I've been using Safari on Windows and the iBBDemo Blackbaud iPhone Browser Simulator to emulate an iPhone but I have noticed that Safari does not render form elements using the default control styles. Safari on iPhone supplies default control styles that are specific to iPhone. This means my web forms look nothing like they do on an actual iPhone.
Are there any style sheets or iPhone Web Design Tool Kits that will style the form elements exactly as they should appear? Or is there an online service that provides screenshots of how a web page looks on an iPhone?
If you have a Mac, then the easiest way is to use the iPhone Simulator. It might not be suitable for your purposes, though.
There are a lot of things which you'd need to do to get the rendering right (there are a lot of rounded rects, and the user can scale the page to an arbitrary size, and strange things sometimes happen when you rotate the device).
Related
There's a web page at http://examinemysite.com/foodRating. The webpage shows properly in two iPhone emulators as shown below. However testing using a real iPhone and a real WP7 phone, the size of the text and the stars are a lot smaller. Why are the physical devices not showing the same page like the emulators (same size text, stars and spacing)? The emulators are running under Windows 7.
IBBDEMO:
MITE:
You're using tools that simply try to display what they think would be displayed by MobileSafari. IBBDEMO is, if I'm not mistaken, an Adobe Air application. I'm not sure about MITE, but I don't think it has any special knowledge of MobileSafari either. These tools seem like nothing more than web browsers that display in a small 320x480 window with an iPhone image wrapped around the display area. It would be fairly astonishing if they did a perfect job of simulating MobileSafari.
I have a software that eventually will have some reports to be accessed via iPhone.
Once I am not willing to develop an iPhone app, I´d like to make these reports accessible via iPhone Safari browsers.
GMail in iPad uses HTML 5, so I guess I can do the same.
My question is where can I find some resources to learn best practices doing so and how can I test it in a PC computer.
Thanks
Here is a similar answer I've given: Exclusive CSS for iPhone/Android
For testing you can use Chrome or Safari, as they are both webkit browsers (which is what the iPhone uses). Safari can even render as the iPhone user agent.
Hope this helps.
Please take a look at PhoneGap, I think that is what you are looking for.
You can emulate the program in xCode, but you will need an Apple for that. For PhoneGap also..
From the app architecture view-point you should also consider introducing app-specific optimization such us:
Simplify the app (show only what you need for mobile)
Minimize Application and Data Size
Aggregate Images into a Single Composite Resource (Sprites)
Include Background Images Inline in CSS Style Sheets
Keep DOM Size Reasonable
Ensure Paragraph Text Flows
Avoid Redirects
I'm looking for a way to test my web layouts for mobile devices without having to buy the actual hardware. I'm primarily interested in testing for the iPhone and the iPad. I own an iPhone and so can do a proper test there. But I'm unable to know for sure what it looks like on the iPad. Either way: it would be nice to check the visual output on my Mac as I'm building it for productivity sake.
testiphone.com is supposed to simulate the appearance of a website, but there is a difference in rendering the layout scale: On my iPhone hardware, the content's width is scaled to fit the left and right margins of the screen. In the testiphone.com simulator, the content is not scaled at all.
So does there exist a method that can test visual layouts consistently?
(I'm not opposed to subscribing to the Developer SDK, but if there's a faster and easier way to get the viewport and scaling to behave consistently, I would prefer it!)
You can download an SDK with a free developer account. You will not have access to beta versions, but you won't need them for testing web layouts. Go to http://developer.apple.com/ios and click the link for "XCode and iOS SDK". It will ask you to log in with your apple id, and set up a free developer account if it isn't registered with one. Then, use the iPhone Simulator application to test your website.
I'm looking to create a mobile version of our website/web app. What's a good way to provide the best, most fully featured version.
Part of the reason for creating it is instead of an iPhone app, so I'd like to offer an iPhone web app that takes full advantage of the iPhone's version of WebKit (so CSS animations, being able to rely on good javascript support etc). However, I'd also like the site to work well on other smart phones as well as more basic mobile phones as well.
Do I create two sites (Mobile WebKit and basic mobile web) and redirect based on User Agent? Can I create one site that degrades well? What are the possibilities, and how do other people handle it?
Also: are mobile web simulators worth a damn? I have an iPhone, so can test easily on that. If I want to test on Blackberry/Palm Pre do I really need a device or are there reliable simulators?
These are some of the iPhone specific libraries that provide a native look and feel on webkit:
iUi
jQTouch
Sencha Touch
iWebkit
Getting it to work on most phones will definitely be an issue with most libraries as they are built around with the iPhone's screen size (320x480) in mind.
To get a wider coverage of devices including Android and J2ME phones, checkout Yahoo Blueprint. It's a markup language that translates for various platforms and devices.
You could either get the mobile view based on User Agent by dynamically switching the stylesheet on your server when spitting the page. This is not a recommended approach though for heavy-duty pages as you will still be sending huge chunks of data that would not be rendered. Alternatively, if you have a clear separation of your views, you can templatize the view based on User Agent and/or other parameters. This has the advantage of keeping your controller logic in one place with only changing views. You could use the above libraries for iPhone/iPod Touch and switch to a simpler mobile version for other smartphones or tweak it as you want.
Creating a separate mobile version of the site can be painstakingly difficult to maintain when changes arise.
The iPhone and Android simulators are as close as it gets to the real deal. The iPhone won't let you do stuff like make calls on the simulator for obvious reasons, but the Android provides mock implementations for basically everything on the device.
I want to develop a mobile web application using asp.net 3.5 that can be viewed on an iPhone but there is no longer a template in VS2008 to enable mobile development. Can this be done ?
the iphone uses the "regular" version of your website so developing a "mobile" version would nto accomplish what you're looking for. You should check the browser headers and redirect people to the iPhone version of your site if you detect mobile safari.
http://iphone.facebook.com/
Another option (if you're using MVC) is to have your controller detect the browser and show a different view if it catches mobile safari. This way you wouldn't need a duplicate site, just two sets of views.
A web application (via Asp.Net 3.5) would be accessible over the Internet and would be accessible via the iPhone's Safari browser. There isn't anything truly special you need for it unless you want to make a true web application for mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberries. In that case, you are looking purely at design aspects since it's still just a website. Due to the diversity of mobile browser capabilities, you'll need to do some research to find out what is recommended for the specific mobile browsers you want to access (the BBC's website comes to mind as a good example of mobile rendering).
Ultimately, the user agent is evaluated by your system and then it renders (or redirects) appropriately. Everything else is design if you want the page to render differently for the iPhone than any other browser on the web.
If you can get your hands on a copy of .Net magazine (a.k.a. Practical Web Design in the U.S.) issue 178, there is a great article on what you need to be aware of when doing mobile development and how the iPhone's browser is a lot different than others.
The iPhone (at least mine which is the 3G version) have full support for "normal" web apps with Ajax and everything. So mostly any Ajax library would be 100% compatible with the iPhone, at least as long as the Ajax library is focusing on Open Standards and such...
[Shameless-Plug I work with Ra-Ajax]
Ra-Ajax have 100% support for iPhone except for "dragging and dropping" which interferes with scrolling on the iPhone. This means that you can use Ra-Ajax (which is an LGPL licensed and Free of Charge library for ASP.NET) to create a "normal" website which will work 100% perfectly (except for dragging and dropping, which is used in e.g. Ra-Windows etc) on the iPhone...
Even the really "advanced" stuff like our Ajax Calendar sample works flawlessly with the iPhone :)