Connect for Your iPhone

As I teased earlier in the week, Rich has been cooking up Connect People Search for your iPhone. Last night, it went live.

This isn’t an iPhone app because, as we all know, there are a few issues preventing an app that requires behind the firewall access: 1) we can’t yet connect to VPN using the iPhone VPN client and 2) there’s no way (without jailbreaking) to put an app onto your iPhone without using iTunes, which means applying to the App Store and hoping Apple will approve.

Connect People Search is just that; people search optimized to run in Safari on the iPhone. Rich did several clever things to make this work.

First, he’s obviously not using the iPhone VPN client, but rather, another method provided by GIS. It’s not really a secret, just not as frequently used. So, before you can do anything, you’ll need to authenticate to VPN.

Once you’re in, you’re presented with a search box. Simply enter the string you want to query, just like in the full version of Connect, and off you go.

The results are constrained to people only, natch, and you can click through to view a person’s profile. No fuss, no mess.

This simplicity has a lot of value. Rich left out all the social elements of Connect, and you don’t have to log in to SSO to search. His goal was people search, nothing more.

Connect has a lot of iPhone and Apple content. The “Have an iPhone?” group has nearly 600 members, and people use it actively to exchange iPhone information. Many have asked how they could get some type of directory lookup on their phones.

Rich took this demand and ran with it.

He used features of Safari on the iPhone to make Connect People Search a bit more app-like, e.g. he hides the URL bar by default, which makes it look more like an app. My iPhone Twitter client of choice, Hahlo, does the same thing.

The bar is still there; it’s just not rendered in the visible screen area. Just scroll up to see it.

The search box, results and profile are all optimized to fit the iPhone display in portrait (standard) mode; if you turn the iPhone to view in landscape, you’ll notice Rich hasn’t yet tweaked the display to resize, not a big deal.

One big missing feature is the abilty to click on a phone number and call it. Testing this out, I think this may be a limitation with how VPN handles the URL versus a gap in functionality. Maybe Rich will comment.

Clicking a person’s email opens the Mail app with the address populated, which is nice. I noticed that links to other people on a person’s profile, e.g. the management chain, begin to render and then nuke Safari. Again, not a huge deal, just a warning.

Thanks to Rich for building this very useful little web app. Now that he’s got his feet wet with iPhone development, the sky’s the limit. Look for more goodness in the coming months.

Curious? Gotta have it? If you want the 411, leave a comment. Obviously, I’ll only be able to give out the link to employees, so use your Oracle email address when commenting.

Update: There is also a mobile-enhanced version of search for Aria. As with the full-sized versions of Connect and Aria, you’ll get different results for the same keyword search because Connect indexes your profile.

So, if you’ve completed your profile, you can be found based on its contents, e.g. a search for the keyword “appslab” returns Paul, Rich, me and a few others.

Another Update: If you’re interested, Clayton Donley has a few iPhone apps, as well as a way to get them on your iPhone without a jailbreak. Good stuff.