Introducing...LED Light for iPhone 4!

The iPhone 4 comes with a super bright LED for flash. Why not use it as a flashlight?

The app also includes an adjustable strobe light mode:

A video from a beta tester (thanks Michael!)

Update 7/7/10: The app has been approved!

Also, a free (iAd supported version) is available for download here.

Going to WWDC is a pilgrimage that every Apple developer should make, and as a first-timer it was quite a spiritual experience.

On keynote Monday, I arrived just before 6am at Moscone West and found the line already wrapped around three-quarters of the building. Anticipation and excitement increased as the hours slowly passed. Finally at around 9:30am they opened the keynote room, causing a small stampede of folks trying to try get a seat close to the stage.

In the keynote room, the atmosphere was electric. Press photographers were posted with their huge telephoto lenses poised at the main stage, and everyone in the crowd was trying to connect to the congested wifi network in efforts to communicate with the outside world. Throughout Steve's presentation my attention was split between furiously taking notes on Google Wave and trying to take in the whole experience.

The conference really does bring developers from around the world; throughout the week I met folks from France, Germany, Australia, and more. I also noticed that there was a good distribution of younger and more experienced older folks who have been around the block. However, you could tell by the bathroom lines that the gender split was much more uneven...probably about 97/3.

The catered lunch was not bad the first day, but after that variations on the sandwich/wrap got old very quickly. Thankfully, snacks throughout between sessions and my favorite--Odwalla drinks--kept me awake throughout the day.

Though I can't delve into details of the sessions, I can say that their quality was top notch. They started and ended on time, the presentations were well rehearsed and of high content quality, and the demos were fantastic. I'm glad that they will be available for download later, because they went by fast. I found the labs very helpful as well. It was really nice having an Apple engineer to ask questions and help you through specific issues in code.

During the conference I was a bit starstruck when I met the developers of some really popular apps: Angry Birds, Words With Friends, Bump, Things... I had to remind myself that behind every app there are developers, who are real people.

WWDC is a unique gathering of tons of smart people, bleeding-edge technology, and exciting new software, all in one place. I learned a ton, met lots of cool developers, and left saturated with new information and ideas.

Safari 5 (released this week at WWDC) now supports browser extensions! So, I've ported my popular Flickr Original Firefox extension, you can give it a try here!

I found the extension development process to be much easier than Firefox, especially with testing. The Extension Builder is built in to Safari and makes it easy to edit your extension info and content items. You can also quickly reload the extension during testing and build when you're ready to publish.

(Protip: when testing, reload the plugin first, then refresh the page. That way the page will pick up the reloaded plugin.)

I found a few differences in the development between Safari and Firefox:

• You need a Safari developer certificate to sign your extension
• You have to host the extension on your own server (no extension gallery yet AFAIK)
• Safari uses an event listener method of handling events (at least for context menu extensions)
• No XUL, thank God!

Some similarities:

• The browser checks for updates to the extension by checking an XML (.plist) file on your server
• JS is mostly the same, except for Safari specific objects (to refer to browser window, etc)

Download Flickr Original for Safari 5

Though tablets have been around for awhile, I would say it wasn't until the iPhone was released that touch-based technology became natural and easy to use. With multi-touch, Apple has taught us new ways to interact with a screen: expand/pinch to zoom, swipe to pan, et cetera. Kids this generation have grown up easily learning these intuitive gestures which have now become second nature when interacting with a screen.

Before touch technology, desktop computers trained us to use a mouse and pointer: slight movements of the hand translate to movement of a pointer on a screen; initiating an action requires a button press. Doug Engelbart (father of the mouse), describes the mouse as the easiest way to interact with on screen objects:

We timed how long it took the users to move the cursor to the object. It quickly became clear that the mouse out-performed all the others. Devices like the light pen simply took too much time, by repeatedly requiring the user to pick up the pointer, and reach all the way to the screen -- very tiresome.

Touch removes a level of abstraction. Instead of moving a device to move a pointer to touch something on the screen, you interact directly with a much more natural device: your finger.

However, touch technology has its disadvantages. You no longer have the same level of 1 pixel precision as a mouse, the concept of a "hover" state doesn't exist anymore, and click-drag (think: selecting text) actions are not easy. Because of this, user interfaces have to be adjusted accordingly. With the iPhone's limited screen real estate, user interaction and experience had to be redesigned in the form of iPhone's UIKit: big buttons, navigation bars, table views, tab bars are all finger-friendly.

With the iPad, the paradigm of user interaction needs to be rethought again with its larger screen size. As a developer, I'm excited to work outside of the 320x480 box and think of new applications that will take advantage of the 1024x768 display.

The iPad will bring everyday computing closer to us. If the iPhone has taught us that we can stay connected everywhere all the time, with access to anything we wanted in our pocket, then the iPad will teach us that we no longer need to sit at our desks for most of our computing needs. Browsing the web, watching videos, and viewing pictures will all be more organic experiences when we use our fingers to interact--the feedback loop is drastically shortened. For iPad owners, I'd say that the desktop/laptop will be staying on the desk, and the iPad will become the new primary consumption device.

I'm still not sold, however, on its capability to create complex content. After watching the iLife app demos, the apps themselves look great, but the actual experience of trying to create a complex presentation or report looks a bit painful. Complex apps like Photoshop don't seem to be practical on a touch interface. For writing essays, programming, or photo editing, I'll stick with my laptop and mouse.

That being said, it's hard to say if that will change: we learn fast and adapt quickly, so who knows what the next computing paradigm will be.

The past couple weeks have been a lot quieter though, so I've decided to experiment by release a free, ad-supported version of the app to see how the revenue compares. I've chosen to go with Mobclix and will update this post with results!

Download Good Word Free

• iPhoneSender 1.0.4
• Prowler 1.0.2
• Flickr Original 1.0.5

Since I was using Haml in conjunction with Compass, I thought it would be nice to be able to do the same for my Haml files instead of having to do haml test.haml > test.html every time.

So, here's a simple shell script you can use that will do just that. Just place it in a bin directory in your $PATH and run it in the directory you want to watch.

Some folks have mentioned that Word With Friends already checks words, so why make Good Word? I created Good Word to scratch an itch: I wanted to quickly make sure a word was valid if it wasn't my turn to play, and if it was my turn to make sure a word was valid before committing. The latest update (available now!) scratches another itch: so I know a word is valid--but what does it mean?

So, I've added a quick definition view to Good Word. It's perfect for those times when you're playing someone who puts down an obscure word and you're asking yourself "what does it mean?!"

I wanted to keep the app clean and simple while fast and functional. After you search for a valid word, the keyboard disappears to reveal the word's definition, keeping everything on one screen. If you prefer not to see the definitions upon checking, there is a toggle in the application settings to turn them off.

As I mentioned before, I'm planning on expanding Good Word to be a more full-featured word training tool by adding features like "save word" so you can quickly review words you want to learn or remember. Stay tuned for more updates! I'm a proponent of the "release early and often" philosophy, so if you guys have any features you'd like to see, let me know.

Last thing: I have more promo codes to give away, so if you're interested please let me know!

I'm excited to announce my first personal app in the App Store! Good Word is a quick and simple app to check if a word is valid in Words With Friends.

Good Word uses the Words With Friends dictionary, a modified version of the ENABLE (Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon) word list. I'll be keeping Good Word up to date whenever Word With Friends modifies their dictionary.

I'm planning on making Good Word a more robust word training tool by adding definitions, saved words, etc. Any other suggestions are welcome!

Thanks to Clement for helping design a great icon and UI!

Also...I have a limited number of promo codes to give away...let me know if you'd like one!

• If you're developing within an FBML canvas page, you have to adjust your javascript to conform to FBJS. FBJS does a number of things--itwill prepend all your variables and function names with your appid, setting/getting object properties are done through custom methods, you can't create new elements in the DOM, etc. If you need to use heavy javascript, it would be easier to use an iframe-based application.
• If you're developing a tab-based application, it will start in "passive mode" , which means your Flash and javascript won't run until the user interacts with your page. This means you can't use onload javascript methods until a user clicks something. This was very frustrating because some javascript I adapted to FBJS (to create pretty checkboxes) didn't end up working at all.
• Also on a tab-based application, your image assets will be cached by Facebook's image proxy cache. For some reason, the proxy cache was really flaky earlier in the week; it would randomly show some assets but fail to load others and would vary on computer to computer and browser to browser.