iPhone Development
I got a shiny new iPhone, and it is amazing. But you’ve already read that somewhere else.
Being a web developer, I immediately started looking for some best practices on how to write apps for this new tool of mine.
Google “iPhone development” and you get nothing but blog entries about people who don’t actually have much real concrete documentation, and a couple of development IDEs that give you preview for the frame and such. But no actual development guidelines. Shame on whoever does SEO for apple…
So then I head to the apple developer connection site, where I log into the area where you usually find this kind of documentation. Nothing iPhone related there. So I download the new documentation for XCode, and 350MB and an install later, there is still no documentation for me to read.
FINALLY I’m on google reader this morning (on the iPhone, yeah, it’s pretty) and I see an article with an O’Reilly domain (usually promising for apple info) and that post has a link waaaaaay down at the bottom for the apple developer site for the iPhone!
Yes, maybe i should have tried that url… maybe I should have guessed that putting a ‘/iphone’ on the end of the developer address might have worked.
There’s some really great stuff in there about how to format things, load custom stylesheets for the iPhone, viewport settings, how to make links that open into phone calls, restrict scaling, etc. It’s a bunch of standard best practices kind of stuff, but the specifics on how it applies to my shiny new friend.
All that to say, check back here in the near future for a plugin for symfony (and possibly ruby on rails) that will make building iPhone friendly interfaces fun and easy… Depending on how much free time I get over the next week or so I have some ideas simmering…
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John H