when will this be ready? and would I have to "hack" my phone to use it?
The bulk of the application is handled on the server, the ajax web 2.0 application is quite small and doesn't require any hacking, jailbreak or anything like that.
The app can be deployed on a local area network, if you play with the proxy config a little you can deploy it "elsewhere".
The application does not require any webserver, apache , tomcat or the like, just an executable for mac or windows.
The server is built in java and is quite small.
The ajax app is quite small, has configurable themes, and looks for upnp and bonjour resources on you network. Using bonjor allows for some unique abilities I believe. First and for most I should be able to get at any unencrypted daap content stored in itunes , but you can also use it as a kind of super bookmark, ie. say you had a wiki site on a static ip address , you could advertise that on the network and it would show in the browser. Yes this is the same tech iphoto, itunes etc. uses and I'm not sure why other apps don't, apple has whole sample projects for doing this kind of stuff. I need to carefully watch the load on the network before trying to deploy that feature, not sure what the effect on the nextwork will be with all those service registrations and text records.
Sorry you can see I'm really psyched with Iphone development. These apps cry out for a real sdk. I've work around so many safari problems to get this far.
As for availability
I have a college student, a job and 4.5 pets, dogs , cats and whatever.. so Its going to be a couple months..
But an alpha may be available as early as next week, and it will be on sourceforge and available for testing.
I'm going to try to get a web page up in the next couple days.
