Our good friend and colleague James Langford recently posted a great article on his Pointy Hair Boss Tech Guide about Google Forms and their display on the iPhone. Here is the post in its entirety:

Google has just released what I think is one of their best product enhancements ever. Read about it on the Google docs blog post: Stop sharing spreadsheets, start collecting information

What makes this so cool is that they’ve given the person of average technical competence — i.e., the pointy hair boss– the ability to create a form with multiple types of inputs, gather the information, chart it, share it, and discuss it. And, the forms display pretty well on the iPhone.

Pretty well is okay, but you can easily make them fit right into the iPhone interface. If you’ve read previous posts about building iPhone web apps, you can apply the same techniques as we have before. Just add a bit of html at the start of the document and a bit at the end and stick the form in an iframe in the middle. We have written a little tool to get you started. Create your form, get the link for it, and enter it here: http://acu.mobi/ig

This will spit out the file in an iPhone-style interface. View source and save it as a document on your web and you’re set. In theory, you could point directly to the url on our server, but this is an experiment and I can’t guarantee it will be available, so please put all code on your own server.

By the way, you can do this same formatting trick with some Google gadgets and Google calendars since Google gives you a way to format the html output. Both are put in iframes. When you configure gadgets or calendars, just set the width to 320 pixels and a minimum of about 420 pixels length. Grab the url and stick it in this tool: http://acu.mobi/igadgets

Please use the same caution as above. Use the tool to grab the html wrapper and then host it on your own server.

Possible uses and caveats for Google Apps users

At this point, only public google.com accounts can publish a form for use by anyone. Forms published from inside Google Apps domains will require a login, so only users of that domain can fill out the form. And at the point, since we can’t use the extra formatting for the iPhone, users will have to tap or spread to enlarge the display. However, this is an easy-to-use online test, survey and clicker tool.

I suspect that Google will at some point give us the ability to share forms outside the domain, format for iPhone and display graphs of the collected input. In the meantime, I’m thankful for what we’ve got.