Today’s website: appcelerator.com

Why?

Because of the great product they offer for free: Titanium Developer.

Titanium is a tool that allows to webdevelopers to build native iPhone and Android apps without  needing to learn cocoa or java.

It will compile your project and even help you release it.

They have a great section with resources, screencasts, tutorials, code examples and documentations, and a nice community to share and solve your issues.

Take a look.

Related posts:

1. Seven days with Titanium – day 0 – introduction
2. Custom row for TableView in Appcelerator Titanium
3. Create a countdown timer with Titanium Appcelerator

LAB.js (Loading And Blocking JavaScript) allows you load in parallel your js scripts , speeding up the process ( sometimes a lot). But also it can force that scripts are loaded in a certain order, so this way no dependencies are broken.

The developer declares a 2x speed improvement on his site.

On an ondevelopment project , with 9 js scripts and 282k without labjs the page loaded in 8 seconds and with labjs in 2.5. So we have a >3x improvement.

No related posts.

I am so used with MooTools as I started to forgot the basic Javascript and more, I started to dislike a lot to write code in pure js. But MooTools lacks the touch events ipod and iphone has. So I wrote a small code that adds the touchevents –  well, touch, gesture, animation and transform –  to the Element class.

This will only  help you to add and remove the touch events the MooTools way, you still need to use e.preventDefault() as e.stop() is not working and to detect touches by yourself. But at least you can use addEvent and removeEvent.

I am sure it can be improved, so If you have any ideas, just let me know.

Oh, yes, the code is here: mootouch.js

Check the Spanish version of this post:
Motools con eventos de toque

Related posts:

1. How to make a glowing menu with MooTools in 3 easy steps

iPhone is a nice platform to develop for. The Appstore made possible to transform a hobby or a simple idea into a good income source due to the popularity of iPhone and the low prices of the apps found there.

Bu what about the rest of the coders that come from the pure web side of the programming (like me) – php, javascript, ROR, etc ?

Below I’ll try to make a list with components you can use to develop for iPhone using only what you know, or learn only few things more.

Apps for iPhone are separated into 2 groups – native apps and webapps.

Native apps use their SDK and runs native on and from the phone, while webapps run inside safari, and are fetched from an external sever.

Frameworks

Here comes one type of projects , that managed to make a bridge between the 2 types of applications, using a native instance of webkit to render and use html/css/js files – from local space of the device and/or a remote server.

Usually the frameworks expose some native device functions –  camera, accelerometer, contacts, geolocation to javascript methods, so you can use it on your apps.

Big5apps -  it lets you access some features of the device using javascript –  like image, camera,sound,geolocation

Phonegap - is intended to be a cross-device platform, covering iphone,blackberry,android.

Liquidgear – seems to be a fork of phonegap but oriented on the iphone only, so the development of this framework get another course, more specific for the iPhone device.

Quickconnect - allows you to use a template for dashcode or for xcode to develop for iphone using web technologies.

The above frameworks needs only the effort to learn a little of xcode usage.

JavaScript/CSS/HTML  Llibraries

WebKit for iPhone or other mobile devices is a little different –  for example touch events, or hardware accelerated css transforms. For this you need to develop your own functions/methods, or to adapt other scripts to to use this.

Or, you can use one of the below js scripts/frameworks.

XUI

A simple javascript framework for building mobile web applications.XUI strives to be a framework for first class mobile device browsers such as WebKit, Fennec and Opera with future support under consideration for IE Mobile and BlackBerry.

MagicFramework

Magic Framework is a native iPhone UI imitator and HTML5 db interface built in html/css/javascript. It’s useful for online websites or on-device Webkit-based applications looking to imitate the native iPhone UI and/or use native storage without having to write native code.

Dashcode – Apple’s web toolkit

jQTouch

A jQuery plugin with native animations, auto list navigation, and default application styles for Mobile WebKit browsers like iPhone, G1, and Pre.

CiUI – CNET iPhone UI

Safire – Safire is an open source framework written in HTML/CSS/JS. It makes building/porting applications to the iPhone ridiculously easy.

iWebKit

iWebKit is a file package designed to help you create your own iPhone and iPod Touch compatible website or webapp. The kit is accessible to anyone even people without any html knowledge and is simple to understand thanks to the included tutorials. In a couple of minutes you will have created a full and profes

iphone-universal

The framework is based on 1 stylesheet and several HTML examples, also, it contains original artwork so you can edit them in Adobe Photoshop CS and adapt it to your projects.

iUi 

Based on Joe Hewitt‘s iPhone navigation work, iUI has the following features:

• Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML
• Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages
• Ability to handle phone orientation changes
• Provide a more “iPhone-like” experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)

Tools

Iphone Simulator – It comes with Apple’s SDK

Phonegap iphone emulator – use it to test apps built with phonegap

iPhoney 

iPhoney gives you a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that you can use when developing web sites for iPhone. It’s the perfect 320 by 480-pixel canvas for your iPhone development.

TestiPhone.com

This is a web browser based simulator for quickly testing your iPhone Applications. This tool has been so far tested and working using Internet Explorer 7, FireFox 2 and Safari 3 in Windows, but you ned Safari to get the real experience.

Safari 4

Well…no comment here

Ok, almost all the above tools needs a mac to be able to use. But  to develop for iPhone you will need a mac anyway.

Have I missed something ? Let me know.

Related posts:

1. Create a nifty tooltip in Titanium

I  just want to signal a great developing tool, from Nitobi, the guys that created Phonegap.

Is an mobile phone simulator ( emulator ) build in AdobeAir that alows you to test and debug your apps developed for iphone, android, palm pre or blackberry using the Phonegap framework.

Is jut a beta version but offers a preview of the final tool that for sure will represent a great developing tool for this framework.

Right now it allows you to test the accelerator response of the device  -  a thing not possible on iPhone Simulator from Apple – and also respond to some events, like sound or vibrate.

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