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How to write a semi-application for iPhone

July 17th, 2008 | Yaz

Switching among different programming platforms is frustrating specially if you, as me, are not a professional developer. Since the day that I got my iPhone, I have been planning to work on it and write at least some “hello world!” type applications. After signing up as developer in Apple and skimming over the documentation, I find out that I won’t be able to write even a simple application for a while, mostly because of time shortage.

But how about writing small – or even big – gadgets for the iPhone browser? This should not be that hard. A good thing about iPhone is that you can place a bookmark to a website on the main page. So, if you write a gadget and place a direct link to the gadget on the main page (I will show how to do this later), this can be something similar to an application. Lets see the steps:

1. Write or choose a Google gadget. Here, I am going to use my own gadget Google Form.
2. Go to gadget page.
3. Click on “Embed this gadget”
   

   gadget embed page

4. Adjust gadget settings and customize it.
   

   settings

5. Click on “get the code”.
6. Copy the src url
   

   copy url

here, url is

http://www.gmodules.com/ig/ifr?url=http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/103029429785519833710/googleform.xml&up_form_ID=piPBHOaJgExr390eeHQdZKg&up_suffix=%26hl%3Den_GB&up_width=400&up_height=580&up_border=0&up_marginheight=0&up_marginwidth=0&synd=open&w=320&h=300&title=Google+Form&border=%23ffffff%7C0px%2C1px+solid+%23595959%7C0px%2C1px+solid+%23797979%7C0px%2C2px+solid+%23898989&output=js

7. Use http://tinyurl.com to shorten the url and convert escaped characters such as ampersand.
8. Email the shortened url to yourself
9. Open the email in your iPhone and click on the url.
10. Check if the gadget is working as you adjusted settings. If not, make sure that you have copied the correct src url.
11. Click on + sign and choose “Add to Home Screen”.

Done!