a few very small mobile apps, as I learn jQuery Mobile

I’m putting together a few mobile apps (in the form of mobile web sites) that are designed for small-screen phone use. Here’s what’s in the works. Each of these are likely to change over time, so don’t get too fond of anything just yet.

The a2trees app provides some kind of on-the-go listing of street trees in Ann Arbor that are interesting. The observation that there is a great apple crop in 2013 and that there are city trees laden with nice apples just waiting to be picked was the motivation. It’s really bare-bones now, with not more more in the way of detail than my old juneberry listing post, except neatly set up for mobile use.

The mobile web app is self-referential in that it tries to collect useful bookmarks to mobile-ready versions of things like newspaper, bus, weather, netnews, and other web pages specially formatted for mobile use. I got tired of typing in the URL to fetch the bus listing so I put it on a menu. This is an up-to-dated version of the list I kept of mobile sites on monkey.org dating back about 5 years from when I had a Blackberry and was collecting same. The project is up on Github (and has been for the past 5 years!) but there’s not much more to look at than data. Please do feel free to give me feedback there as well as here.

Finally two power outage related mobile sites. The mobile power outage maps collection is a slow but sure approach to turning my popular power outage maps blog post into something more tidy for the small screen. The state it’s in is functional but not complete, and I expect I’ll chip away at it as storms or outages warrant. A second and new app for me is a utility company finder site that takes as its input the first three digits of a zip code and returns the utility companies that serve that area, or type the utility name and get back a list of 3-digit zips it serves. The big caveats on this are that it’s slow, slow, slow, and that the data set it’s derived from is nominally from 2011 but shows many signs of not being kept up to date with utility mergers and name changes since then.

All of these “mobile” things are browser-based right now, so you can try them from whatever system you are likely to be typing at. They use jQuery Mobile for the fancy bits, and I’m pretty happy so far in just how far I get with that system using HTML do to the work and not having to write a bunch of Javascript to get things to work. On the server side I have been generating these as static sites using old-fashioned Unix shell scripts and makefiles, and though it’s not elegant by any means, it is well within exactly the kind of coding environment I’ve been using since the 1980s.

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