Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

It's a fact: if you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you already have the tools you need to develop your own iPhone apps. With this book, you'll learn how to use these open source web technologies to design and build apps for both the iPhone and iPod Touch, on the platform of your choice ? without using Objective-C, Xcode, or Interface Builder.

What are the advantages? Device-agnostic apps are the wave of the future, especially for mobile devices, and this book shows you how to create one product that can be used on several platforms. You'll get guidelines for quickly converting your product into a native iPhone app, using the free PhoneGap framework. And you'll learn why releasing your product as a web app first helps you find, fix, and test bugs much faster than if you went straight to the App Store with a product built with Apple's tools.

* Build iPhone apps using tools you already know how to use
* Compare the pros and cons of web apps and native iPhone apps
* Learn how to make an existing website look and behave like an iPhone app
* Add native-looking animations to your web app using jQTouch
* Take advantage of client-side data storage with apps that run even when the iPhone is offline
* Hook into advanced iPhone features (accelerometer, geolocation, vibration, and sound) with JavaScript

Preface xi
1 Getting Started 1
Web Apps Versus Native Apps? 1
What Is a Web App? 1
What Is a Native App? 1
Pros and Cons 2
Which Approach Is Right for You? 2
Web Programming Crash Course 3
Intro to HTML 3
Intro to CSS 6
Intro to JavaScript 9
2 Basic iPhone Styling 13
First Steps 14
Preparing a Separate iPhone Stylesheet 16
Controlling the Page Scaling 17
Adding the iPhone CSS 19
Adding the iPhone Look and Feel 21
Adding Basic Behavior with jQuery 23
What You've Learned 28
3 Advanced iPhone Styling 29
Adding a Touch of Ajax 29
Traffic Cop 29
Simple Bells and Whistles 34
Roll Your Own Back Button 40
Adding an Icon to the Home Screen 46
Full Screen Mode 48
Changing the Status Bar 48
Providing a Custom Startup Graphic 49
What You've Learned 50
4 Animation 51
With a Little Help from Our Friend 51
Sliding Home 51
Adding the Dates Panel 55
Adding the Date Panel 56
Adding the New Entry Panel 58
Adding the Settings Panel 60
Putting It All Together 62
Customi...Preface xi
1 Getting Started 1
Web Apps Versus Native Apps? 1
What Is a Web App? 1
What Is a Native App? 1
Pros and Cons 2
Which Approach Is Right for You? 2
Web Programming Crash Course 3
Intro to HTML 3
Intro to CSS 6
Intro to JavaScript 9
2 Basic iPhone Styling 13
First Steps 14
Preparing a Separate iPhone Stylesheet 16
Controlling the Page Scaling 17
Adding the iPhone CSS 19
Adding the iPhone Look and Feel 21
Adding Basic Behavior with jQuery 23
What You've Learned 28
3 Advanced iPhone Styling 29
Adding a Touch of Ajax 29
Traffic Cop 29
Simple Bells and Whistles 34
Roll Your Own Back Button 40
Adding an Icon to the Home Screen 46
Full Screen Mode 48
Changing the Status Bar 48
Providing a Custom Startup Graphic 49
What You've Learned 50
4 Animation 51
With a Little Help from Our Friend 51
Sliding Home 51
Adding the Dates Panel 55
Adding the Date Panel 56
Adding the New Entry Panel 58
Adding the Settings Panel 60
Putting It All Together 62
Customizing jQ Touch 64
What You've Learned 67
5 Client-Side Data Storage 69
localStorage and sessionStorage 69
Saving User Settings to localStorage 70
Saving the Selected Date to sessionStorage 73
Client-Side Database 74
Creating a Database 75
Inserting Rows 78
Selecting Rows and Handling Result Sets 82
Deleting Rows 86
What You've Learned 89
6 Going Offline 91
The Basics of the Offline Application Cache 91
Online Whitelist and Fallback Options 94
Creating a Dynamic Manifest File 98
Debugging 102
The JavaScript Console 103
The Application Cache Database 107
What You've Learned 113
7 Going Native 115
Intro to PhoneGap 115
Usingthe Screen's Full Height 121
Customizing the Title and Icon 123
Creating a Startup Screen 130
Installing Your App on the iPhone 131
Controlling the iPhone with JavaScript 136
Beep, Vibrate, and Alert 136
Geolocacion 140
Accelerometer 146
What You've Learned 150
8 Submitting Your App to iTunes 151
Creating an iPhone Distribution Provisioning Profile 151
Installing the iPhone Distribution Provisioning Profile 153
Renaming the Project 155
Prepare the Application Binary 156
Submit Your App 157
While You Wait 159
Further Reading 159
Index 161