Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 19, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Getting to grips with a new programming language and unfamiliar development tools is quite laborious – and completely unnecessary. Use your web knowledge and get started: with HTML5 you can store data on the client and develop applications that work offline. CSS gives you the genuine iPhone look, and with the right JavaScript helpers, the animations work too.
Do you want to use the App Store as a distribution channel for your application? Or would you like your app to run on different mobile devices? Then use the open-source framework PhoneGap, which turns your web app into an installable program. You can still use the advantages of the web version: test and improve your app continuously and promptly before submitting it to Apple’s review procedure.
Contents:
- Web apps compared with native apps
- iPhone styling
- Adding basic behaviour with jQuery
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Advanced iPhone styling
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Using jQTouch
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Client-side data storage
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The path to an offline app
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The path to a native app
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Introduction to PhoneGap
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Transferring the app to iTunes
Even if the impression is initially conveyed that complex applications can be written with a little HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the real work lies in the details. Anyone who wants to write useful applications must either supply the data server-side or delve deeply into JavaScript, even though frameworks such as JQuery or JQTouch take a great deal of work off the developer’s hands. The book is entertaining and written in an understandable way. It would have been nice, however, to receive a few pointers on how to work with applications that consist of more than one document. Downloadable source code and a reference section would also have rounded the book off nicely, but perhaps this will follow in a second edition. Nevertheless: a good introductory book that creates a solid basis for further development.
iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS & JavaScript
Jonathan Stark
O’Reilly
174 pages
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