When the iPhone launched in the United States, Andrea’s son, Anthony, volunteered to wait in line at our local AT&T store. Anthony queued up all morning with a friend from high school and waited many hours before the stores opened at 6pm. They managed to buy one of the first iPhones from the store and returned to our office, eager to try out meebo. Apple had announced that the iPhone runs Safari and we were hoping that meebo would “just work.”

We had a few bugs to fix before meebo was usable. First off, the iPhone doesn’t have an enter key so there was no way to send an IM message! I spent most of my weekend tweaking our code and learning the major differences between Safari on the iPhone and Safari on the desktop. We released a few placeholder tweaks but using meebo on an iPhone was still pretty fiddly. After using the iPhone and playing around with Safari, we found that the mobile version wasn’t very different to the desktop version and with a little work we could make a really great mobile interface for meebo. A couple of late nights later we were very proud to release the mobile version of meebo for the iPhone.

This weekend the iPhone launch extended to the UK and Germany and, once again, there were queues wrapping around London’s Apple store. With the help of meebo’s translators, we’ve added localised versions of meebo for the iPhone and iPod touch, so now you can access meebo’s mobile version in your own language just by going to meebo.com.

Enjoy!

Paul

[via the meebo blog]