I have created a short video demoing the example in action:

No knowledge of Objective-C is necessary to create an app using these technologies, and as you can see the look and feel is just like a native application.  In the demo the app is running in the simulator as a native app, not in Safari.  While action games will suffer a noticeable performance lag, apps that are non-graphically intensive have pretty good performance.

You can download this example here:

The example can be downloaded here: iWebkit/Phonegap

iWebKit is a UI framework commonly used in web apps, and Phonegap is a framework used for running web applications as native iPhone/Blackberry/Android applications.

[Source: Randy McMillan]

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

Randy McMillan submitted a story about an example that he has created of interface design with Phonegap using the JQTouch plugin (Xcode required to load the example).  It makes for a very sleek looking interface.

** Link fixed thanks to those that sent messages.. please don’t tweak your sites after submitting a story.

You can check it out here: JQTouch Meet Phonegap

If you have a tutorial, or some news that you think would be useful for iPhone developers you can submit it here.

If you have any comments or would like to see more or less content on this topic please comment below.

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

Now, this is something that I haven’t coded myself because I haven’t run into a situation where I was using a web app that needed to add functionality not already implemented within Phonegap when working with Iphone web app code. However, the author of QuickConnect has an excellent tutorial on doing this here.

Basically what you do is write to NSLog from your Javascript code, then iterate through that log and extract the commands and variables to be used by your Objective-C code.   Overall, it’s not a very complex process, but a rather tedious one.

Thanks for reading this series about turning Javascript web apps into native ones for the Iphone app store, tommorow I will talk a bit about OpenGL ES.

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

Today I’m going to introduce a couple more frameworks. Tommorow I will get into how you can interact with Objective-C using javascript, and vice versa.

The second framework I’m going to introduce you to today is QuickConnect Iphone.  QuickConnect allows you to develop using Havascript, HTML, and CSS, and provides detailed instructions on how to develop using Apple’s excellent visual web app development tool Dashcode, and turn those into “native” apps.  An added benefit is that apps can also run on several other platforms, and maybe even for the likes of Predeveloper it will run on the Palm Pre too.  I haven’t seen QuickConnect being used in an app yet, and I’ve only gone through a couple of the tutorials on the author’s blog.

The third framework is Big5.  This framework does not seem as far along as Phonegap or QuickConnect, but it does supply the user with the ability to use the camera, location services, and accelerometer.  However, I mention it here because it is very easy to use.  The instructions however are somewhat limited in how to get your app to the app store, because the author wants you to load it up in the “Big5App”.

To sum things up, the 3 frameworks are:

Phonegap – Mature, used in many apps, works with Iphone, Blackberry and Android.
QuickConnectIphone – In beta, works with Iphone, Android, Linux, Php, and Mac.
Big5 – Mature, somewhat limited functionality, works through Big5App on Iphone.

Tommorow I’m going to get into interaction between Javascript and Objective-C on the Iphone so you can access nearly any Iphone functionality using Javascript.

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.