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Amazon’s the latest iPhonized webapp I accidentally ran into… there are some flaws though…f.e. while you can certainly buy products while on-the-go, it’s not possible to maintain your wishlist for future consideration. deep-links to products on the amazon-mainpage aren’t redirected to the mobile version, which I think they should.
interesting that - though the iPhone does a pretty good job on making standard-websites usable on a mobile - most major players see value in offering a customized version of their offering…keep ‘em coming!

since Google brought the blessings of IMAP to Gmail, I’m regularly using the iPhone mail-client on-the-go (on Symbian-phones, the java-based Gmail-client still outperforms the iPhone easily, if only for search-features and conversion of attached documents).

so I was following some incoming contact-requests and was happily surprised that XING has customized their business-focused social network for the iPhone. seems like most features have been ported, although user-interface & look-and-feel are far from iPhone-posterboy Facebook. when I inspected the app’s URL, I was surprised to find that the iPhone-port wasn’t done by XING but by sevenval, a german (?) service provider specialized in bringing webapps to mobile.

to try out XING on your iPhone, just point Safari to xing.com, you’ll be redirected automatically.

Update: according to XING’s blog the iPhone port is active at least since Nov. 9th…

Googler Dolapo Falola has spent his 20% self-allocated time improving the mobile version of Google Reader, especially tinkering with the iPhone-ized app, which is easily the most comfortable way to read feeds on the go - thx! all important features (sharing & starring items, tags) are accessible through the top navigation and the app is sufficiently fast even on slow EDGE/GSM connections.

(just goto reader.google.com on your iPhone).

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on July 6th-8th, Adobe is hosting iPhoneDevCamp in San Francisco, a BarCamp-styled gathering “to develop web-based applications and optimize web sites for iPhone. It is a non-commercial event, organized by volunteers, with attendance free to all. By the completion of the weekend event, a number of iPhone-ready web applications and web sites will be launched to the public.”. more than 120 developers have already signed up, temporarily establishing the most highest iPhone/person-density on the globe there’s also some sweet irony since Adobe is hosting the event while their Flash (Lite)-platform initially won’t be supported by iPhone.

The University of Washington’s Emerging Technology group published a few key-facts and guidelines for web-application developers targetting the upcoming iPhone, including User-Agent-string, javascript-limitations and user-interface conventions. No specific info yet on the Javascript(?)-hooks Safari will offer to make phone-calls or control the integrated Google Maps-client, but a good list of things to keep in mind…

update: since the original page has been taken down by Apple’s request (one really has to wonder why…), here’s the cached document.

the official Linden Blog features the transcript of yesterdays Town Hall talk with Cory Linden, CTO of Linden Labs. obviously, Cory mostly addresses issues regarding the recent open sourcing of the SecondLife client-software, like possible plugin-infrastructures, the installation of CVS and if/when Linden’s server-software is following the client’s path into public. not very much definitive info, but there is a roadmap promised to be released later this quarter.

Arrington predicts the death of DRM. so be it. and quick!

all the hype & gorgeous pics about Apple’s iPhone aside, consider what David Pogue from the NYT - one of very few with actual hands-on experience - is reporting:

Both in the onstage demo and during my hands-on hour, the Web speed was OK—not great, but OK. But all of this used the phone’s built-in Wi-Fi, not Cingular’s notoriously slow Edge network. I couldn’t help wondering how bad the speed will be when you’re connecting over the cellular airwaves.

lets hope Apple adds 3G-support until this sweety is launching in europe (Q4/2007).

Ryan Carson points out that the iPhone is the first mobile platform really suitable for mobile web-apps. I’ld like to add that it really is the first mobile device capable of running AJAX-apps (given that it runs a fairly decent port of Safari, with full Javascript-support). since the phone is based on Mac OS, I’ld also bet that a Flash-plugin isn’t too far away.

sitepen has an interesting post on how offline web-applications implemented with the Dojo Offline Toolkit (DOT) could look & work like. including detailed mock-ups of a - fictional - offline Gmail-prototype. offline webapps could be the next big thing, but DOTs approach (basically installing a local proxy-application) doesn’t seem very intriguing to me.