nextstop for the iPhone

From great things to do in South Africa to great places for photos in Portugal to step-by-step walking tours of San Francisco, nextstoppers have been busy sharing all the places they love most -- and in the process building an amazing resource for travelers. This is fantastic if you are at your computer, but what if you are out and about and looking for what's been recommended around you right now?

Today we're launching a beta version of nextstop for the iPhone that makes nextstop recommendations and guides easily accessible wherever you are. We've focused on making a fast and visual browsing experience, so that its always easy to see what's interesting to do near you. You can also use it to add new recommendations to nexststop -- we'll automatically suggest places near you so you have less typing to do -- and if you install our helper application (available soon) you'll also be able to take pictures with your phone to add to your recommendation.

nextstop for the iPhone is a browser based application, so you can get started simply by going to nextstop.com on your iPhone browser. If your phone isn't handy, take a look at this video to get a sense of what nextstop for the iPhone is all about.



For the technically inclined (and if you're not, you can stop reading here), we've been able to build a browser based application that rivals a native application experience (with a far faster and easier development experience) by leveraging the latest HTML5 technology that's available on the iPhone.

To help other developers learn from our experience, we wanted to explain in some detail the technologies we're using to make this application possible.

The technologies we're using include:

• ApplicationCache: We've built our application using Javascript to manage page transitions, so the core HTML, Javascript, and CSS is only loaded once. We're using the HTML5 ApplicationCache to speed startup time on subsequent loads by caching Javascript and CSS so that these resources are cached for subsequent application loads.


• Geolocation: We're utilizing Geolocation to get your current physical position in the browser to show nearby content.


• localStorage: As you browse the application, we try to prefetch content aggressively so that any time you click, the content needed for the next page has already been downloaded. This is possible because we store all prefetched content locally on the phone using the localStorage object. This also means that as you browse to content you've already seen, no additional network requests are needed because that content has already been stored.


• Google maps v3: Google has been working on a new version of the Maps API, specifically optimized for performance on mobile devices. We've found this to be a substantial improvement over Maps 2, and a reasonable alternative for a native maps implementation.


• iphone-photo-picker: One of the key capabilities of the iPhone that isn't yet available through the browser is access to the camera and local photo library. To bridge this gap, we've built (and are open sourcing) a small helper application that exposes a urlscheme (photopicker://) that can be called from any web application to invoke the camera or photo library, and then will POST the selected image to a URL you specify.

While HTML5 support is still quite variable, we're excited about what's possible today on the iPhone and know that over time these capabilities will be available on other mobile devices. We really believe that HTML5 is the future of mobile application development, and are excited to see this platform become more commonly available over the next year.

As always, if you have feedback or questions, please get in touch!