Never before has the internet seen such a wonderful commercial for an iPhone application.

Okay, so I’m laying the hyperbole pretty thick on these last two posts but you’ve got to admit, its a pretty great video.

That is all.

Enjoy.

While we’re on the topic, the very first film I looked up after installing was Neighbours by Norman McLaren in 1952. Let me type that again for emphasis: 1952.

“In this Oscar®-winning short film, Norman McLaren employs the principles normally used to put drawings or puppets into motion to animate live actors. The story is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower.”

The film was created to speak against anti-militarism and against war, but I was first taken by the style of animation, dubbed ‘pixilation’ by Grant Munro (one of the two men in the film.) According to the Oracle:

The majority of the film is shot with variable-speed photography, usually in fast motion, with some stop-frame techniques. During one brief sequence, the two actors appear to levitate: this effect was actually achieved in stop-motion; the men repeatedly jumped upward but were photographed only at the top of their trajectories.

Fun fact: the soundtrack of the film was made by McLaren by scratching into the edge of the film.

Full disclosure: it gets a little disturbing towards the end, so click through to watch.

Everyone knows that when you start commuting to work in a new city you make a web app to assist in planning travel your travel to and from said city, so when I began commuting to Chicago last Thursday I put my nose to the grindstone and produced this little beauty.

I know what you’re thinking: so what? A little website that helps a very small handful of people who take the BNSF Metra between Naperville and Chicago, all of whom will probably never know it exists? And you’re right: it really is just only for me but what makes it interesting in my eyes is how it works. Using some fancy techniques from this excerpt by Jonathan Stark I was able to assemble a little page that caches itself to your iPhone and will load from the cache without the need for cellular, 3G or WiFi connectivity and persists after reboots or resets. This is perfect because my building, despite having a large AT&T office within its walls, gets very poor AT&T network connectivity.

Oh and in the future if I ever need to change things or add features a little javascript is in place to check for any changes on the network and download anything that needs to be updated. So if you take the train between Naperville and Chicago, go ahead and add this little site to your home screen. I even made an icon from the train symbol in Google Maps!

BNSF Naperville Train Schedule (Optimized for an iPhone, but should work in any browser.)

Update: It looks like I neglected a couple of details. Under the “Day” tab you’ll find the Naperville to Chicago train schedule and under the “Night” tab is the reverse trip. The times are also ranked according to travel time with green representing 30-40 minutes, yellow representing 40-50 minutes and red representing over 50 minutes. In other words, greens are express trains and the others aren’t. I’d like to ultimately turn this into a less specific tool and accommodate additional data and maybe even turn it into a free little app but I need to do a little more research first.

Josh and I both loved the idea, and so we picked up some toys of our own to make docks out of. Josh’s dock is still in progress, but he made this awesome Hippopotadock for me today. Armed with a Dremel, he created a thing of beauty and made me the iPhone dock of my dreams.

See a detailed photo on Flickr.

UPDATE:

The Hippopotadock was featured in a blog post at iPhone Savior. By their suggestion we took a trip down to the pond by our apartment and risked the well being of Josh’s iPhone for this shot.

The app store has definitely become inundated with terrible free applications (more on that another time) but this little app is really impressive. In addition to rewarding updating your status, it provides you with a customizable 3D robot avatar, it suggests local events to attend (in an unobtrusive way), allows you to comment on friend’s Facebook statuses, and provides you with a calendar to look back upon your achievements and updates. Oh, and did I mention it was free? Stop reading my lame review and go try it.

File this one under ideas I wish I had first.

Link