I’m happy to announce that Handheld Designer version 1.4.1 has been approved by Apple and released on the Mac App Store. This update adds an interactive image gallery based on the PhotoSwipe JavaScript library, and more.
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Mobile web-apps are great, and can have many advantages over native apps. But sometimes you need to accomplish something that can only be done by a native app. Perhaps you need to access the device hardware, like the camera or GPS hardware, in a way that web-apps are prohibited to do, or maybe you just want to sell your app on the App Store.
Fortunately, an open-source tool called PhoneGap makes it easy to “wrap” a standard HTML5 mobile web-app in a native wrapper, producing a native app suitable for submission to the App Store. In this tutorial, we’ll review the steps necessary to convert a web-app created with Handheld Designer into a native iPhone or iPad application.
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In the second part of this tutorial, we created a “detail” page that displays the detail from an individual day’s forecast. In the tutorial’s final installment, we’ll create a “settings” page that allows the user to personalize the forecast location.
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In part one of this tutorial, we created the main page of our weather app, and added code to query a weather web-service, process the returned forecast, and display it in a list view. In part two, we’ll create a “detail” page that displays the detail from an individual day’s forecast.
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Weather apps have become a kind of “Hello, world.” of mobile computing. Their simple form, limited functionality, and universal understanding provide an opportunity for programmers and designers to explore different aspects of a platform’s capabilities.
In this tutorial, we’ll build a simple weather app that will use AJAX to query a weather web-service to retrieve a 4-day forecast, dynamically display the forecast in a list view, and provide a detail view for each day. The user will also be able to configure the which city’s forecast is displayed, and whether temperatures are displayed in Fahrenheit or Celsius.
You can follow along with the tutorial, or download a fully-functional version of the weather app from the sample gallery within Handheld Designer.
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I’m happy to announce that Handheld Designer version 1.4.0 has been approved by Apple and released on the Mac App Store. This update adds popup dialogs, list view enhancements, jQuery and jQuery Mobile upgrades, and more.
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A maintenance update, Handheld Designer version 1.3.2, has been approved by Apple and released on the Mac App Store. The update contains the following fixes:
You can update Handheld Designer by opening the Mac App Store and clicking “Updates”, or go there directly using this link.
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I’m happy to announce that Handheld Designer version 1.3.1 has been approved by Apple and released on the Mac App Store. This is primarily a maintenance update, containing bug fixes and a few new features.
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I’m happy to announce that Handheld Designer version 1.3.0 has been released as a free update for all users on the Mac App Store. This update includes support for animated page transitions, code-free page navigation, custom object color schemes with the integrated jQuery Mobile Theme Roller, iPhone 5 support, Retina graphics updates, and much more.
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In part 1 of this tutorial, we covered the creation of a simple set of PHP scripts that give our Address Book application access to a remote MySQL database. Now that the scripts have been created, we can move on to building the app in Handheld Designer.
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