iPhone Dev Camp
iPhone Development
The iPhone Dev Camp started on Saturday by a nice presentation by Chritopher Allen, a MacHack veteran, regarding what is known about the iPhone from a web developer’s perspective. What is known is that the iPhone uses web standards (HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PDF and Quicktime). Web 2.0 best practices apply for the iPhone, such as the proper use and sepration of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Christopher recommends avoiding the use of Flash, SVG, Java applets, embedded video, custom x.509 certificates, and framesets. Christopher also states the the finger is not a mouse and you need to design accordingly with large enough buttons and links with plenty of space between each other.
Fingers can do more than the traditional point and drag cursor such as double tap, touch and hold, one or two finger drag, flick, and pinch.
It might come as a surprise but many of JavaScript events don’t work, such as onscroll, onkeydown, onkeypress, onmousemove, etc. Some web development recommendations for the iPhone are to use columns and small blocks in the layout, such as floating divs. You should also use the tel: and mailto: protocols in links. You can also integrate with Google Maps simply by adding your location search to maps.google.com/maps? URL.
The current activity on the the iPhoneWebDev Google Groups seems to be focused around iPhone specific development libraries, implementing the infamous back button, debugging JS, optimizing application for low bandwidth, and hacking the viewport. There is also a series of open questions such as, what level of support is there for the canvas tag? What level of persistent storage is available, cookies? The right questions will lead to the right answers. I have also published a great list of available iPhone development resources.
Most of time at the iPhone Dev Camp was spent developing a collaborating for the hack-a-thon. This was a working camp focused on developing some really cool applications on the iPhone.
iPhone Dev Camp Hacks
Telemoose has a nice presentation for optimizing a web application for low bandwidth environments and the iPhone entitled Living on the EDGE. He also has some helpful JavaScript functions for working on the iPhone.
Nearly 50 iPhone hacks were developed at the iPhone Dev Camp. I can safely say that about thirty percent of those hacks developed used iUI and the iPhone liquid navigation, both developed by Joe Hewitt. Joe also has been busy phone phreaking the iPhone and had time to developed Firebug for iPhone.
Some of my favorite made at iPhone Dev Camp hacks include Tilt (the first ever motion controlled iPhone game), PickleView, AppMarks, and Qix.
iPhone Dev Camp Pictures
Hacking the Phone
moPhaic co-developer
Sleeping MacBook
Chris Messina, iPhoneDevCamp co-organizer
Hard Core Hacker
Tilt Paper Prototype
iPeeps
In the Crowd
Microsoft Techie
Newton Dev Camp?
Joe Hewitt, Kent Bye, Felipe Ortiz
Hack this Phone
iPhone Zoolander
Option Shift K
Technorati Tags: iui, apple, iphone, iphonedev, iphonewebdev, iphonedevcamp, devcamp, barcamp, webdev, webapp, javascript, js, tilt, iphone game, firebug