Danny Turley - Designing and Developing for the Web and iPhone

Resources for developing iPhone Web Apps

I have been thinking of doing a post like this for a long time, and over the last 6 months I have seen a large number of iPhone related posts appearing all over the web, but I didn’t come across a post that collectively brought you a list of reliable resources on, how to develop a Web App. This post brings together around a years worth of bookmarking, and reading that I did in preparation for developing Performa Sports. I am not a fan of posts that have 100s of links so I have condensed the contents down to the resources that I found really useful, and hopefully you will to.

Download the iPhone SDK

This is a really obvious resource but also the most important one, if you are really interested in developing for the iPhone you must download the iPhone SDK, as although you may not want to be a native developer, programs such as the iPhone Simulator and Dashcode are great tools to get you started building your web app.

Reading is Good!

In my opinion books are one of the best resources for learning a new language, and I have read a lot of books over the last few years to help develop my skills as a designer and a developer. When it came for me to develop my web app I needed some expert help from a book, and I have listed 3 books below that I strongly suggest you should have a look at:

1. iPhone in Action
2. Developing Hybrid Applications for the iPhone
3. Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was Fireballed.

Native Web App Frameworks

When I was developing the web app for Performa Sports, I was curious to search the interwebz to see if it was possible to port my application onto the App Store, and I came across PhoneGap. PhoneGap allows you to port your web application into an Xcode template, and uses HTML and JavaScript to turn your web app into a native app, it’s a really nice framework but it is largely still in development, and I think they are waiting for approval on version 0.8 from Apple any day now. The developers behing the PhoneGap project (Nitobi) have released an Adobe Air application, called the PhoneGap Simulator.

PhoneGap was the framework I experimented with but it may not be the best choice for you, and I have listed some other native web app frameworks below that are worth checking out:

1. http://www.big5apps.com/
2. http://vixml.com/
3. http://www.taplynx.com/
4. http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/

Web App Frameworks

I have experience working with a few Web App frameworks, and because I am a jQuery fan, one of my favourite’s would be jQTouch developed by David Kaneda. With Performa Sports I couldn’t find the framework that was right for the project, so I developed my own but I took a lot of inspiration from jQTouch and the Magic Framework developed by Jeff McFadden. There are lots of really good web app frameworks out there that can be useful to you, I have listed some of them below:

1. http://code.google.com/p/iui/
2. http://code.google.com/p/iphone-universal/
3. http://github.com/brianleroux/xui
4. http://code.google.com/p/touchcode/
5. http://paularmstrongdesigns.com/projects/basejs/

Who to follow on Twitter…

I thought it might be a good to compile and share with you some of the people I follow on Twitter that are always tweeting about the iPhone and sharing great links:

1. @stroughtonsmith
2. @markjardine
3. @tapbot_paul
4. @mike9r
5. @davidkaneda
6. @jonathanstark
7. @mattgemmell
8. @chrismcclelland
9. @cimota
10. @itsjengordon