iPhone built in plugins for Safari? - iphone

I've been using my iphone to surf the internet a couple of times, and I've noticed that some websites had some plugins on their site, I've been trying to find these for my own website but couldn't find them.
The plugin I'm interested in is kind of a 'Coverflow' effect,
it's completely based on the touch screen, and looked about the same on every site I've seen it on. that's why I'm assuming it's a.. built in plugin or something like that.
I've also noticed that these sites have an iphone styled toolbar and menus, well I'd be grateful if you could help me find that plugin,
Would also be nice if you could explain about it a little or show me more plugins that are available out there for the iPhone's safari

I don't know about any plugin in Mobile Safari, but you can use some Frameworks to build apps with touch-events. For example:
http://jqtouch.com/
http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/
These frameworks often offer much features, which you can use to let your web app look like a normal iPhone-App.

Related

How to create iphone webapp on windows? (I can use my friend's mac for finishing)

I know a lot of similar questions have been asked, but my case is a little different.
I have a windows machine on which I want to do the development. I can borrow my friend's mac for signing/publishing to store or other things.
Is it possible to do this? Can I create a "Dynamic Web App Project" in eclipse, do the coding and finally use a MAC to finish it? My app is 100% offline app.
Where can I find the directory structure for the HTML/CSS files?
How can I achieve the iphone look and feel of buttons and other UI?
I know that many people have done this but I cant find any tutorial. Please point me to one if you know about it.
Thanks in advance.
Sounds like this would be a great job for phone gap.
http://phonegap.com/
They provide wrapping software to make your web application run natively on the phone.
It sounds to me like you should look at phonegap for the coding.
For getting your buttons, backgrounds, icons and such to look and feel more like native iOS apps, take a look at this list of graphics for iOS. Most are free. There are .zip files with pre cut images, and a number of .psd files for you to choose from. If you are not using xCode or Titanium to build the apps, these are a nice way of getting that native look and feel.

About making a mobile version of a website

I want to make a mobile version of a website (you know, those with .m in the URL). How is this done, and what is different from a regular website? Can I still make my website in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, or do I also need some additional tools for mobile sites?
Final question - is there a difference viewing a mobile website on an Android phone versus an iPhone?
Thanks.
How is this done?
In the same way as you do websites, is just HTML/CSS/JS and a bit more.
What is different from a regular website?
Basically but not only:
The display size is the biggest (or in this case, the smaller) difference, you have to take care of small displays and viewports.
The user will interact with the finger and not with the mouse, so the clickable area must be bigger.
Can I still make my website in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, or do I also need some additional tools for mobile sites?
Yes you can (and should) use just HTML/CSS/JS but check for the different video/audio tags already on webkit mobile.
Is there a difference viewing a mobile website on an Android phone versus an iPhone?
Both come from webkit but they have small differences (like the touch events) but for mostly websites the differences are minimal.
A website, even a mobile one, is still a website, which means you'll use the same stuff as for any other normal website : HTML, CSS, Javascript, images...
The main thing you'll generally have to think about are :
Mobile devices often have small screens, and various resolutions,
Mobile networks are not really fast, and sometimes have awful ping ; so, your pages must be lightweight, and not include too many external files/images.
Touch-screens mean you'll have to put some spaces arround the things that must be clickable (to prevent the user from clicking the wrong link because two are too close)
iPhones and recent Android devices have some quite advanced browsers ; there should not be that many differences between them (you might find more differences between android 1.6 and 2.3 than between android 2.3 and iPhone ; and there are also many different browsers on android) -- still, don't forget testing on as many devices as possible
You can make your mobile version using HTML/CSS just like any other website. There are guidelines you can follow to help you with the process. Search Google.
You can also look at platforms that help you put things together like jqTouch

JavaScript based iPhone UI framework

We have a push based web-application. Recently, we planned to make an iPhone app for it. Much like Facebook has it's iPhone application as well as web presence. We are looking for a UI framework that can get us going quickly. I've leafed through PhoneGap and couple other JS based UI frameworks mentioned here. I am bit unsure what can suit us the best. So, I am looking for your suggestions.
Our constraints are as follows:
The framework should be JS based. We all are web-devs and want to avoid learning Objective C.
Framework should support iPhone's capabiilities as smoothly as a native app does. If not, we will prefer a JS framework which is the smoothest of all JS frameworks. So, this is the most important constraint.
It should support smooth swipe through screens, support rotation. Nice, if it can capture shake as well. But shake does not take preference over a better framework without shake support.
Nice to have -- with little or no modification in code, if the framework is supported on other touchscreen phones as well. Android and Symbian would be suffice. But again, we are focused on iPhone for now.
I am a bit curious to know what can be the best choice to start development with. I will be thankful if you share your experience with pros-and-cons of the framework that you have used.
Thanks
Nishant
I have been playing with following frameworks.
Jo
Sencha Touch
jQuery Mobile
These are for serving Web based mobile sites, they can then in turn be made into Apps for Android or iOS using PhoneGap
Of the 3, Sencha is the more mature project and has the most things out of the box. Jo looks very promising and would probably directly compete with Sencha. jQuery mobile is very interesting but just far to early to do any production code with it, too rough around the edges. jQuery mobile takes a different approach to the others as it is html based and it interperates the attributes on tags to turn things into tableviews or menus.
jQuery mobile is quicker to hack together and get your head around, where the other two take a little bit more thinking. But once you figure them out its easy enough.
If you don't want to serve the site via a url at all and want to just build an app then Appcelerator is the way to go. You write code in JS and it makes native Android or iOS apps for you. You will get access to pretty much the full Android/iOS api.
I have coded with appcelerator, however I am no longer going to use it and use one of the above frameworks, probably Sencha for just now. I can get access to the device native apis via PhoneGap and for simpler apps give a great experience cross device via a url.
In about 6 months, or sooner, I think jQuery mobile will be the daddy...

Will all javascript libraries work with Iphone? Aptana question

I am trying to use Aptana to build an IPhone web application. I've never use Aptana. I downloaded the iphone support and started a new project. It is now asking me if I want to import a javascript library and lists the "big ones." Will IPhone's Safari be able to use these, specifically jquery? I saw that jquery had a special iphone library so my guess is no.
Should I tell it to use jquery (or other library) or should I download the special iphone javascript subset manually and try an integrate it in my project?
As far as I know JQuery should work fine on the iPhone. The specific libraries you are talking about must be additions to take advantage of iPhone only features like being able to handle the display orientation event or maybe use the webkit css animation extensions.
Although you will need to be careful with events since most mouse related events on the iPhone behave a little different from what you might expect. This presentation by PPK offers some clues about it:
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2009/04/27/video-ppk-jsevents/
Yep, iphone should run jquery just fine. The javascript support is surprisingly capable. Although you may want to look at some of the iPhone specific libraries out there. I forget their names. iUI I think?

iPhone-SDK: How to make iPhone format website?

Is it possible to make my own website as iPhone friendly format when user launches my website in an iPhone browser?
Currently if i launch my website in iPhone, it doesn't look more readable and i need to zoom it to see clearly. If i want to provide my website link will be more clear and readable with bold fonts and buttons ( moreover it is like iPhone friendly format) in the first launch itself in iPhone browser, how to make it success? I could able to see some third party websites like http://tringapps.com and all provide the same logic. How to achieve this and what should i do for that? Where to code?
Clave/
You'll need to make a separate version, or at the very least an extreme re-CSSing of your existing site.
Apple has some good tips on getting started here.
There are several toolkits to assist in developing the web apps as well, like this and even this.
There is a good book to get started. Building Applications for Mobile Safari
There are many PDFs available from Apple.