Professional Iphone and iPod Touch Programming: Building Applications for Mobile Safari

by Richard Wagner

This hands-on, in-depth book introduces developers to the initial release of the iPhone application platform and assists them in creating Web 2.0 applications that operate on the iPhone and integrate with its services. Author Richard Wagner shares his experience as he guides readers through the process of building new applications from scratch and migrating existing Web 2.0 applications to this new mobile platform. Utilizing practical examples, the book shows how to build a wide range of solutions - from a basic XHTML/CSS client to an advanced Ajax-enabled database application.As it does so, it helps readers design a user interface that is optimized for the iPhone touch-screen display. Additionally, the book helps readers integrate their applications with iPhone services, including phone dialog, its motion sensor, and Google Maps. With this book, readers will discover how to: build an XHTML and CSS UI framework from the ground up; emulate the look and feel of built-in applications; integrate public Web 2.0 APIs into applications; capture finger touch interactions; use Ajax to load external pages; create mashups for the iPhone; store local and remote data; optimize applications for the EDGE network Test, debug, and deploy iPhone applications; and more.

Genres: Technology

313 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 29, 2008

About the author

Richard Wagner, the former chief architect of NetObjects ScriptBuilder and the primary author of the ECMAScript Components standard, is currently in charge of development tools at Nombas, Inc.

Reviews

[Said A · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is about writting web apps for mobile Safari. It is not about iPhone SDK, Objective-C nor Cocoa Framework. If you know HTML, CSS and JavaScript this book will bore you a little and you will find yourself skipping over pages of very detailed step by step explanation to write unordered list and asigning it some class attribute.

But if you want to write website or web apps for iPhone/iPod touch then this book is a good reference. Since its' publication a lot of new frameworks and libraries been developed that make this book obsolete. So I would not recommend reading this book and find more up to date references for mobile website development.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a nice, well-written book, however it suffers from a little aging, and too much focus on the Apple platform.

Not that there's anything wrong with targeting Apple devices primarily, but as an implementer I really want to know if I am selling myself short on support for other platforms. Unfortunately, with this book you will be lead down a garden path. If you follow all the advice, what you build will work nicely on the iPhone, iPod touch (and even iPad), but much of the code breaks irretreivably on most desktop and non-Apple-mobile browsers.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book uses solely the iUI CSS framework by Joe Hewitt to build the websites to look like iphone apps. But it goes beyond just using the framework, it also explain the framework and how to extend it for your advanced use.