What have I been up to lately?  It’s obviously not blogging.  Nor is it housecleaning (alas), body-building, knitting, or staring at the ceiling.  It’s not even much eating of chocolate.  No.  It’s prepping for a Vanderbilt class I’ll be auditing come January – EECE 262 – smartphone programming.

In other words, I’m learning how to develop apps for Google Android and Apple iPhone.  Then in the spring semester, I’ll be doing it with a large group of incredibly smart and enthusiastic Vanderbilt engineers.  Can you see how this might grab my attention?

It’s no secret: the future is all about mobile.  And these young engineers, many about to graduate into what I have no doubt will be brilliant careers, know it.  They already have teams and team leaders for projects ranging from Android Dining to iPhone Augmented Reality.

Then there’s me.  I haven’t taken a class in approximately 200 years, and when I did it was oh-so-genteel – library science.  I had to work up the nerve to ask the professors, but once I did, oh my goodness.  They and the student leaders have been so very welcoming.

I’m a far cry from the normal demographic.  Not only am I female, I’ve got gray hair.  But repeatedly they’ve made it clear they’re happy for me to join in their fun.  It’s been markedly different from the stereotypical female-in-IT-land experience.  And this in the hottest area of technology.  All I can say is – wow.

So here is to Professors Jules White and Doug Schmidt, Vanderbilt Computer Society President Hamilton Turner, and all of the Vandy Mobile Teams.  You all are amazing.  I can’t wait for January.

This post is for my favorite physical therapist in the universe. He’s had an iPhone for over a year, but has yet to download a single app. Can you believe it? Me… I fell even more in love with my iPhone last July when the App Store launched.

Brain Tuner
This little gem takes the pain out of keeping your gray cells fit. And it’s free. Just do 20 simple arithmetic problems as fast as you can. (Hint to fellow boomers: don’t compare your best time with that of your children. While you want your progeny to be smarter than you, it can be a tad humiliating to discover just how much more so they might be.)

Recorder
When you have an idea but no time to write it down, just switch on this ultra-simple app and make a quick recording. It’s $0.99 well invested. (More warnings, though. Your first $0.99 payment gives your credit card to Apple. You are then on the slippery slope of temptation to much more expensive goodies.)

Google
Think Google desktop for your iPhone. It searches not just the web á la Google Classic, but everything on your iPhone, including contacts and calendar. Free.

DataCase
Do you have Word, Excel, PDFs, audio files, etc., you’d like to quickly put on your iPhone? With DataCase, you just drag and drop without having to sync. All that’s needed is wireless. And $6.99.

Bejeweled 2
At $7.99, this is overpriced, but I confess, I love it. It’s such nice mindless stuff — and it sparkles. Moreover, unlike Brain Tuner and some other apps, it’s never crashed on me.

In the running for my favorites, but I still haven’t tested enough….

Wurdle
I love word games, and this $2.99 Boggle knock-off has the potential to hook me in a big way.

Friday I had to rush a relative to the Emergency Room. While no one in their right mind enjoys an ER experience, nonetheless there are those surprisingly bright spots. And the biggest surprise was … having my iPhone.

Since I’m on a Mac, my sizable list of contacts, developed over the years in the Mac’s Address Book, syncs seamlessly with my iPhone. The result? It has a wealth of helpful medical information and phone numbers with relatively little effort. In fact, getting phone numbers and addresses into an iPhone is much easier than with any other cell phone I’ve had before.

Back to the ER…. Doctors contacted, paperwork done — then the hours of tension-laced tedium set in. We were there for eight hours before being going to Intensive Care. Inevitably, I didn’t have a book with me, and I’m not keen on most TV. Once again, however, my trusty iPhone came to the rescue. I have hours of video and audio podcasts to keep me entertained, and that’s precisely what they did. As it turned out the hospital had wireless too, but for some reason my email choked, and in retrospect, I’m just as glad it did.

The moral of this story? If you have an iPhone, be sure you’ve got contact information not only for your own doctors, but also for doctors of relatives and friends who have asked you to be their emergency support person. There may come a day you will be very glad to have it (however long forgotten) just waiting in your pocket.

Steve Jobs has a reputation of having it out for Flash. That’s because he won’t put it on the iPhone. As I see it, though, he has some pretty good reasons.

Even though I’m nuts about my iPhone, and love Flash, it simply hasn’t been that big a deal for me, and I sometimes wonder what all the fuss is about. I suspect it’s contextual.

I just did some Flash for my church today. It’s pure fluff and indisputably tacky — but that’s exactly what my church wants. (Have I mentioned I love my church too?) The last three or four years I’ve done some dubious Flash for the annual pledge drive, and people love it. What better reason could there be?

Ultimately you don’t have to have Flash to use the church’s site. It’s easy enough to get to the online pledge form by using the menu or other links. That’s what I mean by contextual. If the site depended on Flash, it would be another matter.

But then again, with very few exceptions (Flash video being one), this web diva eschews sites that depend on Flash. 90% or more are usability nightmares — typically vanity sites at their worst. The iPhone and his Steveness merely prove that point.

Holy Batphone. According to the latest Pew Internet & American Life Project, cell phones matter more to U.S. adults than the internet, TV and email.

“When asked how hard it would be to give up a specific technology, respondents are now most likely to say the cell phone would be most difficult to do without, followed by the internet, TV, and landline telephone. This represents a sharp reversal in how people viewed these technologies in 2002.”

Add to that the central role web browsing plays for iPhone users, not to mention Google Android, and I wonder — how can any self-respecting web diva not be riveted by cell phones? Right after the iPhone was released, I figured my interest would morph from a hobby to a critical professional skill, but now I’m wondering just how soon that will be. Six months? One year? I can’t imagine it will be as long as two years.

Vanderbilt University today unveiled an iPhone optimized version of its website. If you go to vanderbilt.edu on an iPhone or Touch, it will automatically reroute you to vanderbilt.edu/iphone/.

And what a handsome page it is. The University Web Communications team has done an excellent job. It’s not your usual blah gray or blue mobile site. While maintaining the minimalist style best suited to an iPhone, it manages to look very Vanderbilt — black with touches of gold and dark red.

As well as the home page and admissions, the top layers of the news, calendar, athletics, and several other sections have been optimized, and I expect more will come soon. It’s a great start and a very pleasant surprise.

Over the last few days I’ve been gathering iPhone web development links to share with Ada Lovelace, my favorite web professionals group. And here (drum roll) is the final list.

• Marketcircle’s iPhoney
  A small app that simulates an iPhone on a Mac. It works best with Safari 3, and requires a Mac. While you can’t test things like sniffing with it, still you can see much of how pages will look right as you are developing them.
• Apple’s iPhone Dev Center
  iPhone development central. In order to use it, you have to join Apple Developer Connection.
• My homegrown iPhone sniffer
  Some simple PHP that switches the CSS according to whether the page is viewed on an iPhone or not.
• IphoneWebDev
  A Google Group
• iWPhone: The Easy Way to Optimize WordPress for iPhones
• Create Your Own iPhone Icon
• 7 usability guidelines for websites on mobile device
  A common-sense list of principles to focus on.
• Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly in Two Minutes
  Mike Davidson; requires PHP
• W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

While preparing for a meeting on designing for the mobile web, the old memory banks suddenly kicked in, and I remembered there was some tool that made it a breeze to optimize WordPress for iPhones. Since I’m on an iPhone tear, I took the time to research it.

Sure enough. There are quite a number of promising plug-ins, in particular ContentRobot’s iWPhone. It’s a nifty skin for WordPress that doesn’t alter your blog on computer screens — only on iPhones. Even better, it only took me three minutes start-to-finish to get it working.

Of course, being me, I couldn’t leave it at that. I had to personalize it for this very blog. The default is blue, and I’m getting a tad sick of blue and gray sites for the iPhone. (Drab blue and drab gray. Sounds like the Civil War to me.) I changed the colors to red and yellow and added one 4KB GIF, which doesn’t slow things down appreciably. Beyond that, I went into header.php, and added links for the archives and about page.

In truth, I’ve been hovering on the edge (so to speak) of true iPhone design, but this was my first real foray into it — and it was a blast.

My favorite thing about the latest update to the iPhone (1.1.3) is the say-so it gives me over the home screen. Before this release, those precious few inches of real estate were totally controlled by Apple. Now there are still 17 icons that are Apple-chosen. The difference is they are no longer Apple-frozen. Even better, I can add icons for favorite web pages.

What have I added? Very little. It truly is prime real estate, and I’m experimenting right now. There’s one though that’s there to stay, and that’s Weather Underground’s iPhone version — set to my zip code.

Now every morning as I dash into my closet, I do it with iPhone in hand, clicking my Wunder icon. It quickly pulls up a clean, informative page of just what I need to know.

Today, for example, it reported 29.8°F and said: “Winter Weather Advisory in effect until 10 am CST….. Freezing drizzle has produced icy Road conditions …. As of 700 am…icy roads were responsible for 12 wrecks in Stewart and Benton counties…. Remember…it only takes a thin glaze of ice to produce an accident.”

It sure beats the anemic weather information that comes with Apple’s icon. I’ll give you one guess where that icon is now on my iPhone.

Night after night I make the same mistake. You’d think I’d learn, and hopefully putting this in writing will get me over the hump.

The mistake? I crawl into bed thinking I’ll just turn out the light and listen to a podcast. So far, so good. Snuggle under the covers on a cold winter night, turn on my iPhone and listen. It’s a beautiful thing. And there are so many podcasts I love: Lullabot’s Drupal podcast, the MacCast, and, naturally, the Apple iPhone Show, to name just a few. (Somehow the latter never gives advice about whether or not to sleep with your iPhone.)

The problem is that invariably I drift off. I come to an hour or so later, conscious enough to remember the iPhone is in bed, but that if I put it on the bedside table, it’s at risk of turning into a cat toy. So then I’m stuck half-asleep, half-awake in a tangle of wires. Come to think of it, I’m lucky I haven’t choked myself.

As if that’s not enough, today I read of a report linking mobiles to disturbed sleep. Apparently it has to do with to exposure to 884 MHz wireless signals. I suppose I could put it in airplane mode, but somehow I think this may be not just a wireless signal, but a signal to me. Read a book instead.