A friend recently asked me if I had seen Hotels.com's iPhone App? I said no, because I had no need for a hotel room anytime in the next few weeks, and I'd probably book ahead when I did need one.
Since she had only heard about this app at a web conference she attended but not seen it, I agreed to grab it from the iTunes App Store and look at it with her on my iPhone. I was glad I did, because the Hotels.com application is an interesting mix of a tiny native iPhone app with an iPhone-optimized website. I had never even considered building something like this until I saw it.
Hotels.com for the iPhone is a kind of an iPhone app stub. All it appears to do is access Core Location Services when you tap the big "Find Hotels Near Me" button. Once the iPhone has established it's location, the app passes the location to Hotels.com's iPhone-optimized website, which returns a list of nearby hotels and available room rates.
This is a pretty slick way of taking a half step into the native iPhone app world, and I have to give Hotels.com credit for getting something into the iTunes App Store that performs as advertised and gets their brand out there.
How many native iPhone apps have you seen that have a lot of features but only some of them work? Isn't something like this, which has only a few features but does the job, an alternative worth considering?
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interesting. another advantage to this method is you can bypass Apple's lengthy approval process to get updates to the app; just update the code on your web application. and "updates" are instantaneous for everyone using the app...without requiring to connect to the iTunes store and install a new version.
This was disappointing. It generates a url and sends it to Safari. I was expecting it to use a WebKit view in the app to display the website.
@manufract: That's a good point, I hadn't thought of that angle.
If you're interested in this technique you guys should check out http://phonegap.com (product of iPhoneDevCamp / Nitobi).
Check out the Locatable project (http://lbs.tralfamadore.com) for a technique that allows any website to request to see location data. It would mean you could simply go to hotels.com, not download a special app just to accomplish this. Personally I'm reaching a saturation level with apps that simply wrap web functionality, when I can create a web clipping and have it on Springboard if I really need it. I'd rather that hotels.com and others spent their time making a site that looks good through the browser on the iPhone.
http://my-iphone-mobile.blogspot.com/