Dear GF and I have iPhones and she’s become increasingly addicted to the fact that she can access web applications online at any time (as long as she has at least EDGE access).

A couple of weeks ago, she was looking online for a calorie counting web application and she was frustrated by the fact that she couldn’t find something she liked. Since I have mad Google-Fu skills, she asked me to try to find something. Instead, I asked her what her requirements were and since they were simple enough, I offered to write an iPhone specific application for her in Ruby on Rails.

Even though the application is dead simple, I learned a lot this time around since I tried to follow the recommended practices defined by the Rails community from coding to deployment. I’ve still got some more to learn (does one ever stop learning? Maybe when you’re dead), but I’m becoming more and more confident in my Rails skills.

She’s been testing the application on my staging server for the last week and we’ve discovered some bugs that were pretty egregious. Now that I have those worked out, I’ve deployed the beta application at caloriecounter.eddorre.com.

Although the application was written specifically to be displayed on the iPhone, I’ve tested it using desktop browsers such as Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 7 (IE 6 is dead to me – I won’t even test against it). With the exception of a CSS styling bug in IE 7, it’ll work just fine on your desktop.

In addition to to all of this, I’ve actually allowed open registration to the application so that anyone can use it. I’m actually quite nervous about this as no one has ever used my web software besides me. Apparently, it might get more use than I expected since Dear GF’s work is having some sort of Biggest Loser-esque challenge at work and several of her co-workers have expressed interest in using it.

One more thing, at this time, I’m hosting the application on my home server. If you decide to take it for a spin, please be patient with the poor box.