It was my birthday recently and I somehow managed to talk my wife into going with me to the Apple store to pick up an iPod Touch. I have to say that I was tentative because of all of the screen problems that I had been reading about. Well, I have had my Touch for less than a week and I am already in love with it. I don’t have a ton of music or anything so I opted for the 8gig version. I don’t even have it half full. This is my first iPod and I really like it. I need to get a FM transmitter though…

Anyway, as a web developer this thing intrigues me. Yea, Steve Jobs said that you get the real Internet, and you do… But, I am really starting to like “iPhone” websites. Since my Touch is virtually an iPhone I have been trying to find good sites that properly handle the UI interaction. You might think this is a no brainer but consider this. There really is no “drag” event that I know of on the mobile version of Safari. So if you plan on writing something involving dragging (e.g. Google Maps) you will be out of luck as that event scrolls the page. There are definitely people doing things correctly though. The best two examples I have found are Meebo (IM on the web, GTALK, AIM, MSN, etc) available here and the iPhone version of digg available here.

Those of you interested in developing for the iPhone and Touch can hit the Developer’s Center on Apple.com You might want to check out Aptana also – you can download an iPhone SDK plugin to help you get started writing iPhone websites.

I think these little mini-sites, RIAs or web gadgets are really going to catch on. It is a pain to do “pinches” to zoom in and out on a web page on the iPod. It is much easier to be provided a style sheet that pushes the content in a mobile friendly manner. The plus is that Safari supports a large fraction of web standards, thus developers aren’t working with old school legacy code when developing their apps.

The only complaint I have is that the Mail and Maps apps which are available on the iPhone are not on the iPod. They also pulled the plug on adding calendar events from the iPod (they can only be added when syncing). So, an iPhone it isn’t – a great iPod it is. Apple really needs to release some apps to add on to this thing or release an SDK.

I have one final thought on why Flash isn’t on the iPhone or iPod Touch. My guess is that has to do with the whole “drag” or general event interaction. As I mentioned, dragging your finger across the screen scrolls the page. Actually having flash focused to trap the events might be a difficult task to tackle. I think it is only a matter of time… Once we have Flash we will have a plethora of mini-sites and RIAs for the iPhone and Touch.

If you are thinking about the Touch, I would recommend it. Just bear in mind that it isn’t quite the iPhone minus the phone. You lose some other things as well. Google some reviews or take a walk to your local Apple Store and you will get a good idea what you are in for. Also, Feel free to send me iTunes cards, etc. .

I ran upon a pretty interesting piece on John Knack’s blog today. It seems that Adobe has released a new logo for what they are calling the Photoshop family of products. This seemes to encompass Photoshop CS3, Photoshop CS3 Extended, Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Album Starter Edition, and soon Photoshop Express. I dig the new logo. John’s post has a ton of information on it all – check it out.

Well, today is the deadline for the Adobe AIR Derby contest. As a Flash developer I thought it would be cool to go back to my roots and develop an application using HTML and CSS. My app is iFreelance. It is a tool for me to keep track of clients, contacts and invoices. It allows you to save and export invoices, etc. I have put together a short video of iFreelance in action. I wanted to add a ton of other features but ran out of time . Learning my way around AIR and some of the bugs (I know it is beta) in AIR was very valuable. I may release the .air file at a later time. In the meantime – check it out below. I would love to see anyone else’s entry!