Iphone Application Development Considerations

The number of iphones being bought is increasing; with a report from Nelson Media stipulating Apple iphone ownership is estimated at 13% (in a 2009 report) among the 43% of Australian internet users owning a mobile device that has internet capability (http://au.nielsen.com).

As a company wishing to maximize the potential of utilizing an iphone application to offer a service or product offering to your customers, there are a few initial considerations to be made and discussed with your web developer.  An article; ‘iPhone Development: 12 Tips To Get You Started’ by Stoyan Stefanov provides an overview of some useful ‘tips and tricks’ one can apply to an app which should also act as a check list too.

Below is a summary of the article focusing primarily on the high level points as a starting point:

Register as an iPhone developer and install the Mac iPhone software development kit (iPhone SDK) which will contain the iPhone simulator. Helpful web development info is also available at developer.Apple.com

As iPhones have smaller screens then the typical user PC/MAC, one can create an additional style sheet specifically to be used by the iPhone as opposed to the existing web page that is rendered in the desktop browser. Remember to include the ‘max-device-width’ in the markup to define the available width when the iphone is in a landscape orientation. 

Making use of the ‘Viewport Meta Element’ is beneficial in many ways. Pages on the iPhone viewed via Sarari are rendered to fit the screen, whereby users must zoom in/out to see the content clearly. With an app, using the element mentioned above, will instruct the browser to render the width of the hand held device as being the width of the viewport making the font size more legible. Some other great tips include containing multiple comma-delimited values, for example ‘initial-scale’ – used to adjust the zoom level which the user initially sees and determines whether or not the interface will be scalable.

Additional considerations to developing an app include:

• Will it use either or both portrait and landscape orientations and what actions will be required to be performed when tilting the device?
• What specific formatting, using styles, will be required to display the content properly within a particular orientation?
• Suggestion to remove the toolbar for all iphone applications to make the look and feel of a web application more of a native iphone application