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A. D.'s Library tagged mobile   View Popular

14 Jul 09

Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse, Part 3: Developing advanced views for iPhone

  • Apple recommends that clickable targets be at least 44 pixels square for best usability.

Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse, Part 2: Displaying iPhone content to the client

    • The most important differences are:


      • The screen size of the iPhone (320x480) is much smaller than even the smallest target
        application for a desktop Web application. The iPhone screen also has a significantly
        different aspect ratio from a typical desktop or laptop monitor.
      • The pixel density of an iPhone is much greater than a desktop
        monitor, allowing small text to be read somewhat more easily and somewhat changing the relative size of images.
      • Users can rotate the Mobile Safari view 90 degrees, changing the size and, more importantly, the aspect ratio of the screen.
      • The touch-screen interface to Mobile Safari is less precise than a mouse interface,
        meaning that targets like buttons and links should be larger and farther apart than would be necessary in a desktop application.
      • An iPhone is often used under slow network conditions. However, users have a strong expectation that the responses to their actions will be nearly instant.
    • There are two primary options for giving your Web application an iPhone look and feel:


      • Add your own CSS and JavaScript to your site based on Apple's sample code or other good-looking sites.
      • Use a pre-existing toolkit.
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Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse, Part 1: Serving content for iPhones

    • To serve your mobile users, your Rails application needs to manage the
      following:


      • Detecting when a user accesses the site using an iPhone or an iPod touch.
      • Allowing the user to freely switch between the mobile and regular versions of the site.
      • Using a different layout for Mobile Safari users, including separate Cascading
        Style Sheets (CSS) files and, possibly, JavaScript libraries.
      • Serving different content to mobile users.
  • Helvetica is the font of choice for iPhone system links. The font size is a little
    smaller than recommended for body text, but this isn't supposed to be body text. The
    other items will center the link in the viewport. The result looks like Figure 5
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