I’m taking this “build iphone apps w/HTML, CSS & JS” class online. I find I pay more attention if I’m writing down notes. these may or may not make any sense to anyone else.
First 15 minutes or so has been housekeeping, how all the bits & pieces work.
iPhone simulator. is jQTouch a jQuery spinoff?
first week is building a “business card app” that turns an info page into something nice-looking for iPhone.
simulator – developer.apple.com/iphone – get apple id to get dev center stuff.
downloads only for leopard & snow leopard. (we have tiger still?)
is the simulator only for mac? she’s showing it via mac. got distracted in chat. yes, simulator only for OSX leopard or higher. I’m surprised they’re not prepared with more options for those of us w/out. in the chat someone notes that using Safari or Chrome gets pretty decent results. also iPhoney?
does it work for blackberry or android? android should look much the same as iphone. nice. phonegap simulator, adobe air. phonegap itself is a development environment.
2nd week will do actions, web app: call, email, video, and gmap. how to get to the home screen, also how to get rid of safari chrome. sample has shiny red button, then stuff you can do in re: creative tech.
Q: inside the web app, can you tell that it’s a web app? all-in-one app can’t tell hardly at all, but when you link to new page, chrome etc comes back.
more questions that are obvs, basic answer is: it’s a web page running in a browser. if you can do it with a web page, you can do it in an iPhone web app.
will cover what phone functions can be accessed w/web apps.
week 3 – more JS! animating, detect touches (like keypress), implement gestures. iUI library (am I remembering correctly that there’s a Drupal module for it?) — then do it again w/jQTouch. yes, is jQuery, apparently more powerful. and hey, debugging! very different look from iUI to jQTouch.
any way to make web app use existing window if safari browser is open? sounds like not.
week 4 – native app. this may be where I’m SOL.
audio died in gotowebinar…apparently they’re pausing the whole class. :\
ok, now back. native app writing is all tightly tied into mac platform. (surprise surprise) “kinda painful” to get your app onto your phone. (not covering store) not super-excited about this session, but will watch at least some, I think. (this makes me hope and wish that android takes over, honestly.) interesting: all of the items on the app, except blog, are owned services. (flickr, twitter, youtube)
[got interrupted by phone call]
can’t import biz card web app into address book.
flash iphone packager? CS5 will come with feature to convert flash apps into native apps. but still not actually putting flash on the iphone.
poll whether people are more interested in web or native apps. (web, I think, at least for the time being.) most people want both, 20% just web, 6% just native.
stuff: metal stencil to design iphone apps uistencils.com; plastic version from kapsoft/mobile sketchbook. notebooks pre-printed, vol5.com. graffletopia (stencils) for omnigraffle. photoshop stencils 320480.com. keep the web weird. tons of sources for button icons “iphone icon” search.
looking at some other things. was brought back by her saying “bus schedule.” if only. intercity transit doesn’t even offer schedules as web pages. (gddmn pdfs)
Q: graceful degradation for non-iphone users? conditional css with media attribute; or (OMG!) javascript browser/device sniffing. ::sigh::
can use cookies to store sessions. mentions html5 offline storage. (?!)
can buy files, etc. from o’reilly. not sure yet if I will. will be offering a 10-week class on building native apps? wow. you srsly have to pay $99 to distribute native apps? ew. “hard to teach a class when there’s an NDA on the material for the class.” it took her TWO HOURS to submit her first app.
but I’m pretty excited about getting into the web app stuff, seems like it would be handy for multiple devices.
that phonegap simulator looks handy.
logging off…now. 🙂