Re: iPhone and WebObjects
Re: iPhone and WebObjects
- Subject: Re: iPhone and WebObjects
- From: Mike Schrag <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 09:40:14 -0400
I was thinking about playing around with iPhone to my WO apps and was
wondering if anyone on the list was doing this now and if there were
any
suggestions, best practices, or even starting hints.
I would say the big decision is whether you're making an "iPhone
Interface" or a "Mobile Interface". We went for a mobile interface
that is heavily tested on the iPhone (meaning we didn't constrain
ourselves to the iPhone user experience and look).
Random tidbits:
* General consensus seems to be that you should not require people to
use the mobile version if their user-agent is a mobile, or rather you
can send them by default, but you should allow them to get back to the
full version (since the iPhone is a "real" browser, someone may want
to use the non-mobile version, which is usually restricted in some way).
* The iPhone can change aspect ratios, so test in both portrait and
landscape to be sure your site doesn't look silly.
* There is no drag event or hover event on the iPhone, so any UI that
you use that expects to receive them is out of luck. I _believe_ this
extends to scrollable divs, btw.
* The iUI Project ( http://code.google.com/p/iui/ ) can give you a
head start if you're trying to make an iPhone-looking interface, but
just know that it's fundamentally unsuited for use with component
actions and will be a complete disaster if you try to use it like
that. You can either 1) choose to use it DA-only, 2) steal their CSS
and make a version of your own (also know that the full-screen slidey
effect is actually sort of tricky to pull off this way, so potentially
you will sacrifice that effect or spend a lot of time reproducing it
for component actions), 3) ERIUI framework is going to be committed
one of these days, but it's just not cleaned up and finalized yet --
it's basically a rewrite of the iUI Javascript, but based on the iUI
CSS, but with support for component actions, and provides a bunch of
component wrappers for all the iPhone widgets. The interesting part
here is that you actually may end up making a BETTER user experience
by NOT trying to be an "iPhone app" because people will have such
demanding expectations of what the iPhone native interface looks like
(not to mention iPhone 2.0 comes out and who knows if they will change
the user experience, potentially obsoleting all your hard work
emulating it). But this is just a decision you have to make.
* Apple has some content on developing web apps for the iPhone on
their iPhone dev site.
* Javascript is not nearly as fast as it is on your desktop. If
you're doing lots of animation effects (other than with the brand new
CSS animation stuff in WebKit, which is natively optimized), you're
probably going to be a sad panda.
* Get the iPhone Dev Kit ... It's REALLLY handy to be able to test
your app in Safari inside the iPhone Simulator rather than on your
phone all the time.
* Profit
ms
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