

Ask HN: Best resources for small IPhone Web App? - dxjones

I am developing a small php-based web app to be accessed both by desktop and iPhone/IPod Touch.<p>I am wondering what tools people use to make IPod Web Apps.  I have come across iWebKit (http://http://iwebkit.net/) and WebApp (http://webapp.net.free.fr/), but I don't know if there is anything better or more useful out there.
Also, if you have any pointers to detailed tutorials or source code examples, that would be cool.<p>thanks in advance, ...
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sergeo
I would recommend iUI, which is based on the code originally developed by Joe
Hewitt - the creator of Firebug.

I have developed a pretty advanced iPhone webapp with it (online food diary
searching while you type). The only thing was that I had to disable page
transitioning emulating sliding screens, as the animation was quite slow and
unpleasant.

Since then, Apple added support for proprietary CSS extensions providing
access to "native" animations, but due to the availability of native SDK, I
don't think it is widely used and on a first glance this is not supported in
iUI.

For reading and reference I would recommend Apple's Developer Connection topic
[http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/referencelibrary/G...](http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/referencelibrary/GettingStarted/GS_iPhoneWebApp/index.html),
which provides several "entry" points to documentation, guides, and samples.
Still, for development it makes a lot of sense to save efforts and build on
top of an existing library, such as iUI, which provides you the app structure,
pre-built JavaScript for iPhone-specific manipulations, and images.

I would be careful with iWebKit since it seems to use GPL, which may result in
issues with non-open source use.

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cyunker
Stanford iPhone class:

<http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php>

UI library for websites to mimic the iPhone UI:

<http://code.google.com/p/iui/>

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Zev
Stanford's classes are for native apps, not webapps.

However, iUI is an awesome framework for making iPhone-oriented webapps with.

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auston
<http://phonegap.pbwiki.com/>

Go down to tips and tricks

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seren6ipity
Check these 31 sample examples. <http://www.appsamuck.com/day1.html>

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Zev
Apple's dev docs. See <http://developer.apple.com/safari/> for the Safari dev
center. It covers everything WebKit supports and how to interact with it.

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hbien
For a standard/easy to implement UI, check out iUI:
<http://code.google.com/p/iui/>

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SwellJoe
We used iUI for our iPhone (and Android) versions, and it worked very well,
and was really easy to apply to an existing web application (an old-fashioned
non-AJAXy one at that).

