During the iPhoneDevCamp, OpenLaszlo team took the time to create a first iPhone application called “NewsMatch” and prove that Open Laszlo compiles to standards-compliant DHTML that works well in every major browser, including Safari on the iPhone. The application simply grab RSS from Yahoo including news and photos, then user have to match news title to photo to read the news itself. Probably not the best way to read news, but lots of a fun and especially an excellent experiment to see OpenLaszlo able to create complex applications for iPhone.

iPhone Link : http://labs.openlaszlo.org/ipdc/newsmatch06/
Website : http://weblog.openlaszlo.org/archives/2007/07/our-first-iphone-app/

To get started developing for iPhone, there is two approaches : link your PC to your iPhone and start testing directly, or simply use a similator. iPhoney is the first iPhone similator, and I guess this approach is much more easier. iPhone Browser Simulator provides an iPhone sized web view with which to test your iPhone targetted apps, all in a pretty iPhone-inspired package. iPhoney is available for MacOS only but now that open sourced under GPL, probably more systems will be supported.

iPhoney 1.1 new features include :

• Zoom out to see how your current pages might look while zoomed out on iPhone.
• Turn off plug-ins (including Flash, but note that they all turn off (including QuickTime).
• Specify a custom user agent string.
• Automatic updates with Sparkle, so you’ll always know if there’s a new version.
• And of course, open source code so you can contribute to iPhoney’s rapid development.

Today Apple released official documentation to develop AJAX web applications for iPhone. Most interesting tips is about understanding the User-iPhone interaction and knowing the input device.

iPhone users supply their own input device — two fingers. Fingers come in all sizes and shapes, from the thin, pointy model to the thick, rounded one. Yet, webpages are designed to receive mouse events, not finger events. Existing pages need to continue to work as expected even with the finger as an input device.

The gesture available are Double Tap, Touch and hold, Drag, Flick, Pinch open and Pinch close. There is some notes accordingly that there are no gestures for cut, copy, paste, drag-and-drop, and text selection. The links on a page should not be too close due to finger width which limits the link density on page. f the links are too close, your users won’t be able to choose a single one.

Continue reading ‘Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone’