X

Downloadable software for the iPhone

Glaskowsky offers a correction to the historical record.

Peter Glaskowsky
Peter N. Glaskowsky is a computer architect in Silicon Valley and a technology analyst for the Envisioneering Group. He has designed chip- and board-level products in the defense and computer industries, managed design teams, and served as editor in chief of the industry newsletter "Microprocessor Report." He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
See full bio
Peter Glaskowsky

Arik Hesseldahl of BusinessWeek said today (here) that a group of independent software developers led by Patrick Walton have created what "appears to be the first downloadable program created for the iPhone." (More details here.)

But actually I think the first genuinely useful downloadable iPhone application might have been this one:

http://scicalc.belfry.com/

The programmer, a friend of mine named Garth Minette, discovered on July 28 that he could encode an entire application, 85 Kbytes in size, into an iPhone bookmark. So it works even when the iPhone is not connected to the network-- the basic definition of a "downloadable program."

This discovery was first disclosed by a mutual friend of ours here:

http://tugrik.livejournal.com/589562.html

The original version of this program required Safari 3.0 for some reason, but when I tried the downloadable bookmarklet, I discovered it runs normally on Safari 2.0.4 under Mac OS X.

Anyone who can write JavaScript code can use Minette's method. Walton's approach is much more complicated, relying on a series of hacks... but it's much more capable, too. So there's room for both solutions.

I can't say for sure that Minette was the first to discover this technique, but I can't find any prior implementations. If you know of any, please add a comment here. Thanks!