Ask HN: Best resources for small IPhone Web App? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best resources for small IPhone Web App?

17 pointsdxjones8 comments

I am developing a small php-based web app to be accessed both by desktop and iPhone/IPod Touch.

I am wondering what tools people use to make IPod Web Apps. I have come across iWebKit (http://http://iwebkit.net/) and WebApp (http://webapp.net.free.fr/), but I don't know if there is anything better or more useful out there. Also, if you have any pointers to detailed tutorials or source code examples, that would be cool.

thanks in advance, ...

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I would recommend iUI, which is based on the code originally developed by Joe Hewitt - the creator of Firebug.

I have developed a pretty advanced iPhone webapp with it (online food diary searching while you type). The only thing was that I had to disable page transitioning emulating sliding screens, as the animation was quite slow and unpleasant.

Since then, Apple added support for proprietary CSS extensions providing access to "native" animations, but due to the availability of native SDK, I don't think it is widely used and on a first glance this is not supported in iUI.

For reading and reference I would recommend Apple's Developer Connection topic http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/referencelibrary/G..., which provides several "entry" points to documentation, guides, and samples. Still, for development it makes a lot of sense to save efforts and build on top of an existing library, such as iUI, which provides you the app structure, pre-built JavaScript for iPhone-specific manipulations, and images.

I would be careful with iWebKit since it seems to use GPL, which may result in issues with non-open source use.

Stanford iPhone class:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php

UI library for websites to mimic the iPhone UI:

http://code.google.com/p/iui/

Stanford's classes are for native apps, not webapps.

However, iUI is an awesome framework for making iPhone-oriented webapps with.

http://phonegap.pbwiki.com/

Go down to tips and tricks

Check these 31 sample examples. http://www.appsamuck.com/day1.html

Apple's dev docs. See http://developer.apple.com/safari/ for the Safari dev center. It covers everything WebKit supports and how to interact with it.

For a standard/easy to implement UI, check out iUI: http://code.google.com/p/iui/

We used iUI for our iPhone (and Android) versions, and it worked very well, and was really easy to apply to an existing web application (an old-fashioned non-AJAXy one at that).

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