I’m sitting here with Alex chatting about iPhone various and sundry. He’s got an incredible amount of insight on the ins and outs of not only writing apps, but also getting them approved and getting success in the app store.

He’s giving a talk at SDSIC on Feburary 19th. It’s sold out, but I’d still recommend you try to get in.

I thought I was all caught up with my packing-fu for my javascript, but a quick look at YSlow on a friend’s computer revealed I had some oddly packed version of jQuery that was 56K instead of the 30K packed version from the jQuery site. Once spotted (thanks YSlow!) this was quickly remedied.

Now I’m wondering what the best packing method for jQuery on iPhone is, since size and performance are even more important there. gzip or no gzip? Which packer?

Here I am sitting at the train station waiting for a train that’s 1 1/2 hours late, and I can’t call home to tell my wife about it, because the iPhone ran out of battery. It was fully charged when I left the house this morning. I didn’t make any calls, did use it to browse the web, and also used it as an iPod. And now it’s failing to do what 5 of the 6 letters in its name claim – to be a phone.

The guy standing next to me has his new 3G iPhone turned off because he’s almost out of battery. He’s saving it in case he decides to forgo the train and have his roommate pick him up.

Some phone. Bah, humbug.

Is there a way to write iPhone apps that can be distributed via the AppStore without writing Objective-C / Cocoa code? I’m perfectly happy writing happy HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but don’t want to get too deep into Apple proprietary languages and technologies.

Basically I just want the HTML/CSS/JavaScript app I have packaged so it can live offline on the iPhone, have network access, and use the local SQLite instance. I’ve looked at the SDK videos, the docs, and everything else I could find, but they all seem focused on writing Objective-C.

If that’s not possible, is there a bare-bones skeleton app that simply embeds safari and renders files stored on the iPhone?