Can I successfully do iPhone/iPad web development (not native apps) on Windows, and without having an iPhone/iPad device?
I.e. work like PSD-to-iPhone-optimized XHTML/CSS layout.
I’m interested to learn about and make iPhone/iPad optimized websites. Any tips? How different will it be from desktop? What’s different other than the smaller screen?
From experience I will say the only true way to test for the iPad is to test on an iPad. I have been developing a site in html5 specifically for an iPad and we initially used the iPhone to test. The drag function we had implemented with jQuery had worked almost perfectly on the iPhone but after the client had tested on the iPad they came back to us and said the function did not work period and they were correct.
I guess this could change depending on what type of development you are doing. From experience I would say either A. Make some trips to the apple store B. Make friends with iPad owner C. Buy and iPad
yes for an ipohne emulator... try MobiOne.
It's a good application to test the pages in iphone like environment.
http://www.genuitec.com/mobile/
I don’t think you can really do iPhone/iPad development successfully without an iPhone/iPad at all, whether on Windows, Mac or Commodore 64.
If you’re serious about iPhone/iPad development, how could you not try your software out yourself on the devices it’s going to run on? Your clients are going to want code that works on the iPhone/iPad. You need an iPhone/iPad to check that it works.
if your developing a web app then i think you can use this: http://ipadpeek.com/
The answer is: Yes you can absolutely do iPhone and iPad website development on a Windows PC.
However, you really should/must test the result on an actual iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. Especially if you are integrating in any way with special device features like the dialing feature of the phone. (Yes you can have phone numbers in a webpage trigger dialing when you tap on them.)
However, you can do the bulk of the development on Windows, testing the WebApp in Safari or Chrome, which are the most fully compliant HTML5 WebKit based browsers out there.
Also highly recommend using an HTML5 touch framework like jQuery Mobile or Sencha Touch. This will go a long way to ensuring that your WebApp is optimized for the screen size and touch gestures of the mobile devices.
Remember that you can't deploy a pure WebApp to the app store, only download it from a website. You'll need a native wrapper like PhoneGap for that. And to compile a PhoneGap wrapped WebApp you'll need XCode on a Mac.
But there's a lot of power in adding your WebApp to the home screen on iOS. No native code involved and you get a full screen webapp with a home screen icon, loading image and no browser toolbars. Highly recommended.
Related
The apps provide the same functionality, but have different code bases.
Is this possible?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "bundle" in this instance. PhoneGap provides the ability to deploy your app to numerous platforms (iOS, Android, Windows Phone) by writing in just HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. Your question states that you have a functioning HTML5 version of the app written for the PhoneGap platform. If this is the case, what is the need for the Objective-C iPhone app? Simply maintaining the HTML5 app should be sufficient to deploy to both iPad and iPhone. PhoneGap currently supports iOS, iPad, and retina displays.
From the PhoneGap documentation, you can specify differences in your interface using config.xml.
You can mix phonegap and native code fairly easily - just have the startup code check the platform type and display either the native view or the phonegap webview.
However, whatever you do at this point will result in some inconvenience to users - the only way to share in app purchases across devices is to have a single universal app. If you want to keep existing purchases, you have to add an ipad view to the existing iphone app, but that will not show up as an update for anyone who has the existing iPad app.
There are other possibilities such as setting up a server to track purchases in both apps, but that gets a lot more complicated than standard in app purchase and only works if your app includes a login system.
Anyone know of any flash equivalent software for the iPhone. Need to do some simple masking, animation...
As others have said, you can use AIR, but I'm guessing you want this to run in the browser, not as some native app. That is, you want something you can put on a web page, not distribute as an application through the App Store.
If that is the case, try Wallaby: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/
Wallaby can export certain Flash features to HTML5, which can be rendered in mobile Safari.
Hope that helps.
Depending on your exact needs (eg. if you want to work with timeline animations) then using the iOS packager part of AIR is a good option. For most uses however I would consider the performance of Flash iOS apps to be sub-par.
A development tool that is fairly similar to Flash programming-wise is Corona SDK:
http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/
Checkout Adobe's AIR. Its a run time that runs on the iPhone. You write in their flash language and then same code can run on iOS and Android.
I have an iPhone web app I'm producing on a Linux machine. What's the best browser I can use to most closely mimic the feature-limited version of Safari present on the iPhone? (It's a "slimmed down" version of WebKit, which is more limited than one might think.)
A used iPod Touch for US$150 (used, in Seattle). It's either that, or the iPhone simulator running on a Mac. If one is specifically targeting "iPhone web app", the cost should be budgeted into the project.
Barring that, use desktop Safari. That will still require a Windows or Mac box. The rendering engine is the same, so I imagine it's as close as you're going to get on the desktop.
On the other hand, what are the problems you are trying to avoid? Mobile Safari is pretty good at rendering most web sites I call up. There are guidelines for development, and avoid media such as Flash. If you don't have the hardware, borrow it for sanity checking when you're done. That's the route I'd go if I absolutely didn't want to spend the US$150.
I am planning to make an iPhone web application and I just wanted to know what is required for web development?
Can I do the web development on a windows machine? Does Apple provide any iPhone plugin so that we can develop web application using Windows?
What is required for developing on a Mac?
Regards,
Amit
If you are making a web application, you can download Safari for Windows and view it there.
You can also use Joe Hewitt's iUI framework to make your app look and feel all iPhone-y.
? If you are gonna build a web application, the application runs on the browser. To use your application the user use Safari (on the iPhone). Apple doesn't control web applications.
If you mean, embed your web application, INSIDE a native iPhone application, you need a Mac to build the wrapper, for the core application you can use whatever system you want.
May I suggest to take a look at phonegap (if you are looking to iPhone app).
Check out these three apple sites:
http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/codinghowtos/Mobile/GraphicsMediaAndVisualEffects/index.html
http://developer.apple.com/safari/
http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/navigation/CodingHow-Tos.html
I would check out these pages thoroughly, and also at a minimum, I'd download safari for mac or windows.
Yes, you can develop it on windows. They are just web apps.
For mac or windows, latest safari and a public website is probably all you need. Check out google app engine for a good free development site that supports a database/datastore. www.appspot.com
Also, you can look at the webapps on a regular computer. http://www.apple.com/webapps/travel/staycation.html
http://wsidecar.apple.com/cgi-bin/nph-reg3rdpty2.pl/product=25536&cat=94&platform=osx&method=sa/
http://www.apple.com/webapps/games/
I presume you are talking about creating a web application designed to be used from an iphone.
The iphone uses safari as its browser. You can download this for use on windows and it should give you an accurate representation of how your app will look when rendered on an iphone. However in order to test how well your app performs on the phone, and if it really is usable using the touch screen the I think the only way to be really sure is to test using the iPhone.
You can use safari for windows to test the rendering but for your final tests you need to use a real iphone in order to understand how your users will experience it.
I want to test a website to see how it works with the iPhone but I don't own an iPhone or an iPod touch. Is there a way I can test how the site works on them without owning one?
What I'm really after is fixing how Stackoverflow's WMD markdown editor works on the iPhone. I hear that the hyperlink and image prompts are created too high. I think I know how to fix that but it's pretty tough to develop blind.
If you own a Mac, you can download the iPhone SDK which comes with an iPhone simulator. It works not only for debugging a native app but also for browsing the web.
If you have Safari on your computer, you can enable the "Develop" menu under Preferences > Advanced > Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar.
With this enabled, you can go to Develop > User Agent, and change the user-agent string to the device you want your browser to report to the web server as.
By resizing the window to the appropriate width, you can emulate what the site will look like on the iPhone.
The upside of this is that it's quick, it works on both Windows and Mac, and you don't need the iPhone SDK installed. You can also browse iPhone-specific versions of websites that catch user-agent strings directly from your PC.
The downside is obviously your Safari browser on your PC will behave quicker than on the actual device (especially in regard to javascript performance); it displays plugins and shows fonts that may not be available on the actual iPhone OS; a lack of multi-touch support and "snapping" to columns while scrolling; no auto-rotation; no multi-touch/pinch-zoom; widgets will look different; etc.
Just a notice on this old thread - we have now enabled live testing on iPhones and iPads via vnc at CrossBrowserTesting.com.
Ken - Founder
There is a free app on the mac that emulates the iPhone browser: iPhoney
I don't purport to have done more than a web search, but the problem seems to be solved by several products that are "iPhone web app emulators."
http://www.testiphone.com/
http://marketcircle.com/iphoney/