HomeFindr has been picked as a featured application for the iPhone in BusinessWeek.

Technology Evangelist, Ed Kohler, asks, “Will iPhone Applications Reverse the Trend Toward Mobile Web Browsing?” and concludes, “I doubt it.”

Ed’s right, but that does not mean that native iPhone apps are a flash in the pan. This is why:

Mobile web browsing is absolutely here to stay. The benefits of centralized hosting and direct, fast links into data sources at the web servers are great, not to mention (generally) browsing platform and device independent code (HTML/CSS/etc.) of presenting data for an application.

Clearly, I view native iPhone applications as a way to supplement the mobile web browsing experience. For the iPhone, specifically, native apps will provide the more integrated user experience, allowing access to the hardware features, including 3D graphics, motion detection, complex user gestures, camera, location/GPS capabilities, microphone and audio, offline data storage, detached network access, background processing, and so on. Web apps can’t do any of these.

However, there’s a balance, which depends on the need of users for any particular application. Not all web applications should become native applications. Likewise, many native applications will need to be web-aware to achieve true integration.

Thus, native mobile (iPhone) apps don’t replace the mobile web browser, they become an advantageous (for the consumer and business) supplement to the overall user interaction with a business’ data.

Update: More Global View images are here.

A week has passed since our last demo, so we’ve decided to release another demo showing more native iPhone technology from CodeMorphic.

With Global View, iPhone users can interact with a virtual globe, using standard multitouch gestures: swipe to rotate the globe, pinch in and pinch out to zoom.

The demonstration shows the use of the Global View globe to display:

• day and night views of the Earth
• surface temperatures via heat maps
• composite satellite cloud images covering the entire world, updated every three hours

It’s with a huge number of [alloc]s and [release]s that we bring to you the first demo of HomeFindr.

HomeFindr is a native iPhone application that shows you real estate for sale around the iPhone.  It uses Core Location to determine the latitude/longitude coordinates (geocode) of the iPhone and presents real estate listings of properties for sale within a radius of the geocode.  

HomeFindr features include:

• ability to find real estate for sale within a radius of the iPhone
• allows user to scroll through a list of thumbnail images on each property
• play a video (if available on the property)
• Google map integration
• direct agent contact via e-mail or phone

HomeFindr is a conceptual product.  To bring this product to market to the general public, we are looking to partner with real estate companies with national exposure and integration into national real estate property search data sources.

We are also interested in partnering with video production companies or real estate promotion companies to provide video listings of properties.  We believe strongly in the power of video to promote and sell real estate.

We’d greatly appreciate feedback on the demo.  Any and all feedback is very important to us.

Enjoy!

Welcome to the CodeMorphic blog, designed to discuss developer and management issues on iPhone software development.