Today Apple released official documentation to develop AJAX web applications for iPhone. Most interesting tips is about understanding the User-iPhone interaction and knowing the input device.

iPhone users supply their own input device — two fingers. Fingers come in all sizes and shapes, from the thin, pointy model to the thick, rounded one. Yet, webpages are designed to receive mouse events, not finger events. Existing pages need to continue to work as expected even with the finger as an input device.

The gesture available are Double Tap, Touch and hold, Drag, Flick, Pinch open and Pinch close. There is some notes accordingly that there are no gestures for cut, copy, paste, drag-and-drop, and text selection. The links on a page should not be too close due to finger width which limits the link density on page. f the links are too close, your users won’t be able to choose a single one.

Continue reading ‘Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone’

iDomDig is an instant domain availability lookup which allow you to check for multiple domain availability for the extensions com, net and org. Pretty simple and useful AJAX usage in the application make the service run from a single page. DomDig uses its own AJAX library, and PHP at the server side to retrieve domain status via an API.

iPhone Link: http://domdig.com/iphone/
Website: http://domdig.com/

After some JavaScript experiments with iPhone, Joe Hewitt just created iBug, a new Firebug bridge for iPhone. Writing and debugging JavaScript from iPhone screen isn’t that fun, that’s why iBug is a network proxy to the phone which allow debugging your AJAX applications directly from your computer “with its big screen and real keyboard”. iBug uses Python for the server, to get it work here are the steps :

1. Download ibug0.1.zip and unzip it somewhere, anywhere on your computer
2. Make sure you have Python installed - if you are on a Mac, it is already there, if you are on Windows, download it here
3. Open your terminal and cd to the ibug directory that you just unzipped
4. Run python ibug.py launch - it will start the web server and open the console in your browser. If you don’t want to open the console, remove the launch argument.
5. Copy the snippet of HTML that you see in the console and paste it into the head of any HTML pages you want to debug on your iPhone
6. That’s it! console.log() calls on the phone will now show up in your browser, and you can use the command line to enter JavaScript commands that execute on the phone. To stop the server, just hit Ctrl-C.