My iMeetzu app has been sluggishly working it’s way through the approval process of what seems to be 1/2 of an employee at Apple approving these things. Just Joshin’ ya Jobs, but it honestly was under approval for about 8 weeks before we got a response telling us to make some changes before it can be accepted.  Making changes to an app means getting to the back of the line to be approved again.  The required adjustments have been made and we’re sitting in line again waiting for this thing to get pushed public.  Since I’ve had all this time to think about the app, I cleaned it up a ton and made a short video demo attached here at the bottom of this post.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

I changed the layout quite a bit. The colors match the new iMeetzu site and I did away with the iPhone style chat bubbles. I thought the bubbles were going to be great, but I realized the only thing awesome about them was how hard they were to build in CSS. They made the app look cheap, and its not! So I had to get rid of those and simplify the chat box with a white background and a single line between messages. Plus I like having it say “You” and “Stranger” in the all too infamous red and blue colors.

My final thought on the app is to add in some of the advanced features from the site such as smilies and images. I haven’t decided on this yet, but I imagine some of these cool features from the full version of iMeetzu will find their way to the iPhone app. Luckily most of the changes to the app can be done via some files hosted on one of my servers, so we won’t always have to wait 2 months in between versions!

I got a great idea from a fellow webmaster this weekend to make a widget out of my iMeetzu application. What a great way to spread the word around about the site. I spent a better part of my day Saturday making a lightweight version of iMeetzu that anyone can put on their site with just a small snippet of code. I actually have put this widget here on my blog as well. You can check it out on the right side of the page. The widget is integrated with the main system, so you could potentially chat from the widget with another user on the main site. Also you could be chatting through the widget from two separate websites. My hope is that the widget will get picked up by a lot of bloggers and help iMeetzu grow considerably.

Visit the iMeetzu Widget page to put iMeetzu on your site. The widget allows an adjustable size to fit nicely into your site.

I wrote an AJAX function awhile back that I use in a lot of my website projects. I use it because I prefer it to using an entire javascript library just to get the AJAX functions out of it. This is incredibly simple and is great for just the basic AJAX applications. Just about anyone with basic web building skills should be able to implement this into their site for some extra jazz.

I put together a simple demo here: Ajax Demo. Check it out for basic usage and to get the javascript source code. You can download the entire demo here: Ajax Demo Source Files. Upload these file to your server and you’ll be able to figure out how this works in no time.