Got something interesting to share from the road? Just have to comment on that latest EagleEye Top Story? Don’t want to miss anything at UMW? Here’s your chance!
Visit http://umweagleeye.wpengine.com on your iPhone and add the spiffy new EagleEye icon to your iPhone home screen! Just add it as a bookmark and enjoy more EagleEye goodness!
About Brynn Boyer
Awesome. I looked it up in the dictionary, and there your picture was. Thanks for adding this functionality to EagleEye.
How exactly does this work? Is it a separate EagleEye App? Or is it simply an icon with the URL? I know we are using WPTouch for IPhone compatibility on this site, but not sure how the icon helps on the iPhone? Then again, I don;’t own an iPhone so there is probably a lot I don’t know about it.
Jim, the iPhone icon is no different from a Mac icon in the dock, or a bookmark in the browser. WPTouch appears to use the iPhone API to get wordpress to parse in an iPhone browser with phone-friendly css. I have a Blackberry, so had to see what I could do with this on Noel’s phone. The upshot is that you get to brand your bookmark right on the “desktop” of the iPhone giving it the availability of an app, but it’s really just regular old Web content.
I see it less as a technology leap than a marketing one. Potentially, I’d like a structured selection of icons, perhaps a family of them, for all kinds of UMW info depending on audience. Imagine an Orientation icon, a Graduation icon, so that there can be temporary quick-to-get-to iPhone locations for things happening at the University.
Where earlier higher-ed forays into mobile apps amounted to text-only links and pages, that were linked to from the home page, this is a bit more fluid and user-driven. It’s only a glimmer in my eye at this point, but the ease of deployment for this is kind of seductive. Next, the Blackberry…