Dirk and I worked for some time on team.sPod - a handheld version of team.sPace. This demonstrator is designed to show a touch enabled web-application for handheld devices. It started as a web-application for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, but the intention is to widen the scope to other handheld platforms. Now the first working demonstrator is available at our development server.

Team.sPod is none one of our major projects, so we never pushed the project seriously. However, after some embarrasing public trials, I decided to fix the show stoppers of the latest version. The new version has now full support for the contribution counters that Dirk added as mock-ups around Christmas. It also supports the latest firmware for the iPhone, in which the "desklet" feature has changed and broke the application of some hardcoded bits. Besides I found a bug in the scrolling functions that made the screen scroll always downwards regardless of the direction of the touch gesture. This bug has been introduced after I refactored some normalisation functions - aparently I "fixed" too much code.

Providing real data for the contribution counter was relatively simple, because the visuals as well as the data were available for ages, but never connected in the interface. I changed this. From now on, the contribution counter shows the number of contributions for the current tag filter or if no tag filter is defined, it shows the number of contributions in the team.sPace database.

While demonstrating team.sPod using the latest firmware on my iPod, I found that the application did not work anymore. The reason for this was that apple changed the screen realestate for "desklet" applications from firmware version 2.1 to version 2.2. With the latest version a desklet application can run in real fullscreen mode. This broke some parts of the application, because we hardcoded the screensizes for determining the orientation of the screen. The hardcoded values have been removed with the new version - now the screen orientation is identified by checking which side of the screen is bigger. This means if the width is bigger than the height, then the device is in landscape mode.

The latest version of team.sPod is based on a much cleaner and flexible codebase and demonstrates nicely the features of web-based applications on handheld devices. By removing the hardcoded values, the code now runs also on Android 1.1 on the G1. This is very nice although the Android browser of my device does not pass the touch events to web-based applications.

If you have an iphone or a G1 then you can try team.sPod now.