Go out and enjoy the weather. It has been exceptionally beautiful here in Ottawa for past couple of days. So take time off your computer and just enjoy mother nature.

So now that I have my iPhone all ready to go and had my moment of joy playing with all the features on this phone, its time to move into development. This device provides a lot of power to the developer but there are still few things that we need to look at before diving head first into development:

1. iPhone supports an amazingly powerful feature set that can make your applications visually attractive and engage your users with great amount of interactivity.
2. Touch screen can bring thousands of creative ideas right to your finger tips (literally)

3. Limitation of no background apps running is sort of a deal breaker but I am hopeful that Apple will change its stance after a while.

Over the next few days I will be posting my experience in developing a simple iPhone application and sharing my thoughts and struggles with you via blog. So what sort of application can we make on iPhone that would be simple yet fun? There are few ideas that I am debating between but feel free to make a suggestion.

Let the fun begin!

Lately I have been working on a User Interface library that runs on top of Prototype and Scriptaculous framework. Please note that this library is in very early stage and I am planning on releasing the source code soon. Still have a lot of issues to fix and address but I wanted to float the idea in public and get wheels rolling.

So what does this UI library have?

This library will have the following components:

• Layout
• Splitter
• Panel
• Button
• Menu
• Tab
• Tree
• and more…

These will be the foundation layer components. With support of Prototype based class inheritance I have also been working on some widgets such as:

• CheckBoxTree
• AjaxTree
• AjaxPanel
• ButtonMenu
• ContextMenu
• Toolbar
• Accordion
• and more…

As mentioned earlier I am still working towards first public preview release but if you have any suggestions or comments please feel free to post them here. I should have a first public preview ready for you soon (can’t promise dates yet)

This library is in no-way meant to compete against ExtJS or Dojo or other such libraries but I believe that with community support we can bring an amazing UI layer to Prototype and Scriptaculous framework.

The main focus is to provide solid foundation layer and believe that our community will build and contribute amazing set of Widgets.

Here are screenshots for Button and Splitter (using Firefox 2.0)

So I have finally decided to jump the ship and move onto iPhone. I have been playing around with the SDK for a while now and the simulator is just amazing and it will be interesting to move onto that platform.

Full browser support: Makes it fun to write interactive web applications that can really push the limits what we can offer to the end user interms of interactivity and amazing experience.  I can’t wait to try the new CSS based animation techniques that they have introduced in Safari and I hope that W3C makes it a standard soon.

Apart from porting web applications to iPhone, I am also looking forward to build native Objective-C based applications.

So those of you who already have an iPhone, want to share your experience so far? And for those who are still waiting to buy one, what are you waiting for?