Building an iphone app with JQtouch in two hours | Hacker News Reader

Building an iphone app with JQtouch in two hours

snook.ca

17 pointskilian8 comments

The only thing missing for these Javascript/HTML5 iPhone apps is a way to package them so you could publish them on AppStore.

I know people can bookmark the app but the AppStore is also a great venue for people to discover your app.

Another nice thing would be to be able to mix native code with Javascript code.

Tread carefully, as mentioned on HN before, Apple has recently started filtering for apps that are "repackaged websites"; I couldn't find a great article on this but here's something close:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/07/apple-cookie-cutter-apps/

...anyway if the level of scrutiny they are currently applying to iPad app submissions is any indication (under which I'm suffering at the moment) they may be getting a lot more selective in the near future.

I'm not saying it's not worth a shot, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

That said, there are distinct advantages to bypassing the App Store altogether, which is one of the advantages of the Web App approach. You just need to use the app to drive revenue generated elsewhere instead of charging for the app itself.

(although a clever fellow could find a way to charge for web apps as well...hmmm)

Anyway the biggest challenge apps outside the App Store face (and this includes Web Apps) is discovery, and I'm hoping that I can have a hand in addressing that shortcoming as well.

Have a look at: http://www.appcelerator.com/

I've installed it, had a quick play around with it and have a 'hello world' sort of app on my iPhone. Just need to clear a few things off my plate before I can focus some attention on it and try to use it to build something substantial.

The O'Reilly book on web apps for iPhone suggests Phonegap (http://phonegap.com/) for this job.

O'Reilly book at: http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/ch07.html

I am impressed that he did this in two hours, but at the same time, I am dismayed that I am impressed that he did it in two hours.

Why are 'simple' programming tasks often so hard?

For example: I spent hours trying to figure out what was wrong with my oauth requests to twitter last night. Just kept getting "401 Unauthorized" over and over. Still haven't figured it out. (The worst part has to be that I was using a library and serious debugging ended with me following the instructions on the tutorial step-by-step; I still got the error...).

My question: Why should this app take 2 hours? Why shouldn't this take 2 minutes? All it is is a little form that stores the number of push-ups you did and the week. Why is everything so hard? Why is so much of my life painful library wrangling?

There was a good twitter oauth script written by jaisen mathai which you many find useful, unless you don't like PHP. :)

http://www.jaisenmathai.com/blog/2009/03/31/how-to-quickly-i...

Which library ? which language? If it is ruby/rails I can point you in the right direction. mail me at manu@manu-j.com

It was clj-oauth and clj-apache-http.

I've been working on building a generalized DSL for http-requests (based on a site structure description generate the request-functions).

I figured it would be interesting to test it with twitter's oauth. It works quite well for http-get requests, didn't work very well for post requests (ex. status updates). Squinted at it, macro-expanded a few times and fixed a bug... now it seems to be generating the right code. Still not working

So I went back to the base case (libraries without my DSL over-top, direct from tutorial), posts still didn't work.

Anyway, the interesting thing is that posts will work for very short strings, or strings that are very repetitive (a string full of s's 'ssssssssssssssssssssss...' would post, as would 'wtf' and 'ww'; 'well this is a nice message', would not...).

Much hacking and fussing and resetting of keys later, it was 4am and I had to get up and work in a few hours (did I mention I was doing this for fun? sigh).

So I'm starting to think that something may have changed in twitter's oauth spec between when I downloaded the libraries and when I got back to using them (it was a few months). Other than that, I suppose my next step would be to look at some other implementations and figure out if there is a bug in the what I am using.

I guess my point is, even easy things aren't easy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com