It’s not a native application (getting to know XCode is going to be harder!), but a so-called “web application” for the iPhone. A few times I’ve been at RTAs involving trucks carrying hazardous chemicals, and other times it’s out of curiosity that I would like to know what exactly is the well-protected container wrapped in warning labels carrying when such a truck drives by. If you want to dive right in without going through the introduction, browse your iPhone to http://the.firehou.se/hazmat – if you save it as webclip on your desktop you will get a nice orange flaming icon with it.

Hazardous chemicals and their classification

To cover the need of a unified system to classify and identify dangerous goods in transport, a unified number system was devised and adopted by the United Nations, and is now recognized by a number of countries, including those in the European Union and the United States. The commonly used label on trucks, train carts and other containers is an orange placard with two numbers – the top is the Hazard Identification Number (HIN), and the bottom the UN Number, uniquely identifying the substance. It looks like this:

In this particular example, the HIN is 33, meaning highly flammable liquid (the same number repeated indicates an increased danger), and the substance as the UN number 1203, which corresponds to motor spirit, gasoline or petrol. For example, diesel is not as flammable as gasoline (lower flashpoint) and carries a HIN of 30.

In addition to these placards, a container must carry hazmat (hazardous material) information placards, known as ADR labels in Europe, an example of which is shown below:

The HazMat web application

Without further ado, here is what the desktop looks like with the webclip shortcut added to it:

Once you launch it, Safari will show a very simple form with one field – the UN number. Enter it, hit ‘Search’, and get the basic HazMat information for the substance in question. To search another number, scroll to the bottom of the form.

I plan to add additional information like safe distances for various spill sizes and emergency response information. Feedback in the comments please. Enjoy!

Some news from the Mobile World Congress – apparently, in a week, Movistar Spain (owner of UK’s O2 network) will announce that they will get a 3G iPhone exclusively in Spain. At this stage, it’s only a rumor, overheard at the O2 stand.

One has to wonder, when you read news like this, where Orange France is stating that their 500MB per month data plan, tied to the iPhone, excludes pretty much everything other than email and web browsing. So no VoIP, modem access for your laptop, or even newsgroups (??).

In Spain, Vodafone has been toting 5GB/month plans for some time now, with similar “fair use” policies. What is exactly the point of having such huge data plans, when all you can do is squint at the web on a tiny screen, or read your email – without trying to open attachments which are even harder to read. Granted, the iPhone has represented a leap in usability on these two fields, with fantastic web browsing, and very usable email where attachments can at least be useful. The only problem is the iPhone is one device lacking many functionality other platforms already enjoy, such as VoIP, decent IM, and…newsgroup access. These will come for sure, only because there is a very dedicated community of hackers porting and writing applications for it.

During my first month of iPhone use, when the novelty wants to make you try everything and, for example, browse the web when you don’t really need to, but just because it’s so cool – I went through about 70MB of data. Peanuts, compared to the 1GB plan I had with Vodafone…

View some live coverage by Engadget here, who are in a conference call with Google’s PR. The new mobile OS will be called Android – a damn ugly name if you ask me, but we’ll see if it will live up to expectations, with the iPhone raising the bar much higher than Symbian ever has done.

It actually indicates GPRS attachment status, the capability (or lack thereof) of sending and receiving data, be it over plain old GPRS, or the faster EDGE. I was going to comment on the original Engadget blog post, but after seeing a few pages of comments already, I doubt they would have noticed it. This is where they get it wrong:

You’ll notice the iTunes WiFi Store icon, and an O2-UK network symbol up top. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the E logo for EDGE is missing: we guess that 30% network coverage on O2 don’t quite stretch inside the Apple Store.

A bit further down, they mention this again:

O2 iPhone on the left, unlocked US iPhone on the right (running on T-Mobile’s UK network). Note that the O2 iPhone doesn’t show the EDGE logo, but the unlocked phone on T-Mobile does. You can probably guess at what we’re getting at here: O2′s EDGE coverage sucks.

In this particular side-by-side photo, T-Mobile’s coverage is marginally lower than O2′s, but they should both be capable of sending GPRS traffic. Another reason they get this wrong is that the waves icon ‘overwrites’ the E symbol while the iPhone is connected to a WiFi network, so you could still have GPRS/EDGE attachment in the background, so-to-speak. In my particular case, the iPhone is happily registered on Vodafone Spain, and is attached to GPRS (no EDGE here at all), showing the E while I’m not in range of WiFi.

The iPhone also does something very clever – when you open an application that requires a data connection, it will start a GPRS attach and session, while it asks you if you want to join any of the nearby WiFi networks (if any). In case you say no, the alternative data connection is already established, cutting down on extra waiting time before you start seeing content on your screen. This may seem stupid to Europeans, by default stuck with hugely expensive pay-as-you-go data (50 Euro cents per 250kB!!), but with the original AT&T voice + data plan, it does not really matter.