Adam Darowski » Safari

BatchBook for iPhone (And How I Set Up the Development Environment)

Adam Darowski — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:19:42 +0000

On Monday, I announced the release of BatchBook for iPhone over at the BatchBlue Blog. Check out the post for the details of what features we launched with and what’s coming next. Don’t have a BatchBook account yet? You can sign up for free.

But what I wanted to talk about here is how I set up the development environment. Obviously, designing for a phone is much different than for a desktop or laptop. Luckily, there are plenty of tools available to make developing for the iPhone both a breeze and—quite frankly—incredibly enjoyable.

iui

I highly recommend starting with Joe Hewitt’s wonderful iui framework for iPhone-optimized web apps. The framework has a very small footprint, can be heavily customized, and is downright fun to experiment with.

iPhoney

Testing can be interesting… you don’t want to keep pushing code live and firing up your phone, so what’s the best approach to take?

First, I tried iPhoney. iPhoney is your own gorgeous iPhone sitting your desktop. You can tell iPhoney what User Agent to behave as—the iPhone, standard Safari/WebKit, or more.

Safari 3.1

Once you get to a certain point, though, you need to use some developer tools to fine tune your code. Safari 3.1 came with a bunch of developer tools. Among them are an element inspector so you can see the cascade of styles attached to an element (think a prettier version of Firebug that isn’t quite as powerful). Also, you can choose from a huge list a of user agents.

Using the iPhone user agent with the element inspector lets you troubleshoot any display issues you may be having.

To turn on the iPhone Developer Tools, head to Safari’s preferences:

Once you quit Safari and open it back up, you’ll see the Develop menu.

From there, just choose iPhone from the User Agents list and you’re in action!

So, have fun! I’m personally looking forward to updating the BatchBook iPhone app and am tempted to play with some other ideas for creating iPhone apps. I have found that working with a totally different canvas (a phone as opposed to a desktop browser) after all these years can actually be quite thrilling.

Plus, developing for iPhone means no Internet Explorer!

How To Run Safari 2 and Safari 3 At Once

Adam Darowski — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 21:10:01 +0000

Okay, maybe I was a bit harsh.

I ranted the other day about Safari 3 replacing Safari 2 on my machine (among other things). It took a teenie bit of thinking, but I came up with a workaround.

Before installing Safari 3 Beta:

Duplicate Safari in you Applications folder.
Rename the new copy “Safari 2″
Run the Safari 3 installer.
Restart. You have two Safaris.

IE can’t even run two versions on the same computer (without hacking). I have Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 installed, but I can only run one at a time. I can run both Safaris simultaneously. Now that’s pretty cool.

Safari 3.0 Beta Rant

Adam Darowski — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 02:16:29 +0000

I’ll start off by saying I’m a fan of Apple’s Safari browser. In fact, I used it as my main browser until recently. Once I started doing web development on a more consistent basis, I really needed Firefox for the plugins. In fact, since starting at BatchBlue, my most used piece of software is Firebug. I can’t use Safari if it doesn’t have Firebug or Web Developer Toolbar.

So, Apple just released the new Safari beta. It runs on Windows now, too. While I don’t think it will have the same effect as iTunes on Windows, it can’t hurt. So, I’ve installed it on both systems (Windows via Parallels). I installed on Windows first. It was a breeze. Then I installed it on the Mac.

First of all, why the eff do I have to restart… to install a web browser? You didn’t make me restart on Windows, why on the Mac? Firefox doesn’t make me restart. Shiira doesn’t make me restart. Hell, I don’t think OFFICE made me restart. Why do I have to restart? I normally wouldn’t care, but I’m running Rails locally for testing. When I restart my Mac, I have to restart the local database, restart Rails, and do a bunch of other stuff I don’t really know how to do. Luckily, Sean gave me a step by step “so you’re a Terminal noob and you are still trying to run Rails locally” cheat sheet. But sheesh. I haven’t restarted in weeks. Why restart to install a browser?

Second… when did Safari become Internet Explorer. Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. But where the heck did Safari 2 go? Why did you replace it? I need to test in both! So now, I get to UNinstall Safari 3… no doubt I’ll have to restart again (gah!) then test in Safari 2. If I want to test in Safari 3… guess what… install again… restart… curse…

Come on, Apple. You do this stuff right. I know it’s just a beta, but come on…

Update: Here’s a workaround.