Chapter 5. Using iUI for web apps

Creating web apps with the WebKit gives you a lot of power and allows for a lot of diversity. But it doesn’t address a real concern: what if you want to create web apps that have the same look and feel as native applications on the iPhone?

The reasons for doing so are obvious. You can take advantage of lessons that users have already learned by using Apple’s standard iPhone user interfaces. The question of how to do so, however, is slightly more complex.

Certainly you could do so using the WebKit’s extensions atop HTML, and we’re going to give you the opportunity to do so here by dissecting what makes up the iPhone interface. Unless you have specific needs, however, creating your own interface is probably overkill.

Fortunately, we have another solution to this problem: a third-party library exists that you can use to model the iPhone interface. It’s called iUI, and it’ll be the focus of much of this chapter. But before we get into iUI, let’s see what the iPhone interface looks like.

5.1. Creating your own iPhone UI

The iPhone UI has quite a few unique (and distinctive) features. If you want to model its UI inside a web app, you must consider all of them. We’ll provide some guidance by highlighting the most important UI features in this section.

5.2. Getting ready for iUI

5.3. Developing with iUI

5.4. Creating an iUI back end

5.5. Other iUI tips and tricks

5.6. Integrating iUI with other libraries

5.7. Summary