iPhone Application Development
The Apple iPhone is a great device that supports a host of features and applications. iPhone Applications or iPhone web apps can be developed using a variety of tools like Apple's free iPhone SDK development tool or a number of other iPhone Custom Software Application Development tools like iPhoney, Ajaxian page, David Cann's iPhone Simulator or Firebug. The important aspect to note about iPhone's custom application development is that your application interface has to well organized and completely focussed on the user's needs because of the relatively smaller screen size vis-à-vis a PC.
iPhone SDK Application Development Tool:
Apple offers a fully functional and freely downloadable iPhone Application Development tool that provides the complete repository of development instruments including Xcode, DashCode and Simulator. For the uninitiated the Xcode provides an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to create and handle all iPhone projects, build, run, edit and debug source files in an iPhone simulator or device. The DashCode bundled with the iPhone SDK enables web widget creation for the iPhone Safari OS. The Simulator does what it should, enabling developers to test their iPhone application without an iPhone. The simulator supports both resident and web application development. The iPhone SDK Instruments enables application code tracing and profiling.
The iPhone SDK can be used to develop the following apps:
- Weather
- Sports
- News
- Games
- Calculate
- Travel
- Social Networking
- Entertainment
- Search Tools
- Utilities
Other iPhone Apps Development options:
Apart from the great iPhone SDK Development tool there are other reliable options for developing user friendly and stable iPhone apps. You can use your standard development tools like the Visual Studio and ASP.NET since their output is standard HTML, which is greatly desired by the iPhone.
While we are discussing the iPhone application dev options it should be noted that the iPhone does not support any 3 rd party plug-ins or downloads. Hence some significant iPhone options are left out like Adobe Flash, which is not supported, as well as Microsoft's Silverlight, another great dev tool. Still Apple has done us a favour by including PDF support and most JavaScript events. Also owing to absence of any mouse you cannot create any drag and drop events.
State-of-the-art technologies like AJAX can be utilised for designing iPhone specific apps. These technologies allow you to take advantage of CSS styles that are supported by the iPhone Safari web browser. You can create webkit styles to portray rounded corners, coloured buttons and shadows to avoid use of high bandwidth images.