Thinking about developing a web app for the iPhone? Or maybe an iPhone version of an existing website? Obviously you’re going to want it to look and “iPhoney,” having the slide animation when you go between screens, and things like that.
It would be a pain to do all of that from scratch, wouldn’t it? Especially when you don’t have to.
There are already a couple of solutions out there that make it easier for you to create a web page that looks like a native iPhone app. With a bit of work, you can customize them to make them your own.
First we have Joe Hewitt’s iPhone Native Skin. Just copy the files to your server and you’ll have a working demo of what it looks like. From there you can customize the look, and then introduce your PHP routines in to make it functional. (For an iPhone version of a blog, you could query the database and display the results, or you could parse the RSS feed and format it for display.)
Then we have CiUI, the “CNET iPhone UI.” When CNET decided to build an iPhone version of their site, they first considered Joe Hewitt’s solution, but later decided to build their own solution. The resulting CiUI is a slick solution that makes use of AJAX to load new screens, and is probably the most powerful solution out there. I haven’t had a chance to try it out myself, but it’s definitely on my list.
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