Brand New - iPhone Apps Manager and integrated Apps List

[aria505]

http://matthewpeach.com/iphone/

Hey everyone. This is an iPhone "app" that I've been working on for the past few days. It allows you to manage a list of your favorite iPhone apps seperate from your Safari bookmarks. It also has a full built-in list of iPhone apps that can been added directly to your favorites list. You can add your own "apps" that might not be listed and sort them however your desire.

I know there are a few people who have already beat me to this, but I didn't want to release it until most of the bugs where out and the features were complete for what I think is a solid first version of the "app".

I look forward to adding more features to it in the future such as:

1. An easy way to identify newly added iPhone "apps" in the full list of apps since the last time you visited the list.

2. A rating system of some sort.

3. Filtering by category once more "apps" are available

4. A way to submit an app to the full list.

What do you all think?

 

[72930]

Nice! Well done...

 

[jono_3]

this has nothing to do with bands! cool app though

 

[Daiden]

Very cool, I like the effects. Seems more feature complete then some of the other iPhone application managers I've seen.

Also, I like the fact that you can add custom applications that aren't on the list.

 

[chatster18]

This is awsome, I will def use it when I [eventually] get an iPhone! Great Work!!

 

[Eric1285]

Very neat, so it's basically like a web based app launcher/organizer. Very nice idea.

 

[aria505]

Glad to hear that you all like it. I've made a couple little tweaks. You can now add multiple apps from the "all apps" list to your favorites without it going back to the favorites list after each one.

And a few tweaks have been made so that on the launch day of the iPhone, I will change the container to 100% width and the app will work in landscape and portrait mode.

I hope to have a category filtering feature completed by June 29th.

 

[aria505]

Completely creating the categories feature

I just completed building the category filter so that the apps are separated into groups. You can still press the "show all iphone apps" group and see all the apps at once.

I'm not completely happy with how the groups are implemented though. I keep wanting to click on the "favorite apps" bar to get back to the group list instead of pressing the group button in the top left-hand corner.

 

[Jeffrey903]

Very cool. Looks very slick.

One thing... you spelled "Gas.app" wrong (sorry to correct you, it's just that I'm the developer). I would greatly appreciate it if you fixed that. Thanks!

 

[aria505]

Very cool. Looks very slick.

One thing... you spelled "Gas.app" wrong (sorry to correct you, it's just that I'm the developer). I would greatly appreciate it if you fixed that. Thanks!

Opps.. Thanks. It is fixed now. You created a great app. I'm just curious as to how you are pulling your data. Are you getting it from another website or feed?

 

[mkrishnan]

And a few tweaks have been made so that on the launch day of the iPhone, I will change the container to 100% width and the app will work in landscape and portrait mode.

Very nice! Your loader is gorgeous and very easy to use.

Does this mean that, when you use it on an iPhone, the black bar with the info button will stay at the bottom of the screen?

 

[aria505]

Landscape and Portrait mode

No the info bar will not stay at the bottom. Neither the top or bottom bars will stay in place when scrolling. I personally think that it would be a waste of screen space. Some of the screen will already be taken up by the safari bar that does not disappear.

The tweaks that I made will make sure that it works in both landscape and portrait mode. The way it looks now in safari is how it will look in landscape mode when the iPhone is turned on its side. When it is portrait mode it will be skinner at a width of 320 px.

The lighting effect that shines down on the app links will change to fit whatever way you have the iphone turned and the titles at the top of the Categories section will change to a right-aligned layout instead of being centered when the phone is turned to portrait mode. This is to stop the text from running into the favorites button. The app is primarily designed to work in portrait mode, but either way is fine.

 

[The Viking]

Kickass. That is an amazing apps manager. Way to go!

 

[aria505]

Thanks I'm glad you like it. I'm hoping to get a lot of feed back from everyone once people get the iPhone in their hands because sadly I won't be able to get one.

 

[Cleverboy]

Thanks I'm glad you like it. I'm hoping to get a lot of feed back from everyone once people get the iPhone in their hands because sadly I won't be able to get one.

I'm sorry... so, where is the "Help me make this better, by helping me get an iPhone" link in there? Far less deserving have hoisted the donation banner. And, just to note... it's not charity to allow people to give back. While you didn't exactly define "won't be able to", its worth saying.

~ CB

 

[aria505]

I'm a little skeptical as to how well this app will run over the EDGE network and on the iPhone. Therefore I'm not to sure how helpful this app will be. This app is very javascript heavy so it may be very choppy on the iPhone and may take a long time to load at the start. Therefore it wouldn't be a very quick solution.

We will see on launch day. If it turns out to be really useful and people use it then I may put a donation link on there, but I wouldn't feel comfortable asking for donations for an app before I know if it will be useful or not.

 

[aria505]

Could someone try out the iPhone Apps Manager

Hey everyone,

So now that the iPhone is out, I was wondering if someone could browse to my iPhone Apps Manager on their iPhone, try out all the features, and give me some feedback on how well it works.

It would be much appreciated. I'm hoping to stop by an AT&T store tomorrow and test it out on one of their display phones.

 

[Me1000]

not great... needs fine tuning!


1. set your width to 100% it wont fill up the screen unless zoomed

2. the URL to the link is too big for the background image (it sticks out below it)

3. cannot reorder apps, (no drag and drop, dont think you can fix that though)

4. animations are not smooth, (again, dont think you can fix that)

5. the search box (which is sweet BTW) is hidden some when it drops down,
you need to drop down the rest of the page more.

6. and if you i would make every button twice the size it is now, it is kind of small



other than those things it is AMAZING!

Great work dude!

 

[arn]

Hey everyone,

So now that the iPhone is out, I was wondering if someone could browse to my iPhone Apps Manager on their iPhone, try out all the features, and give me some feedback on how well it works.

It would be much appreciated. I'm hoping to stop by an AT&T store tomorrow and test it out on one of their display phones.

Yeah, it's a little disappointing on the iPhone.

It renders as a small portion of the page, and you have to zoom in. Once you zoom in, things are hard to press. the buttons (plus sign, all iphone apps) are all very small to hit.

Effects aren't smooth as mentioned above.

arn

 

[aria505]

Thanks for the feedback!

I changed things to 100% so maybe that will fix the zooming and scaling problems.

I figured the transitions would be to heavy for it. I will have to redesign things a a lot and probably just switch to the Apple side swipe for the list transitions.

Thanks again for the feedback.

 

[Me1000]

looks much better with 100% width!

but everything needs to be 2 if not 3 times bigger,

 

[aria505]

looks much better with 100% width!

but everything needs to be 2 if not 3 times bigger,

I just read some information over at the google iDev Group about how the iPhone browser window doesn't have a real width so it renders everything at a page width of 980px. Which would explain why it sounds like everything is really small because it is rendering at 980px width with the 100% setting and is zoomed out really far.

iPhoneWebDev Conversation

It is also mentioned that by placing <meta name="viewport" content="width=320"> in the head, that it tells the browser that it needs to be rendered at 320px instead of 980px. But of course this causes problems for when the iphone is turned.

So I placed this meta tag in the header. I'm interested to see if that fixed anything.

 

[Me1000]

SO MUCH BETTER!!! lol

everything looks a lot cleaner, and bigger

but
search bar still is partially hidden.
and the blue bar at the top, IMO needs to be taller

other than that. it rocks!

Great work


EDIT:

when you turn it on it's side, everything is a WHOLE lot bigger, no need for size changes there.

 

[Steve1496]

Great app and I just added it to my iPhone bookmarks.

 

[aria505]

Just got back from the AT&T store - testing

So I visited the AT&T store this morning to test out my app on the browser. I noticed a lot of little problems and made note of them. I'm going to work today to get most all of these problems fix, and then I will visit the AT&T store again tomorrow to see if my changes worked.

And so here is what I noticed:

1. The <meta name="viewport" content="width=320"> is required to specify the width that we want. Setting an app to 100% width just doesn't work. It renders the width at around 900px if no viewport meta tag is specified.

2. The width of an app does not scale out when turned into landscape mode. The iPhone simply keeps the size of the app that was rendered in portrait mode and zooms in. This does seem to cause images to be slightly pixelated and blurry.

3. The <input> tag property of "type" does not support the value of "search" like it does in Safari. In Safari, setting an input field type to "search" causes it to render as a round ended search-field like the one seen in Spotlight and on Apple's website.

4. There seems to be a little inconsistent CSS rendering between the iPhone and Safari when dealing with padding or margins. I'm not totally sure about this just yet.

5. onmousedown and onmouseup commands do not seem to render at all. That is a little sad. It seems that the iphone just slightly tints whatever you press instead of acknowledging an onmousedown command. I may be wrong on this though. I did hear a rumor that onmousedown and onmouseup commands do infact work but they don't render until after your finger has lifted off of the screen. I haven't been able to test this out.

6. Even simple javascript animations are choppy. Small movements and opacity changes seem to work ok and aren't too choppy though. This isn't really a surprise. It is just a little frustrating when you compare it to what the native iPhone interface can do. Gawd flash would just kill the iPhone and would practically be unusable. No wonder it isn't supported.

I will have to take out a lot of the animated transitions that I have in my app. I'm a little sad about that, but I knew it would have to happen. I will try to keep them in though if you visit the site on a computer.