Any Web developers want to help finish mobile AppleInsider optimized for iPhone?

Care to post any details for potential developers about revenue sharing?

By the way, Kasper... this gives me a good idea for a new site for you (or any other enterprising webhead).

A developer's connection site. Where companies or individuals with ideas for App Store apps can connect and form partnerships and sign agreements for work to be done and share code and provide feedback.

Call it "AppProvr", for lack of a better name.

Other names:

- AppGround
- AppGrounds
- AppStack
- AppVentures
- AppFloor

Why not a developers forum here? I've suggested it before and I still think its a good idea.

It's a great idea, but not only a dev forum, but a way to enter into legal agreements between companies or other individual developers.

Perhaps there is an enterprising legal firm willing to draw up electronic agreements between parties and take a reasonable percentage of sales for apps developed. This could be extremely lucrative.

The main barrier to entry in the AppStore is getting great ideas into the hands of the people who can execute them, and sharing fairly in the fruits of those partnerships.

+++

I mention the idea of a developers forum here because the development of the app Now Playing was chronicled in a thread at Ars. Much input from forum members was used in its development. It was fascinating to watch its progress. I think that app benefited from 'web' development. Maybe other apps would as well.

It would clearly violate Apple's NDA for developers if feedback was part of the development process, however, after the app was released it could be beneficial. Then again, I think most developers/partners would rather have their own web site in place to focus feedback only on their product. That's why I think a "joint venture clearinghouse" would be more valuable.

I was wondering what was keeping it.

You're probably right. That NDA is fucking stupid.

BUT, if AI decided to partner with a legal firm skilled in the art of contracts for this idea, everyone would come out a winner.

A web app, right?

m.appleinsider.com

Nothing at that domain.

I actually did the graphics for Now Playing. It was a pretty interesting process altogether.

Nice job. I agree the process was very interesting. Maybe it was a one time event but, I don't know why it couldn't happen again for a free app.

Humm, no. A website optimized for the iPhone.

Cool I have got a prototype running as some of you have seen before running on iui and php. Got a job interview soon but I would be interested in working on this and building my mobile skills... iPhone skills that is lol. Thanks for the heads up Kasper I hope to get in touch soon. Will try and email you later today...

As some of you have seen it, open up flame.macsquad.net in your iPhone or iPod Touch. It's a prototype of viewing AI forums on an iPhone.

Of course, Kasper's probably got something more sophisticated in mind, but it's an interesting exploration of PHP and rapid iPhone Web App prototyping using Joe Hewitt's iUi code.

Post back here if you want me to release the source code (the PHP "screen-scraping" files, for example). I'm taking a new job on Wednesday, so if all goes well in the next two weeks and I get my pay, I don't mind releasing all the source code to whomever at the end of this month.

And yeah we need an iPhone Dev Section.

Good job nvid!

Thread comments are difficult to read though. Formatting.

That's what he meant.

Thanks... Yeah, that's where I hit the wall.

Hey guys, I'm not a developer but this is an excellent idea. I just checked out the web app link and it looks great. Keep working on this! I wish I could help.

Good attitude

Yep Mr. Good Attitude.

Hi Kasper, I sent you an email...

Hi guys, my iPhone AppleInsider Forums prototype is experiencing server problems, so
http://flame.macsquad.net
may not be accessible for next several hours. (It's a free hosting provider [110mb.com])

OK flame.macsquad.net (enter this into your iPhone Safari) is back up now.

Any news on the official mobile version of AppleInsider??

Here's a shortcut on "nvidia2008's" web site! See appleinsidermobile.com!

Okay, I am really confused. What happened to "the real internet - on your phone!"? I thought the iPhone was above all that mobile optimized nonsense from the dark ages?

Sometimes, reality sucks.

Interesting.

Really nice work, nvidia2008.

How's the new gig going? Have you given up development on this now, or will Flame Research still live on?

Thanks...!

I'm doing some Mac-related consulting stuff. For you know, the day job.

I haven't touched much of the code since July-August 2008. Just a few tweaks here and there once every few months when quotes were showing up weird and stuff.

I've stopped development, until a point in which I can form better partnerships with delivering web forums that come with great iPhone-compatibility "built-in".

Flame Research is an idea I came up with, but not registering a company or anything yet.

Finished off a Flash-PHP thingy recently. It's like a Flash-based product-viewer driven off a simple PHP-MySQL.

Now thinking about the next project. In the current environment "venture capital" or even microfinancing (from boss/ investor/ friends/ parents) for projects isn't that easy to come by.

As I mentioned above, I think the business model I would go for is possibly turnkey Forum website solutions which feature great iPhone compatibility... Or, more tricky, an iPhone App that easily interfaces with Forum websites.

The latter is challenging because unless you have access to the Forum maintainers themselves, there's a heck of a lot of parsing of HTML to get the right content to display on the iPhone.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more iPhone Apps to do with reading Forums. We've got eBooks, tons of Newsreaders, custom News apps, Twitter, but not the good ol' Forums. AFAIK.

Again, back to the funding side, if times were better perhaps I could string together some coders, get some investors, and work on it, even part-time. The prototype is far from perfect, but demonstrates viewing Forums easily. Quick, easy replies would be the next stage of course.

*Probably the hybrid solution makes the most sense. Group together iPhone App Developer, Web Coder, Interface Dude/Dudette and I am the "Idea Guy". Each Forum website (our customer), once paying for product/services or agreeing to revenue share, offers both an iPhone-compatible Forum (there's modified vBulletin templates and such ilk), and to the more dedicated Forum reader, a dedicated Forum App.

Now, I have to return to my day job. Seriously though, having to focus on the day job mostly during this trying times.

Hi all, thanks for the journey and the feedback on the prototype, that was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_QLGhXu_wY

For various reasons, I will be taking down http://flame.macsquad.net / http://flame-research.110mb.com

All the best to iPhone developers out there...! And it would be cool to see forums and forum interfaces work out well on the iPhone, netbook and mobile Internet devices. Twitter is alright but forums still play a role in today's Internet and will continue to play a role over many years, particularly as they are indexed by search engines and are useful for troubleshooting, archived news, comments etc. etc.that Twitter and so on does not provide.

Thanks to Kasper and AppleInsider for "closing one eye" and not blocking me from using (page scrape) data off the AppleInsider website.

Remember, great work continues to be done on iUi http://code.google.com/p/iui/ which is very useful for rapid prototyping/ rollout of iPhone web apps with a "native app" look and feel. Check out iUi if you can.

I'll try. We could call it Appleinsider Lite!

What Kasper means is like m.digg.com and m.cnn.com as well as iphone.foxnews.com and so on :P

Great example for all iPhone websites: http://www.cssiphone.com/

I think m.appleinsider.com is better than mobile.macrumors.com b/c it's too long! :P Macrumors should've went m.macrumors.com instead!

www.m.appleinsider.com sounds good!

Theres no need for a mobile site.