iPhone Development

In this assignment we are to look for sites that discuss the best practices for developing Web sites for viewing on an iPhone. This sounds easy enough until you begin the search. The most obvious and one of the better sites for this is the iPhone Dev Center. I realize this is sort of cheating but when looking for best practices why not go to the source. And in the process I discovered that the Apple Developer site is a really good site. It has information on working with viewport (what is viewable on the iPhone screen), CSS for good iPhone pages, Webkit and iUI. And the surprising thing is that Apple, more times than not, will give you the code to use to make your web site viewable on the iPhone. But using only Apple for iphone development best practices is probably not the smartest thing because it is only one view of how things should be, admittedly, it is one of the most important sites but it shouldn't be the only site to use.

Viewport is not specific to iPhone development although I thought it was when we first started working with it. Basically it is a tool to be used to mimic the viewable screen to display for whatever you are developing and it is used in many other types of software, i.e. CAD. I couldn't find a site I thought was useful other than the Apple site for working with viewport. I am still new to coding so I have yet to learn which sites are reliable and which sites are full of baloney.

I was successful in finding a blog about CSS for good iPhone web pages, www. cssdiscussion.com. The information is interesting but dated (last updated in 2007) and this may be due to the amount of information available at the Apple site basically for free. And there were several sites that proffered CSS design tips and best practices but you have to pay for their services, not something I want to do.

One of the interesting things I was able to find was that several search categories in Google combines CSS, WebKit and iUI into one search. WebKit is the development tool you use for iphones. iUI is short for the iPhone User Interface. Most of the sites I found were fee based sites and I didn't bother to look at most of them because I was able to find the information I want on the iPhone Dev site. And I realize I am beginning to sound like a broken record but if it's not broken don't fix it.

There are so very many sites available for iPhone development, some good, some great, and some you are better off not paying any attention to. The trouble comes when trying to determine which is which. Once of our first assignments in our Internet Technology class was to sign up and participate in a news aggregation site. I chose Google Reader and then by some stroke of luck I added a site to my subscription called 'iPhone Development Tutorials'. This is one of the best sites for learning what others have done with iPhone development, what worked and what didn't. To me, this is a great beginning point for new developers to learn about best practices.