I’ve been wanting to use Pivotal Tracker on my iPhone, so I wrote a little proof of concept using the Tracker API. I thought that a native application would be much more difficult than a skinned web application using ActiveResource.

I tried out Dashcode, Apple’s recommended iPhone-compatible front-end web development tool, but was disappointed. I basically found myself developing the entire application in javascript, actually using XMLHttpRequest to talk directly to the API. This would have been pretty neat if I could have pulled it off, but I’d rather develop a data-heavy application in rails than javascript.

I ended up using simple CSS to skin the application called UiUI. It’s the best looking iphone UI I’ve seen, with tons of elements to choose from. It’s missing effects, of course, being only CSS. I also used Heroku, a free and scalable rails deployment environment to host my application. With it, I was up and running with a functional tracker application in under 3 hours. Since then, I’ve added the ability to create and update stories.

Check it out, let me know what you think:
http://itracker.heroku.com

If you’re not on an iPhone, be sure to use Safari. It doesn’t look great in Firefox or IE.