I was fortuitous enough to meet RubyFringe speaker Dan Grigsby at Emerging Tech, so it's only fitting that three years later I get to announce some genuinely emerging technology that Dan himself is behind.
Since he and RubyInside kingmaker Peter Cooper launched iPhone developer blog Mobile Orchard late last year, they have featured excellent interviews and podcasts as well as articles debunking the popularity of the $.99 app and who's really making the money on ITMS.
Their first technology offering is Alocola, a free-as-in-beer helper application which allows application developers to access GPS data from visitors to their website — functionality currently not offered by the Safari browser itself. While there are some hoops to jump through at the moment, you can install it and then click this link to see your position on a map. More than just a proof of concept, Alocola works today and is perfect for applications suited to periodic updates; due to the requisite application context switch between Safari and Alocola, constantly bouncing back and forth would be highly frustrating to an end user.
How does it work? The Alocola site explains it best, but in short an alocola:// protocol handler is registered on the phone, setting up Alocola as a helper app. A web developer can prepare an encoded URL which opens Alocola; after retrieving the GPS settings from your iPhone, it responds by opening Safari to a callback page that was embedded in the initial URL, carrying the GPS coordinates in the GET request string. A POST option which will require more integration effort from site authors is on the way.
This is an impressive first outing for Mobile Orchard, which is clearly making itself known as a technology player instead of a passive reporter. Frankly, I haven’t seen this kind of capital-I Innovation since the buzzed release of Ocarina, a Legend of Zelda-influenced virtual pan flute which demands users “play” by tilting their phone and blowing into the microphone. While the implications of a socially-networked, collaborative musical instrument are fascinating, I dare say that Alocola is actually useful and potentially disruptive.
Surely this is welcome news to iPhone developers who eagerly await tidbits of functionality from Apple. As gatekeepers, they are notoriously reticent to unlock business advantages functionality which they might sell to their business partners for a small fortune. Congratulations to Dan and Peter for raising the bar; a promising and auspicious start to 2009 and the new Obama-approved technological future.