Glyphboard Brings Character(s) to iPhone OS 3.0

Neven Mrgan, a designer for Panic Inc., has cooked up a pretty sweet little web app for users with iPhone OS 3.0 on their iPhones and iPods touch. Yes, you did just read a sweet little web app. Remember web apps? That was Apple’s solution for third-party developers before the iPhone SDK and App Store.

So, what does this little web app do? Well, Mac users have for years been able to use the option and shift keys to modify the output of other keys. For instance, if you type option + shift + k you get a cool Apple logo that looks like this . If you’re on a PC, you’re out of luck. Other characters include Trademark ™ (option + 2) and Copyright © (option + g). Now, the iPhone OS’s heart is OS X, so it can also display these charaters, but the soft keyboard doesn’t support a lot of these characters.

This is where Glyphboard comes in. Now, clicking that link on a Mac or PC won’t help you much, but if you view it on an iPhone or iPod touch running Software 3.0, you can do something cool. By adding that page to the Home Screen, it will create a standalone web-based application.

In Software 2.x, web apps ran in Safari, and if you scrolled up enough, you’d see Safari’s address bar. One of the cool new features of iPhone OS 3.0 is the ability for web designers to make their web app completely standalone. Essentially, adding Glyphboard to your homescreen is quite like installing a Dashboard widget on OS X.

Glyphboard allows you to copy and paste many special characters from Glyphboard to other apps. It’s quite slick.

Bonus: because it is a web app, it can be updated at any time, without being held up in the App Store approval process.

I believe this is an essential web app for anyone using iPhone or iPod touch Software 3.0. A few screen shots below. Enjoy.