Short: Bloglines Users, go to i.bloglines.com on your iPhone.
Last Saturday, I got an iPhone. It was great, but the full size Bloglines on it, with the Zoom Mode, sucked. Trying to read large volumes of text is a massive pain on the iPhone.
On Sunday morning, I started working on an iPhone specific site for Bloglines. By mid-afternoon on Sunday, I had something that worked reasonably well.
I spent the rest of this week taking in refinements and new feature suggestions from everyone inside the company.
Thanks to everyone on the Bloglines team for helping out with this project. It is by far the coolest thing we have released this year so far.
The iBloglines site is written with:
- 253 lines of C++ in 5 files
- 382 lines of client side Javascript in 1 file
- 287 lines of ETL Templates in 8 files
Of course, this is only counting the code we wrote specifically for the iPhone, but it does make me doubt that you need to use a Scripting Langauge for rapid development, if your framework is good enough.
iBloglines is built upon iUI . Originally we tried to just using it as a base, but in the end, we essentially forked it. We entertained using Dojo 0.9 on the iPhone, but since the only required browser to support is MobileSafari, it would of been pretty heavy.
We used The Electric Template Language, or ETL for generating the HTML. Relatively young compared to things like ClearSilver, it is much cleaner and was a joy to work with.
Developing for the iPhone has been pretty fun, but I believe Apple has been less helpful that they should be.
We might not need a SDK for ‘native’ Applications,
but we need better tools for the iPhone.
Simple things, like making an official iPhone Simulator, like Microsoft has for Windows Mobile, which had identical rendering to the iPhone would be very helpful. iPhoney is a good start, but it really should be an official Apple Developer tool.
We did most of our development on Firefox with Firebug, and then ported it to the MobileSafari later, because the tools for Firefox are so much better.
In closing: I love my iPhone, I hope Apple will hurry up and make better developer tools, and I hope the Bloglines users enjoy the new iBloglines!
Bloglines is my favorite mobile site – I use Berry Bloglines on my Blackberry, which would probably work well on the iPhone especially if you were feeling bandwidth-challenged.
You say “iPhone specific,” but to what degree?
Is there any chance that i.bloglines.com would be better than http://www.bloglines.com/mobile on something like the 320×320 Treo 700p?
(The iPhone is 320×480. Evidently http://www.bloglines.com/mobile was developed on a 160×160 Treo 600.)
Ahh the pains of living in Northern Minnesota- No AT&T/Cingular.. which means not iPhone for me..
The biggest problem with the Treo, is the lack of JavaScript and CSS support. MobileSafari has pretty good JS, and that is what lets us do many of the tricks that make iBloglines nice.
Hi Paul -
Are you still working on iBloglines? I’ve been a Bloglines user for years but switched to Google Reader after trying to use Bloglines on my iPhone – I’ve tried out iBloglines and it has a lot of potential but I’m seeing a number of problems:
The big one – it crashes MobileSafari on Edge _all the time_ – like on every use – I’ve heard this from another user as well.
Lots of little nits that make it harder to use:
–sorting date ascending makes things harder to read, especially given Bloglines’ updating policy, which means you end up with many duplicate posts – so it’s a lot of scrolling through to find the one new post.
–refreshing the feed page takes you back to the main page.
… and some others I’ve forgotten now. So I’m wondering if you’re still working on it or if I can encourage you to do so?
My email is my name at gmail, btw, if you have any other questions.
I agree about the crashing. Its the only website that consistently crashes my iphone so far.
any chance that the articles will be sorted using date descending so that newest posts appear on top? this in my view is the single biggest usability flaw that iBloglines has
i still love it though
On sort order of items: On beta or classic, click on the feed. Edit the preferences for sort order, and the iBloglines site should respect it. It currently doesn’t expose the preference within the iBloglines UI, but it respects settings form the main site.