Continuing the conversation from my post earlier this week, I thought I would share a few more resources I’ve dug up on developing web apps for the iPad. First, because a few of you have asked, let me take a second to explain why I’m going the web app route over creating a full native app.
The primary reason is simply because I have no experience with Cocoa/Objective-C and have no desire to destroy my brain cells by trying to learn it. Although I have a huge amount of respect for those developers, the fact of the matter is that web languages are pretty powerful on their own these days and Apple has provided some great tricks for web apps. As a proof of concept, visit m.longhollow.com on your iPhone/iPod, save it to your home screen and launch it from the springboard. With the logos and loading screens, it’s pretty app-like right?
The other big advantage of web apps for our purposes is the ability to skip the App Store altogether. There’s no approval process, and any changes I make to the app are instantaneous. All I have to do is give our users a web address and ask them to add it to their home screens.
Finally, the animation engine that’s now present in Webkit is pretty bad to the bone (leading me to the resources promised at the start of this post). In my previous web app projects for the iPhone/iPod, I’ve relied heavily on jQuery to animate page elements and transitions like I would in any other browser. As it turns out, Webkit now includes some seriously robust animation capabilities that are extremely useful and hardware-accelerated in their mobile devices. It’s a quick and relatively painless way to add a huge coat of polish to whatever iPad web app you may be working on. (By the way, those same awesome capabilities are present in the full Safari and Chrome web browsers too… Super rad.)
Also, John from 8Bit pointed out a great post on ChurchCreate that’s loaded down with some killer assets and resources for iPad development. Definitely check that out.
Keep your eyes peeled in the coming days for more details about an iPad web app that I’m white-boarding right now. Feel free to share if you’ve had any big ideas yourself!
I look forward to seeing the m.longhollow.com site (getting a 502 error at the moment). I agree with your sentiments and am thinking about using the framework found at http://webapp-net.com/ for our mobile site (web app).
I’d be curious to know if you’ve used any of the frameworks out there and if you prefer one over the other.
You can still build native iPhone/iPad apps without writing any Objective-C. In fact you can build native iPhone/iPad apps with the tools you already use, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It can be done with a framework called PhoneGap http://phonegap.com/
Even better, your web app can be exported as a native Android, webOS and WinMo app as well.