Dec 08

iPhone Tech Talk World Tour 2009

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Unfortunately I was not able to attend any of Apple’s iPhone Tech Talk World Tour presentations this year. Fortunately several developers have posted their notes from the events.

On this blog I talk a lot about UIWebView. It turns out that Apple is pretty bullish on using web views in your app as well (from the iPhone Blog):

  • One dev who was new to Apple technologies found WebKit and their specific CSS (-webkit-gradient, -webkit-mask, webkit-box-reflect) to be “astoundingly powerful”. If you run WebKit or Safari, check out the westciv.tools.gradients demo.
  • Apple stressed the advantages of using WebKit and embedded WebView. The AppStore app is an example of a native app with a WebKit UI made by Apple.
  • A button made in CSS is much lighter than an image file and also scales elegantly (resolution independent).
  • Even a JPG that’s only 50k in size will take up 10 times more memory when it’s decompressed and rendered in a UI.
  • WebKit interfaces can be updated outside of the App Store approval process, so no resubmission just to change UI elements.
  • Client-side database storage API in HTML 5 saves state locally and reloads the next time you view the page. See the webkit.org/demos/sticky-notes demo.

written by Nick

3 Responses to “iPhone Tech Talk World Tour 2009”

  1. Ustun Says:
    December 12th, 2009 at 10:21

    Hi Nick,

    I need your advice on using UIWebView for our project.

    We are preparing an app for a customer which is a test center. Students can login via web, and check their exam/test scores. Unfortunately the web side has been prepared by another company, and without web services in mind; so we can’t just get the xml/json and parse it and show it in our app easily.

    One alternative we thought was then, simply embedding a UIWebview in our app that connects to the results page, which will be specifically styled for iPhone. Does this approach make sense? Actually, we would just be cleaning the user interface a little bit, decrease the page width etc, and try to show an iPhone friendly web page in our application, instead of parsing and showing info with native components.

    Thanks for your time.

  2. Nick Says:
    December 18th, 2009 at 23:14

    @Ustun: I think this would be a good approach. Keep in mind that Apple is unlikely to approve a native app that only has an UIWebView and no other functionality. They would say that you should make it a web app that users can access via Safari. One piece of functionality that you could add to a native app is to save the user’s login credentials to make it quicker to login and check your results.

  3. Ustun Says:
    December 23rd, 2009 at 15:06

    OK, thank you for your reply Nick.

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