all. I feel like I’m on dial-up again!

I have to share this tidbit of information since I spent a considerable amount of time trying to configure my iPhone to work with Google Apps Premier. At Ublip we’re using Google Apps Premier for our email, docs, spreadsheets, etc. Ever since I purchased my iPhone I’ve been using mobile Safari to check my Gmail account. This has grown a bit old so I decided to take the plunge and start using the POP service. I referred to this very useful howto for configuring my iPhone. Yet two very important pieces of information were left out and caused me much frustration and distraction. After you go through the eight steps make sure you do the following:

1. Enable SSL for outgoing email (under the Advanced menu in your mail settings)
2. Specify a username/password for SMTP auth (these are your full email address and password)

That should get everything working as expected. I hope this saves you an hour or two of hassle.

Well it was pretty much inevitable. I kept delaying the purchase of my iPhone in hopes of some sort of GPS announcement. The reality is that we’ll probably have to wait until the next version for GPS support. I gave up the incredible Blackberry 8800, with built-in GPS, for the iPhone this weekend. The main reason I switched is that we’re planning some interesting developments for the iPhone at Ublip. The mobile OS road to get to the iPhone has been an interesting one and basically looks like: Symbian > Windows Mobile > RIM > OS X.

The main reason for this post is to discuss the HTTP_USER_AGENT string for the iPhone. For my device it looks like:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C28 Safari/419.3

I’ve seen several companies implement a completely different URL for the iPhone version of their application. Yet some companies such as 37signals detect the iPhone and display optimized content. A perfect example is their tadalist product. If you have an iPhone check it out and you’ll see what I mean. Although the iPhone does an INCREDIBLE job of rendering content as you would see it in desktop Safari, the user experience is much better when optimizing for the device (big buttons, fonts, screen transitions, etc).

If you’d like to see the user agent for your iPhone then simply browse to the following page on the Ublip site:

http://iphone.ublip.com/user_agent.php

If you’re doing some sort of detection and determining what content to display (ie indexOf(“iPhone”)) beware that the iPod touch may have a different user agent string, yet still runs mobile Safari. I plan on doing some follow up posts on server-side device detection using Ruby on Rails.