I spend about 2 hours every Saturday morning at a Starbucks in Cupertino waiting for my 5-year-old to finish Chinese language lessons.
The great thing about free time, Internet, a cup of coffee, and close proximity to Apple is that it gives you time and inspiration to play with interesting software. Lately for me, this has been the iPhone SDK.
Since a few of the teams I manage are responsible for Oracle Internet Directory and Oracle Virtual Directory, it only seems logical that one of the first things I did was write some code that can talk to these products natively. It took about 2 hours from start to finish, including getting an LDAP SDK working on Mac OS X w/ an ARM processor.
Above is a few pictures of a simple LDAP phonebook client that I wrote using the SDK over my last few visits. The pics show it connecting to Oracle's corporate directory with a few buttons for dialing or emailing the resulting contact.
Certainly this is pretty straight-forward and there's a lot more innovative uses of identity information in a device like this. No immediate plans to release this particular tool, but I'd love to talk to other developers that are looking to do innovative things with identity information on mobile platforms, be it iPhone, Nokia/Symbian, or others...
Clayton
I'll be at RSA Security Conference next week (4/8-4/9). Drop me an email or ping me on twitter if you'll be there and want to meet up.
