Posts Tagged: Web Apps

Apple / iPhone / Mobile Computing / Web Development — No Comments
9
Dec 08

iPhoney for iPhone Web App Development

I’ve not developed any web apps for the iPhone (beyond installing the very cool wptouch iphone-friendly WordPress theme for this blog). However, I do appreciate the continuing value of web apps for the iPhone. I just came across a very cool OS X app that acts as an iPhone simulator for web apps called iPhoney.

iPhoney simply runs Safari in the form of an iPhone, and allows you to choose between Webkit, iPhone, and custom user agents.

Here are the full “iPhacts” from the iPhoney home page:

  • Test your iPhone-enabled Web 2.0 applications and compatible web sites.
  • Open any website that works with Safari (use Safari 3 beta for the most accurate experience).
  • Rotate to see websites in either portrait or landscape orientation.
  • Show or hide the location bar for a full-screen iPhone experience.
  • Simulate the iPhone user agent, to test browser redirection scripts.
  • Zoom out to see how your current pages might look while zoomed out on iPhone.
  • Turn off plug-ins (including Flash, but note that they all turn off (including QuickTime).
  • Automatic updates with Sparkle, so you’ll always know if there’s a new version.
  • And of course, open source code so you can contribute to iPhoney’s rapid development.
Apple / iPhone / Mobile Computing — 3 Comments
8
Dec 08

Washington Mutual iPhone Web App shows us why Web Apps are still cool

Washington Mutual (WaMu) has rolled out an iPhone-optimized version of their web site. It pretty much lets you do all of the basic account management stuff the full version of the site allows, except you can’t view canceled checks. This is a great example of why web apps for the iPhone aren’t going away as some have contended.

iPhone web apps have a number of advantages over native apps, including but not limited to:

  • Rapid development using existing web development skills/bodies.
  • Use of existing web application infrastructure (i.e., no additional costs).
  • Avoidance of the time consuming and magic-8 ball logic of the App Store vetting process.
  • Seemless application updating.
  • Things like phonegap will eventually help bridge the divide between web apps and native apps by taking advantage of the iPhone’s hardware features.

I currently have home screen icons for 5 different iPhone-optimized Web Apps (Digg.com, ESPN, WaMu, Flickr, and Dropbox), plus a few other mobile web sites that are in need of an iPhone-optimized version, including the DirecTV Scheduler and cnn.com.