Ever since I got my iPhone, there was this thing that was really frustrating for me – the time it takes to write a single tweet or compose a single email. While the Mail.app on the iPhone is quite fast, it sometimes annoys me that if I just want to send a quick email I have to go through the inbox and it checks for new mail in the process.
I guess part of the problem is the fact that I’m still using the first generation iPhone, which is slow. But considering the fact that I’m not alone with an old iPhone, I thought that a solution should be available or made. For the tweeting part of the problem I found Twii – a simple app whose all purpose is to compose tweets. It’s an OK solution, but I don’t like that it doesn’t use OAuth and my tweets appear as they were tweeted from “API” (usually a sign for spammers).
So I decided that if there’s no reasonable solution for the problem, I should create one. As I already wanted to try the iPhone SDK, so this two small apps seemed to be good candidates for a first project. I started poking around with XCode and Objective-C, but never had the time to really build this apps. Besides the lack of time issue, the fact that I needed to wait for the whole AppStore approval process was a big turn off.
And then it hit me – why should I waste my time on ObjectiveC and the AppStore, when what I want to create is so simple? I did a few experiments and realized that it is possible to create a good user experience with web apps on the iPhone (HTML 5 FTW!). So instead of poking around with XCode and Objective-C, I started poking around with jQTouch.
Today I finally had the time to wrap everything up in a reasonable package. Now after few hours of coding and mainly designing (and without waiting for the AppStore gods to approve my apps), I invite you to try out my first LiteApps – LiteTweet and LiteMail.
This is a very preliminary release of the apps, and I really look forward for your feedback and ideas on this. There’s a lot to improve – mainly I want to improve the startup time for this apps, as this is the most important feature.
Please be tolerant to bugs, security issues and other bizzare stuff. Also, please report them to me 
I’m available on Twitter or email.
This morning I’ve received a notification email from Facebook, notifying me that my friend Asaf left me a new message on my wall. This seemed to be OK until I read the message:
“hello Arik, hehe.. you could be tht naughty i didnt knw..really hard to see tht from my eyes lol
have a luk urself…
http://www.google.com.id.ewv1g6d2.ij4s0h.2b99df1a.cn/gallery.php?id=dd83hikzt&auth=9490559&cyua=iy2qpfpelm
(click open or run when prompted)
The contents of the message was suspiciously similar to the Messenger virus messages. Another look at the URL gave out the fact that this is not a Google url, but a phishing site. Because I use Ubuntu at the moment, I wasn’t concerned too much of being hit by a virus, so I followed the link. The link goes to a download page of Picture_dl.exe, which I guess is some sort of a virus/worm.
I couldn’t find this message on my wall, so either Facebook removed it already or the email didn’t come from them. Either way, I’ve notified their support about that, and I hope they will act accordingly.
Bottom line – beware of viruses being spread via Facebook/look like Facebook notifications, and don’t click on every link…
Arik