iPhone is a nice platform to develop for. The appstore made possible to transform a hobby or a simple idea into a good income source, due to the popularity of iPhone and the low prices of the apps found here .
Bu what about the rest of coders that come from the pure web side of the programming ( like me ) - php, javascript, ror, etc ?
Below I’ll try to make a list with components you can use to develop for iPhone using only what you know, or learn only few things more.
Apps for iPhone are separated into 2 groups - native apps and webapps.
Native apps use their SDK and runs native on and from the phone, while webapps run inside safari, and are fetched from an external sever.
Frameworks
Here comes one type of projects , that managed to make a bridge between the 2 types of applications, using a native instance of webkit to render and use html/css/js files - from local space of the device and/or a remote server.
Usually the frameworks expose some native device functions - camera, accelerometer, contacts,geolocation to javascript methods, so you can use it on your apps.
Big5apps - it lets you access some features of the device using javascript - like image, camera,sound,geolocation
Phonegap - is intended to be a cross-device platform, covering iphone,blackberry,android.
Liquidgear - seems to be a fork of phonegap, but oriented on the iphone only, so the development of this framework get another course, more specific for the iPhone device.
Quickconnect - allows you to use a template for dashcode or for xcode to develop for iphone using web technologies.
The above frameworks needs only the effort to learn a little of xcode usage.
JavaScript/CSS/HTML Llibraries
WebKit for iPhone or other mobile devices is a little different - for example touch events, or hardware accelerated css transforms. For this you need to develop your own functions/methods, or to adapt other scripts to to use this.
Or, you can use one of the below js scripts/frameworks.
XUI
A simple javascript framework for building mobile web applications.XUI strives to be a framework for first class mobile device browsers such as WebKit, Fennec and Opera with future support under consideration for IE Mobile and BlackBerry.
MagicFramework
Magic Framework is a native iPhone UI imitator and HTML5 db interface built in html/css/javascript. It’s useful for online websites or on-device Webkit-based applications looking to imitate the native iPhone UI and/or use native storage without having to write native code.
Dashcode
Apple’s web toolkit
jQTouch
A jQuery plugin with native animations, auto list navigation, and default application styles for Mobile WebKit browsers like iPhone, G1, and Pre.
CiUI
CNET iPhone UI
Safire
Safire is an open source framework written in HTML/CSS/JS
It make’s building/porting applications to the iPhone ridiculously easy.
iWebKit
iWebKit is a file package designed to help you create your own iPhone and iPod Touch compatible website or webapp. The kit is accessible to anyone even people without any html knowledge and is simple to understand thanks to the included tutorials. In a couple of minutes you will have created a full and profes
iphone-universal
The framework is based on 1 stylesheet and several HTML examples, also, it contains original artwork so you can edit them in Adobe Photoshop CS and adapt it to your projects.
iUi
Based on Joe Hewitt’s iPhone navigation work, iUI has the following features:
- Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML
- Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages
- Ability to handle phone orientation changes
- Provide a more “iPhone-like” experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)
Tools
Iphone Simulator
It comes with Apple’s SDK
Phonegap iphone emulator
To test apps built with phonegap
iPhoney
iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development.
TestiPhone.com
This is a web browser based simulator for quickly testing your iPhone Applications. This tool has been so far tested and working using Internet Explorer 7, FireFox 2 and Safari 3 in Windows, but you ned Safari to get the real experience.
Safari 4
Well…no comment here
Ok, almost all the above tools needs a mac to be able to use. But to develop for iPhone, you will need a mac anyway.
Have I missed something ? Let me know.