[thelist] iphone apps

[Barney Carroll]

Yes, an iPhone App proper is something only iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads
can use. The Joomla thing sounds good — standardisation across mobile
browsers isn't as bad as you might think and a bit of work will make a site
cater to all mobile devices pretty well. http://www.jqtouch.com/ features
mobile events such as orientation change, swipe, etc. if you want to get
adventurous, but if you provide this meta:

 <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0;
maximum-scale=1.0;">

…you will achieve the most sought-after thing, which is to have the page fix
width to the mobile devices available width and prevent zooming.

The demo on http://www.jqtouch.com/ shows how you can instruct the user to
download (or simply link) a site to their iPhone's home screen (so that it
is in fact indistinguishable from an App except in terms of graphical
hardware acceleration) — much like Google's Voice app (which is all HTML5
and JS). http://www.google.com/mobile/voice/

I haven't used this myself but it looks like an interesting halfway house:
build your site with W3 DHTML, then compile it as an application for iPhone,
Android, Blackberry… http://phonegap.com/ — having said that I'd still
recommend the web development proper route.

This is also good stuff:

Regards,
Barney Carroll

barney.carroll at gmail.com
07594 506 381


On 26 March 2010 15:50, Bob Meetin <bobm at dottedi.biz> wrote:

> Barney Carroll wrote:
>
>> Hiya Bob,
>>
>> iPhone Apps are tightly controlled by Apple and are distribute exclusively
>> through the iPhone App Store. You develop them with XCode and the iPhone
>> SDK
>> (http://developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action) — a license will cost
>> you
>> £60. When you've made your app you will need to submit it to apple for
>> review and approval (usually two weeks), and they publish it.
>>
>> Alternatively, you can develop a site to cater for the iPhone's UI and get
>> most of the desired functionality (events like swipes and rotations have
>> their own Javascript functions). This would use open technology and
>> wouldn't
>> cost you, but you'd have difficulty selling it. There's a good guide here:
>> http://blog.mindbites.com/five-things-we-learned-building-our-iphone-site/
>>
>> You can tell whether or not someone is viewing your site with an iPhone by
>> parsing the UA string (iPhone will return true):
>>
>> var iPhone = navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i);
>>
>> Regards,
>> Barney Carrol
>>
> Thanks to all who responded.  Again, with worn out eyes I could never
> engaged in using hand-held devices.  The iPhone is specific to Apple.  Does
> this suggest that my client will need to develop the application for many
> common phone models and go through a similar process with their phone
> store/network?
>
> Several Joomla templates at my disposal already have built in functionality
> for delivering a mobile or iphone version.
>
> -Bob
>
>
>
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