iPhoney: iPhone web simulator
Are you busily designing web apps for the iPhone, but are a little nervous because you don't know what they will look like on it (since the iPhone isn't out yet and all)? Marketcircle, makers of the Daylite Productivity Suite, have just the app for you and best of all it is free (and will eventually be open sourced).iPhoney is a little app that simulates web browsing on an iPhone. It uses Webkit (though for the best experience I would imagine you should install the Safari 3 beta) and requires OS X 10.4.7. iPhoney lets you rotate websites, as you would be able to do on the iPhone, show and hide the location bar, and even set the user agent to that of the iPhone (I suggest visiting as many Mac websites as possible so they get excited about iPhone visits in their logs). The cool thing about this app is that it is a pixel perfect representation of the iPhone. That is to say that the app will display websites using the exact same number of pixels as will be available on the iPhone's screen.
And just in case you were wondering, multi-touch is not included.
Thanks, Adam.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mr. Oz said 11:31AM on 6-21-2007
without the iPhone shrink-to-fit-then-zoom feature this app is worthless. still well done and fun.
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Jonathan said 11:33AM on 6-21-2007
I'm typing this from iPhoney now, but it really needs some more maturing. What I especially miss is zoom, which you see in the ad. Most of this can be done by adjusting your browser size. Altough it is easy, and it looks really good.
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Sälli said 11:46AM on 6-21-2007
Just like Mr. Oz said, this is pretty much the same thing as resizing your browser window. Nothing to do with the way pages are displayed on an iPhone.
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terssi said 11:53AM on 6-21-2007
As a Mac-user, I think it was great thing from Steve Jobs not to kill Mac-app development by letting Cocoa programming with iPhone.
Instead now Windows/web-developers are flocking into iPhone-dev, and they might be more interested in Cocoa when the API's are out.
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Chris Coleman said 12:53PM on 6-21-2007
@ Mr. Oz: It's useless for general web browsing, but I don't think that's the point. The real purpose of this is for building web apps that will work right on the iPhone. Sure, you *could* resize your browser window, but that's kind of a pain in the ass to do every time you launch your browser.
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AJ said 1:12PM on 6-21-2007
Indeed you could resize your window, but things like the user-agent spoofing, the rotation and the "hide address bar" are handy.
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Tony B said 1:18PM on 6-21-2007
Does this mean Marketcircle is working on a web based client for Daylite? The current version doesn't have sync services, though they've been promised many times in the forums by their programmers.
I'm the IT guy at a company of 70 that are switching from windows/exchange to osx for everything. We really like Daylite, but without the sync or web based, nobody can access anything from a mobile device wirelessly.
my .02
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guillaume said 1:26PM on 6-21-2007
This little app gives me an idea (that has probably already been implemented for sure): is there a way to add a script on a webpage that recognizes if the browser is an iphone, with get_browser() perhaps, and then gives a complete different apparence, optimized for this small screen. Anyone knowing of a website already offering that ?
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pentumforever said 1:31PM on 6-21-2007
#8
Yes this is possible in various degrees. You could use PHP und deliver a completely different Website, or you could just exchange the style sheet with PHP or JavaScript.
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thx2001r said 2:17PM on 6-21-2007
guillaume -
Yes, you could detect iPhone's User Agent string... however, this is EASILY spoofed so it may or may not be such a great idea. Just look for 'iPhone' in the user agent string and you're done. You should probably check for display sizes closer to the stated iPhone screen resolution (within a range nearby as we can't know for sure what will actually be detected until people get phones in hand for testing) as well (though this site claims to have the answer for browser resolution: http://gasapp.com/iphone/ ). Not a failsafe but at least avoids simple spoofing and forces browser window resizing as well to pull off a good spoof.
From Apple's home page in the following included javascript file:
http://www.apple.com/global/nav/scripts/shortcuts.js
Search in that file for the following text:
if((!navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i))&&
(typeof(deactivateSearchShortcuts)=="undefined"||
!deactivateSearchShortcuts)){
SearchShortcut.load();
}
}
Note that you'd want to do something like the following instead (as Apple is testing to do something if the browser is NOT an iPhone, hence the "!"... sorry if that is obvious to you, not trying to offend, just don't know how familiar you are with javascript):
if(navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i)){
do.Something();
}
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guillaume said 2:33PM on 6-21-2007
Thanks for the advice!! I'm not familiar with javascript.... I was planning to do something in php with get_browser(). But perhaps javascript is better
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thx2001r said 2:48PM on 6-21-2007
guillaume -
The PHP solution should work fine as well (and is a server side script so javascript doesn't have to be enabled for it to work)... just pointing out that Apple themselves search for just 'iPhone' in the UserAgent string... so get_browser() should work just fine for that as well for iPhone detection.
Of course, detecting the resolution of the browser is a different story. That (apparently) can only be accomplished in javascript.
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Art Kavanagh said 4:53AM on 6-22-2007
#8: They might just do that for an iPhone. For a Nokia N800 (which has a 4 inch screen with a resolution of 800 × 480) they're more likely to say "sorry, you can't use that thing here." Whenever I visit eBay, I'm advised to "upgrade your browser". Of course, there isn't an upgrade available for that platform.Having said that, the browsing experience on the N800 is actually rather good.The iPhone will have a lower resolution but it should be usable in most circumstances.
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