Developing iPhone Web Apps Course

This tutorial introduces you to iPhone Web Apps, a remarkably easy to develop set of applications that you can develop using Dashcode from Apple that run on iPhone. As you'll see they're separate from iPhone OS apps; they're simpler but remarkably powerful and often, when people start thinking about building an iPhone app they think it's going to be a big deal, they're going to have to write Objective C, but in fact, as you'll see with iPhone Web Apps you can really use a lot of what you already have and, by combining that with the features in Dashcode, the graphics and the tools that are already in Dashcode you can do a great deal of work. We'll look at some of the built-in templates and projects and we'll be looking at them often in the Simulator that is part of Dashcode because, of course, it's difficult to look at an iPhone in video as well as looking at the code that's behind it. So this is the Simulator and you'll see that you can type here just as you would type on the keyboard in the iPhone. I double-clicked here on iPhone, of course I'd be using my finger and I can do things such as cut and Copy and Paste tags. All of these features of iPhone are in the Simulator. The Simulator doesn't make phone calls and doesn't send e-mail, but that's the nature of something that is not an iPhone. So, it has a lot of power and we'll start with the basic apps that you can build from the templates including this one which lets you just make some notes, but it illustrates how the built-in database lets you save this information because once I'm done with it, when I quit from this and come back to it perhaps tomorrow, the data that I've changed will still be there. So, that's an interesting way of looking at what you can do. Now, one of the other apps that you can build with Dashcode is the template for browsing which starts with a list of items and you can drill down through the list into data. Now, what we've done here and I'll walk you through each step of the way, is to build a multi-level browser because the browser that Apple provides in Dashcode only goes from one level to a level of detail so in the template you would only have this sort of functionality. But we've added a third level on top of it so what that does is to let you come down through actually n-number of layers of lists drilling down into the information that you have. I will show you how to put this information together in data sources which can come out of, you can type them in by hand, but more often they come from scripts in FileMaker in a database, or a PHP program, so you'll see how easy it is to create these apps and drill down on them in a multi-level app. What we've also looked at is the ability to use an app such as this one which doesn't have all that trafficking, because what it does here is we'll start with something and we just load some data, we haven't selected anything, but here you will see that as I run through the choices - these happen to be libraries - I can look at a great deal of information. I can see that I've got a button to send e-mail, to make a phone call, to develop a map from the address of this library and I also can see the next upcoming event in this particularly library. And, of course, this works not just for libraries but for any type of organization. It also doesn't even have to be an event. Anything where you want to see on one page a number of items and information about them. And, of course, what's very powerful on iPhone is that you can integrate that information with mapping, with e-mail, and with telephones. Now, over here is something rather interesting that's built into Dashcode, it's an Indicator and what this is showing is for this particular event on this time and on this date the availability of seats is, in this case, getting scarce. Many of these have green which indicates there are plenty of seats available and, as we'll see, it can get up here and if something is full it will go all the way up to red here. What's interesting about this is that this information doesn't actually reflect the number of seats available. What I've done here is to show you the percent of seats that are available so you might have an event that takes place in a 200-seat auditorium and if there are two seats available you're going to be up here in the yellow caution area. If you have an event that takes place in a small conference room in a small rural library that can seat six people, two seats that are available means good availability. So you'll see how to do all of this, how to use navigation through lists, multi-level lists in browsers, how to use a single navigation tool over here, how to transform data into indicators and how to do all those wonderful things. So, it really is possible to put your data into iPhone. Let me caution you not to think that this is just about data but for most people using iPhone Web Apps so much of it is about data that what I wanted to do was to show you the features that you have here with the built-in database and with data sources. The other features that you can use we'll talk about as we go on, but primarily it's about moving data and information into an iPhone Web App as quickly and easily as possible.  

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