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.

Now that Apple is letting you play with your iPhone screen real estate, guess what web developers? When someone saves your home page to their iPhone, you can give them a nice little custom icon. It’s not unlike the favicons that show in browsers, except it’s several times bigger, and thus several times easier to design.

There are simple instructions on how to do this for your own website on Dan Dickinson’s blog. The one catch is your site has to be in the root folder. If it’s in a subdirectory (e.g. vanderbilt.edu/mydepartment/), it doesn’t work. If you do have access to the root folder, it boils down to creating a 57 x 57 pixel PNG image, naming it “apple-touch-icon.png” and saving it in said root. That’s it.

For Vanderbilt Med Center web developers, here’s an image I created that you can download and adapt for your VMC site. If you use the PSD file, it’s incredibly simple to change the background color so it matches your site.

• A Photoshop (PSD) file
• A PNG file

[Thanks to colleague Chris for letting me know that this won’t work for non-root folders.]

Three things converged on me yesterday. First, my favorite web professional organization decided to focus next on mobile web design. Second, Steve Jobs in his Macworld keynote said that in its very first quarter (July - Sept 2007), the iPhone zoomed into second place for the market share of U.S. smart phones. Third, a colleague gave me the latest issue of Marketing News (1/15/08) and lo and behold one of the feature articles is, “2008 will be the year of mobile marketing.”

It’s more than just mobile marketing. It’s mobile web. According to what I read, the app that’s most popular on the iPhone is its web browser (Safari). Certainly it’s my favorite. In fact, it’s why I bought one in the first place. The iPhone has broken down that dreadful cell phone garden wall and my bet is Google’s Android is going to break it down even more. They are claiming the World Wide Web in the U.S. for a device other than a PC — and that’s the way the Web was always meant to be — device-independent. (Other countries are way ahead of the U.S. in this arena.)

Add to this that I’ve been drooling over first the iPhone and now Android since they were twinkles in Apple’s and Google’s eyes, and guess where I’m headed. I’ll be getting ready for my next web professionals meeting — starting to code my sites for the mobile web.