
Building an iphone app with JQtouch in two hours - kilian
http://snook.ca/archives/other/hundred-pushups
======
fierarul
The only thing missing for these Javascript/HTML5 iPhone apps is a way to
package them so you could publish them on AppStore.

I know people can bookmark the app but the AppStore is also a great venue for
people to discover your app.

Another nice thing would be to be able to mix native code with Javascript
code.

~~~
jasongullickson
Tread carefully, as mentioned on HN before, Apple has recently started
filtering for apps that are "repackaged websites"; I couldn't find a _great_
article on this but here's something close:

<http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/07/apple-cookie-cutter-apps/>

...anyway if the level of scrutiny they are currently applying to iPad app
submissions is any indication (under which I'm suffering at the moment) they
may be getting a lot more selective in the near future.

I'm not saying it's not worth a shot, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

That said, there are distinct advantages to bypassing the App Store
altogether, which is one of the advantages of the Web App approach. You just
need to use the app to drive revenue generated elsewhere instead of charging
for the app itself.

(although a clever fellow could find a way to charge for web apps as
well...hmmm)

Anyway the biggest challenge apps outside the App Store face (and this
includes Web Apps) is discovery, and I'm hoping that I can have a hand in
addressing that shortcoming as well.

------
anonjon
I am impressed that he did this in two hours, but at the same time, I am
dismayed that I am impressed that he did it in two hours.

Why are 'simple' programming tasks often so hard?

For example: I spent hours trying to figure out what was wrong with my oauth
requests to twitter last night. Just kept getting "401 Unauthorized" over and
over. Still haven't figured it out. (The worst part has to be that I was using
a library and serious debugging ended with me following the instructions on
the tutorial step-by-step; I still got the error...).

My question: Why should this app take 2 hours? Why shouldn't this take 2
minutes? All it is is a little form that stores the number of push-ups you did
and the week. Why is everything so hard? Why is so much of my life painful
library wrangling?

~~~
boundlessdreamz
Which library ? which language? If it is ruby/rails I can point you in the
right direction. mail me at manu@manu-j.com

~~~
anonjon
It was clj-oauth and clj-apache-http.

I've been working on building a generalized DSL for http-requests (based on a
site structure description generate the request-functions).

I figured it would be interesting to test it with twitter's oauth. It works
quite well for http-get requests, didn't work very well for post requests (ex.
status updates). Squinted at it, macro-expanded a few times and fixed a bug...
now it seems to be generating the right code. Still not working

So I went back to the base case (libraries without my DSL over-top, direct
from tutorial), posts still didn't work.

Anyway, the interesting thing is that posts _will_ work for very short
strings, or strings that are very repetitive (a string full of s's
'ssssssssssssssssssssss...' would post, as would 'wtf' and 'ww'; 'well this is
a nice message', would not...).

Much hacking and fussing and resetting of keys later, it was 4am and I had to
get up and work in a few hours (did I mention I was doing this for fun? _sigh_
).

So I'm starting to think that something may have changed in twitter's oauth
spec between when I downloaded the libraries and when I got back to using them
(it was a few months). Other than that, I suppose my next step would be to
look at some other implementations and figure out if there is a bug in the
what I am using.

I guess my point is, even easy things aren't easy.

