Well the iPhone is still selling like hotcakes; I recently heard a story of 25% penetration in one Sydney based Consultancy Company, maybe Steve Jobs’ predictions of the iPhone being as profitable as the iPod will prove true yet.

Now the iPhone has been on these shores for a little while I thought it might be a good time to hear from someone who has been through the process of developing an application for one.

So Graham Dawson from OzPda has kindly offered to share his experience of building the popular Oz Weather application:

Having been a bit of a weather geek for most of my life (and even studied it an uni), I have a keen idea of what I do and don’t like about many of the existing web-based weather services out there and when the iPhone 3G storm started brewing I was keen to see what kind of weather application Apple had built in. Well it was certainly attractively done, but the application was supplied by Yahoo!, who themselves had sourced their data from weather.com ie. a US supplier. Although this was disappointing for me, it did immediately suggest that there was an opportunity to build something more useful for us (ie. Aussies).

iPhone applications come in two varieties:

• Web applications – Web applications cannot be listed in Apple’s App Store – rather they can be found by users only by looking through Apple’s web-based listings pages (free submission), or else via good old web search.

• Native applications – These are applications which can be built only on Mac computers with Apple’s developer tools. Consequently they can take full advantage of all the whiz-bang functionality that Apple’s design geniuses have seen fit to include. These applications can be made available in the App Store and iTunes, and sold for a nominated price from which the developer receives 70% – provided that you register as an Apple iPhone developer, pay the US$99 fee, and have sufficient patience to await their approval.

The first choice I had to make was which type of application to build. Whilst a native application has many advantages (a bit sexier, lets say), it does take considerably more resources and time to build one. Also it seemed eminently reasonable to build, launch and run a web application first, and then later convert it into a native application.  So that is the course I chose.  I am glad to be able to say that I was encouraged and supported in this by Mick Liubinskas (www.pollenizer.com) from whom I also received some screen layout and design input (Pierre Sauvignon of www.pxcream.com fame).

Given that I already had PHP code in place to obtain and store Bureau of Meteorology data every 10 minutes (permission gratefully received), the main job involved the design of an attractive interface that fits into the 320 pixel available width. Two weeks later, the site was up and running: http://i.ozpda.com/ozweather/, and as I queued to buy my own iPhone from the Apple store at 6:15am on Monday morning, I was rather chuffed to be able to demonstrate it to a queue-mate on their iPod Touch using Apple Store’s own WiFi network.

Although an iPhone web application can be made available and advertised on the web like any other website, to have any real chance of success, the application should be registered with Apple, for appearance on their own listings: http://www.apple.com/au/iphone/webapps/. However, Apple’s submission process was fairly painless – and two days later the Oz Weather web application listing appeared on their site – complete with a “Staff Pick” endorsement.

Although I have an idealistic streak which has always made me shy away from adding third-party advertising to my sites, I wanted to try to at least re-coup some of the time and effort involved. Further advice from Mick at Pollenizer indicated that Google AdSense and AdMob were two good possibilities to try. AdMob have been heavily promoting their iPhone-dedicated advertising, so I decided to give them a go first. The addition of a few lines of code to the site allowed for a single ad, with a customisable background colour to be placed across the top of the page, hence not interfering too much with the visual flow of the page.

Although the AdMob advertising started well on the first day (during which a Sydney thunderstorm attracted a peak in site usage), the placement of ads available suddenly dropped to almost zero for the next two days, despite apparently having plenty of inventory.
In the meantime I decided to go ahead with a conversion and enhancement into a native application, including current weather radar images and more detailed current observations. That is one of the advantages of putting out a web app first – lots of great suggestions for new and better features for the next iteration. So keep watching this space for more news as it happens… though will perhaps not be updated quite as often as the weather data on Oz Weather!