iPhone Developer Camp

The Apple iPhone is available now and has been getting lots of great press for its innovative user interface. I attended the recent iPhoneDevCamp in San Francisco http://barcamp.org/iPhoneDevCamp with my coworkers Eddie Chen and John Cahill (with remote support from our visual designers Molly Barksdale and Donna Brown).

We wanted to explore the feasibility of taking one of our enterprise apps designed for larger systems and scaling it down to run on a small mobile device like the iPhone. We investigated changes needed to the UI to be appropriate for a small display, utilizing the multi-touch interaction style of the iPhone, and to see how hard or easy development is for the iPhone.

The application we chose for this is called BMC Service Request Management http://www.bmc.com/products/proddocview/0,2832,19052_0_77980702_148142,00.html . It allows anyone in a company to request a request an IT or other business service such as resetting a password, or fixing a connectivity issue. We pared this application down to the basic features that a customer would be most likely to want on a mobile device – the ability to recreate a request and to track the status of existing requests.

The iPhone turned out to be surprisingly easy to develop for. It is similar to creating a web application running on the Safari browser. There is little iPhone specific coding required.

The Dev Camp lasted 48 hours from 6 PM on a Friday night to 6 PM on Sunday night. There were almost 400 developers in attendance and it was a fun and cooperative environment with lots of talented and creative people doing interesting things and always willing to help others. We were able to put our application together and have it ready for the demo session Sunday afternoon. A video of our demo is available at http://blip.tv/file/306971