Tip: Start iPhone Development with iPhoney

Just a couple weeks ago at WWDC, many of us were expecting Apple to release a full iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit) for all the developers to get in on the action. To our surprise, Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone would not support development of native applications. Instead, using its full-fledged Safari browser, iPhone “apps” would essentially be styled web applications. While inherently disappointing, this fact enables developers to quickly jump on the bandwagon with little else needed.

Albeit, a few have seemed to manage with the iPhone “styling.” One great example of this is David Cann’s Digg interface. Intelligently making use of images and old-fashioned browser frames, he created a great “simulated iPhone” (just Safari though, by no means fully-featured) for a better sense of how exactly his apps will run on the real thing.

iPhoney is a little Mac app that allows you to do this very thing without the fairly complex configuration required in getting his simulation up on your site. Interested users can even give it a try just to see how their favorite websites will look on a real, life-size, iPhone. You can even rotate the simulated device into landscape mode, making the experience that much more realistic.

If you’re a developer, or even someone who just likes to tinker around with things, David Cann has provided the source code for both his Digg and Chat applications. Another iPhone developer, Rob Fox, has also released the source code for his RSS “app” which is heavily based on the aforementioned Digg interface. If you’d like an even broader sense of what seems to work well with the iPhone, this application list should keep you up to date on what developers are producing, many with downloadable source code.

iPhoney is highly recommended, even if you’re just pretending to surf the web on an iPhone. The app is freeware, although it’ll soon become open-source. Download it here.

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