Undoubtedly, iPhone is one of the most exciting mobile devices in the world. Its iOS is used in other Apple devices, such as iPad and iPod Touch. With this book, you'll learn how to build and develop applications for these devices without applying Apple's burdensome and, at times, restrictive technologies. Just use your experience and knowledge combined with web frontend technologies, such as JavaScript, to build quality web applications. Nobody will ever come to know that you haven't used Objective-C and Cocoa.
iPhone JavaScript Cookbook offers a set of practical and clear recipes with a step-by-step approach for building your own iPhone applications by only applying web technologies such as JavaScript and AJAX. Web developers won't need to learn a new programming language for building iOS applications with a native look and feel.
Chapter 1 , Frameworks Make Life Easier, is the "getting started" chapter of this book. It covers how to install and set up different frameworks, which will be used for the recipes of the book.
Chapter 2 , Building Interfaces, introduces you to the world of iPhone applications. You'll learn how to build essential and advanced interfaces, such as buttons, lists, forms, and date pickers.
Chapter 3 , Events and Actions, discovers how to deal with events and actions. Both allow us a better control of the interaction between the user and the device.
Chapter 4 , A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words, takes advantage of the great screens of iPhone and iPad teaching you how to display a grid of images, how to apply different effects, and how to work with the built-in camera of the device.
Chapter 5 , Mastering Sound and Music, explores the audio and video capabilities of iPhone. You'll learn how to play and record audio and how to create iPod playlists.
Chapter 6 , Exchanging Data: AJAX, covers how to use this technology for exchanging data between the server and the client. Readers are walked through the process of sending HTTP requests and processing JSON responses.
Chapter 7 , Working with Data: Storage and SQL, provides coverage of the process for storing and retrieving data using the SQL language. Also, you'll learn how to deal with different kinds of storage available in iPhone.
Chapter 8 , This is a Phone, enlightens that we cannot forget that iPhone is a smartphone. This is the reason to get focused on learning how to create, select and display contacts, and how to call a number and send an SMS.
Chapter 9 , Location, Location, Location, introduces to readers to geolocation, showing how to detect the current orientation and position, and how to use the API provided by Google Maps for displaying a map at a specific location.
Chapter 10 , Web 2.0 Integration, helps readers learn how to integrate their iPhone applications with third-party popular services such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr.
If you're planning to build native applications, you'll need a computer with Mac OS X, iOS SDK, and Xcode installed.
Despite the fact that it's possible to use a WebKit-compatible web browser for the recipes of this book, we suggest to use a real Apple device, such as an iPhone and iPad. However, the iPhone Simulator is a very useful tool that you can use on your Mac for testing applications.
This book is for web developers interested in applying their knowledge for building web applications for iOS devices. You can develop your own iPhone web applications using nothing but JavaScript combined with XHTML and CSS. You can even give these applications a native look and feel though you wont be able to submit them to the application store. You will develop an application for iOS without having to learn the Objective-C programming language. This is the book for any iPhone developer looking to side step the totalitarian application store regime of Apple.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "we'll need to add a span element for the smallfield label."
A block of code is set as follows:
<div id="leftnav"> <ahref="#">One</a> <ahref="#">Two</a> <ahref="#">Current</a> </div>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ wget http://iui.googlecode.com/files/iui-0.31.tar.gz
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "After clicking on the Search button, we'll see our dialog box:"
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