Bits on Bytes bits on solaris, programming, and all things tech

If you haven’t heard, ACU just announced that all incoming freshmen will receive an iPhone or iPod Touch - the details aren’t hammered out yet - Engadget has even picked it up. There has been a huge movement at ACU pushing this for quite a while and has been fueled even more by a student/faculty/staff created video called Connected. So being the first school in the nation to do this it’s pretty big, which really puts the pressure on us to deliver the applications necessary to utilize these devices in a learning environment.

For the past couple months we’ve been ramping up iPhone development; you can see most of what has already been developed at acu.mobi (best viewed in Safari as it’s designed for the iPhone). NOTE: This is still considered a development site and not production ready. There is a protected section (requires and ACU login id) which allows us to display data customized for the user viewing the site and a demo of what you might see if you were logged in.

A lot of the content on acu.mobi is just links to external apps (like Google Docs, Facebook, etc.) that are customized for the iPhone but there are a few that we’ve developed specifically for the university environment. For example, I created an application that allows professors to take attendance in class from their iPhone. You can see it in the demo section of acu.mobi under My Classes (professor) -> Roster. It allows the professor to easily select which students are Present, Tardy, Absent, or Excused as well as automatically send an email to those students notifying them of their status. When I was a student I would have loved this because often I was marked absent when I really wasn’t and so had no way of knowing I needed to ask the professor about it.

There are a number of challenges when it comes to creating applications for the iPhone. I won’t go into all of them but the biggest is usability. Some people say content is king, well I say usability is king. This is true with any program or website but especially true on the iPhone, where you have a very limited interface. Thanks to all the classes on usability and design standards with Dr. Susan Lewis in the JMC department that I thought I’d never need, I’m able to (hopefully) design with usability in mind.

Well this is just the beginning so I’ll try to keep updating this as iPhone development starts to become more and more a top priority. Hopefully we’ll make some pretty cool apps, both general purpose and for higher education.