Hello World - iPhone Style

I'm excited about mobile development again. I'm eagerly awaiting the iPhone SDK and while I wait, I figured I'd at least try some iPhone development in its current, web development, form.

I'll post about what I made in a future post. For now, I just wanted to link to some of the things that got me going.

Apple has some great developer resources, including the iPhone Dev Center. I'm not sure why they hide them all behind a login curtain, but they do. Once you create (or buy) an ADC login, you can access 2 hours worth of videos about iPhone development. The videos range from UI elements to how to simplify your app for smaller form factors. Even if you have no interest in Apple and the iPhone, you might enjoy the usability aspects of the talks. Most of the concepts apply to Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, and other mobile development. If you watch and it all seems like common sense to you, good, you are better off than most developers that build UIs.

If you're ready to start building right away, look no further than iUI. iUI is a great framework to build web based apps that look native to the iPhone. Within an hour, I was able to build a great looking, highly functional, app using iUI. I tweaked the included CSS a bit to include some further button samples I found at the iPhone Dev Center. Thanks go to Joe Hewitt for his work on iUI.

Finally, if you want to follow some discussion and get some links to other apps people have built for the iPhone, head over to the iPhoneWebDev Google Group.

Tick tock on the SDK clock.