Borwser based iPhone Simulator

[Ifone]

You can easily test your iPhone apps here as a starting point.
http://www.testiphone.com/

[nroose]

Hmm. No scroll bars, and the address bar does not go away.

I have something quite similar to this working for my own site and for
demos, but I am not allowed to release it yet.

I personally think to do this at this point, you need scrollbars.
Just too hard to scroll otherwise, so not useful for any site that
requires scrolling. If a site does not require scrolling, then they
won't appear anyway.

[Jeffrey903]

I think that unless we are somehow able to obtain the copy of webkit
that the iPhone is using, we will never have a true iPhone simulator.

[Ifone]

Great points. I added scrollbars. http://testiphone.com/?url=http://groups.google.com/group/iphonewebdev

I will work on removing the address bar functionality to mimic my
iPhone today.

[D. Rich]

David Cann created his site June 12th, http://davidcann.com/iphone/ &
all of the other sites have copied.
There has already been another site, that does what you have done and
has been available since June 16th at http://iphone.borrowadollar.com/interface

Most of the problems that people are having creating apps for the
iphone involve things that can only be seen when testing on an iphone.
If your app can read the meta tags and adjust accordingly, then I
might give it another look.

D. Rich

[SunboX]

its not possible to test an application on your 'simulator'... it does
show webpages in another way than iphone does. some examples:

- iphone zooms webpages and renders input fields like textboxes,
buttons based on zoom factor
- you can style input fields with webkit css tags
- fileupload fields are disabled
- page renders based on metag tags (viewport)
- another interaction like safari on desktop (Fingers don't have the
precision of the pointer controlled by the mouse. They also have
different capabilities than those of a mouse)
- some (important) javascript events will not work
- there aren't gestures to perform cut, copy, paste, drag-and-drop,
and text selection
- and some more

so you cant simulate iphone behavior with a normal browser

...just my two cents

On Jul 4, 8:00 pm, "D. Rich" <Dave...@gmail.com> wrote:
> David Cann created his site June 12th,http://davidcann.com/iphone/&
> all of the other sites have copied.
> There has already been another site, that does what you have done and

> has been available since June 16th athttp://iphone.borrowadollar.com/interface

[Ifone]

Wow looks like we are all trying to come up with something that can't
be done. So negative. I guess we should i just quit and go away :(

[Jeff Harrell]

Don't take it personally or anything. It's just that the iPhone has a
totally different user-interaction system, making it incredibly
difficult to simulate with a mouse and keyboard. I can't even imagine
how you'd simulate multi-touch, for instance.

I think right now the best way to develop ordinary Web pages for the
iPhone is to stick to the standards. Web app developers will, of
course, have to have iPhones to test their applications. That's just
how things are.

Investing a lot of time in an iPhone simulator isn't something I
personally would consider to be a good choice, because it's going to
be incomplete in some very significant ways. But that's just my opinion.

[Kai Cherry]

I agree. While it could be possible to do this on the desktop, like
iPhoney, its just so far off how webkit renders on the phone that it
ultimately won't be useful for anything but the simplest of web apps
to be honest.

Of course, if you dont actually have the actual phone hardware on your
possesion, you may not realize how futile your attempt will ultimately
be...

-K

On Jul 5, 2007, at 12:26 AM, Jeff Harrell <jeffery...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Kalle Alm]

Kai Cherry wrote:
> I agree. While it could be possible to do this on the desktop, like
> iPhoney, its just so far off how webkit renders on the phone that it
> ultimately won't be useful for anything but the simplest of web apps
> to be honest.
>
> Of course, if you dont actually have the actual phone hardware on your
> possesion, you may not realize how futile your attempt will ultimately
> be...

I'm "new" to the whole handheld/small-device deal, but isn't that
completely insane? Shouldn't Apple be providing the web developers who
don't want/can't afford an iPhone with the capabilities to decide/modify
their sites to work on the iPhone? Don't they want as much compatibility
as possible?

From what I've seen, Apple seems to think that if a page looks okay in
Safari 3, it will look okay on the iPhone, but that's... well, relative,
you might say. So I don't think a simulator is a waste, personally. But
I do think a web page is not the way to do it. It has to be a real app
which can do what the iPhone can. And as someone said, the iPhone webkit
would be nice too. :)

-Kalle.

[Peter Strand]

From my many years of experience with mobile devices, and - in the last few years - web and ajax content for mobile devices, I find that it is key to have actual devices to test your stuff on. This goes for all mobile platforms, iPhone included.

It is amazing how many quirks and little issues that pops up when testing what you would expect to "just work". Even Nokia's S60 platform, which is fairly mature, combined with their webkit browser ( same browser core as iPhone ), issues are regulary introduced on new models.  And the amount of dubious workarounds that we have in place in our mobile ajax code to avoid crashing various devices is increasing steadily.

I do not yet have an actualy iPhone, but it seems - from my US based colleagues - that what we have implemented to work on Nokia's S60 browser seems to work "out-of-the-box" on the iPhone. We do have applied several iPhone specific part already, mainly the viewport meta tags and increased font sized to be hitable by fingers :-)

For development - in lack of an iPhone - I find that an Nokia e61 is a fairly good device. As I wrote above, it has the same browser core as the iPhone, it has WIFI for good local testing and it has a fairly large screen. Alternatively, we also use the Nokia N800, which uses an Opera browser, but is good for testing landscape-mode pages in high resolution.

Naturally, none of these devices will get you close to the core iPhone features such as multitouch, finger based clicking, orientation-change etc

Peter

[Kai Cherry]

On Jul 5, 2007, at 5:25 AM, Kalle Alm <kall...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm "new" to the whole handheld/small-device deal, but isn't that
> completely insane?

Yes. It most certainly is. However as a mac dev, you kind of get used
to this sort of thing.

> Shouldn't Apple be providing the web developers who
> don't want/can't afford an iPhone with the capabilities to decide/
> modify
> their sites to work on the iPhone? Don't they want as much
> compatibility
> as possible?

Again, the following response is the point of view of a ADC card-
carrying os x dev, so please keep that in mind...

Apple is full of crap :)

Most of the mac devs I know, especially the ones that were at wwdc are
pretty much of the opinion that apple is not serious at all about 3rd
party iPhone development and the "web 2.0" solution was a last minute
toss it out there thing, evidenced by the lack of any sort of real
integration with springboard and the rather...lacking code samples.

Some of us however have decided to suck it up and see what we can do
with the thing.

At ADC, apple said quite frankly that if one wanted to develop and
debug these web apps, get a phone on June 29th

> From what I've seen, Apple seems to think that if a page looks okay in
> Safari 3, it will look okay on the iPhone, but that's... well,
> relative,
> you might say.

They think no such thing:) that was the marketing message.

> So I don't think a simulator is a waste, personally. But
> I do think a web page is not the way to do it. It has to be a real app
> which can do what the iPhone can. And as someone said, the iPhone
> webkit
> would be nice too. :)
>

I don't think a sim is a *total waste* however it is a non-trivial
task, and without the phone version of webkit just a doorway to
heartbreak and dispare :)

> -Kalle.
>
>
> >

[DRichPro...@gmail.com]

I don't think anyone is trying to tell you to give up, but a simple
simulator isn't going to help us too much in developing apps.
Before the iPhone came out, the simulators were all we had.
After, I got my iPhone, I could quickly tell that all the simulators
were very lacking.

If you are very serious about creating a simulator, get an iPhone and
code the simulator to behave exactly like the iPhone.
Take peoples apps, and test them both on your iPhone and on you sim
and make sure they behave exactly.
Write your own examples and test them on both, try all sorts of
screwed up code.

If you can get you sim to do that, then it will be worth doing.

D. Rich

[Ifone]

I agree that Apple has to start offering developers a full featured
testbed for its iPhone it it is serious about iPhone apps catching on.
I would assume they are probably working on one now and if not they
better start today. Also I would imagine they underestimated how
popular iPhone app development will be, and they are also probably
quite pleased to see this amount of activity.

I do have an iPhone and have tried to make my sim as close as possible
to the iPhone and I test it out all the time. Having said that, its
alpha and a work in progress, it is not easy to do some of the tasks
we are trying to accomplish such as zooming in and out. There are many
security restrictions in web browsers that make doing some of these
things a pain, but i am not giving up.

Cheers

On Jul 5, 8:57 am, "DRichProducti...@gmail.com"

[Ifone]

I've added a few more options to the tool, you can turn on/off
scrollbars and load in horizontal and vertical modes.

I've noticed that when apps use the viewport 320 meta tag rule, the
simulator freaks out in my Safari (windows) and starts going haywire
turning the scrollbars on and off repeatedly
http://testiphone.com/?url=http://www.joehewitt.com/files/liquid1.html
I'm not quite sure why this happens, or if it happens in the Mac
version of Safari. Any ideas?

But, in those cases turning scrollbars off helps to fix that issue for
me
http://testiphone.com/?url=http://www.joehewitt.com/files/liquid1.html&scroll=off