Pathfinder, a software development and user experience design firm, announced the initial release of rails_iui, an open source Rails Plug-In for the iPhone.

The plug-in makes it easier to build iPhone enabled web applications. Rail plugin adds the ability to iUI framework which contains a number of CSS styles and JavaScript event handlers, to make iPhone Web apps look and feel somewhat like native iPhone applications.

via UnWiredView.com

Now that iPhone has almost become an open platform for third party software development, we can expect tons of new exciting applications that will make it into a much more useful thing, then a fancy phone and media player.

But that does not mean that developers inside Apple are leaving all this to the third parties. They are also busy, thinking up a whole lot of new things that an iPhone could do.

And recent patent applications provide us with a glimpse of the things to come.

When I started browsing through these patents , I first thought that it was just a new fitness application for iPhone:

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Recent developers in WebKit on which Safari is based, ended up in Safari browser for iPhone 2.0 as well as in newly released Safari 3.1.

Apple has implemented HTML 5, CSS 3 and SVG into it. HTML 5 provides a standard for embedded SQL statements into a script code. SVG (scalable vector graphics) brings motion into places where only static bitmap graphics worked before. SQL (through SQLite) and SVG are linked into Safari but not by plug-ins. CSS 3 sets up implicit and explicit animation, and manages both using renderer.

The advancements to Safari are not only the additions of new standards. Apple has also managed to speed up JavaScript performance.

Early on Apple decided not to include cookies and XML to Safari, and hence ported SQLite from iPhone OS to Safari. It allows JavaScript coders the ability to manage data using real SQL with transaction support.While SQLite is client-sized, it is very powerful for a database that links entirely into your code.Since iPhone has space restrictions, using SQLite forces developers to use space carefully.

The advancements in Safari on iPhone 2.0 are great. In fact, Mac users will want it in their desktops! At least viewing for the developers

In an AjaxWorld Conference this week, Aptana had one of the more impressive presentations on how easy it is to develop Ajax applications for the iPhone.

They presented open source Aptana Studio IDE. It is a full Ajax development environment and it is available as a stand-alone as well as an Eclipse plug-in.

Integration with Eclipse provides developers with an interactive console as well as preview support for iPhone applications. Plug-in also supports preview with which you also see how the application will look like and how it will behave on an iPhone. This is achieved by integrating the plug-in with iPhone emulator.

The demonstration showed how to build a simple application. It was also explained how Aptana Studio includes options that enable developers to take full advantage of the iPhone user interface for sizing, resizing and left-to-right toggling. The result is that developers will get a real sense of what their applications will look like inside of iPhone.

If you would like to give this a try visit Aptana website.

In a shareholder meeting on Tuesday, Steve Jobs said that Adobe Flash will not be supported by iPhone anytime soon.

He said that the cause for that was Flash

Is it sometimes difficult to understand the lyrics of your favorite tune?

CNET has posted a small video tutorial of how you can do it. You can view it here.

In brief it explains that you can copy lyrics into the lyrics option in song properties on iTunes. Of course you paste lyrics which you found on the internet before.

You can also use Soundcrank plug-in which will get your favorite lyrics automatically.