.…… for a few years no so have got­ten very used to the dif­fer­ent key­strokes. Now i have two pieces of work which are no remote win­dows servers. One i con­nect through Log­mein and the other with RDC but i am going barmy get­ting key­stroke com­bi­na­tions screwed up on both the Mac and the Win­dows servers.

.….. i would marry her!

Quick­Con­nect

Quick­Con­nect is a pow­er­ful, mod­u­lar, sim­ple to use, appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment library avail­able for many lan­guages and plat­forms. Quick­Con­nect is cur­rently avail­able for: iPhone, Android & Mac JavaScript apps, Erlang/Yaws, and PHP.

Quick­Con­nec­ti­Phone is LGPL so you can use it the way you want. It has a cus­tom Dash­code project that includes the needed files. It is highly mod­u­lar. It will even let you com­pile your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS into an instal­lable appli­ca­tion if you want.

It is also documaneyted in an Adi­son Wes­ley Book

• By: Lee S. Barney
• Pub­lisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Pub. Date: June 22, 2009
• Print ISBN-10: 0−321−60416−4
• Print ISBN-13: 978−0−321−60416−3
• Web ISBN-10: 0−321−60454−7
• Web ISBN-13: 978−0−321−60454−5

http://​source​forge​.net/​p​r​o​j​e​c​t​s​/​q​u​i​c​k​c​o​n​n​e​ct/

For more infor­ma­tion you could look at

iWe­bKit

iWe­bKit is a file pack­age designed to help you cre­ate your own iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad com­pat­i­ble web­site or webapp. The kit is acces­si­ble to any­one even peo­ple with­out any html knowl­edge and is sim­ple to under­stand thanks to the included tuto­ri­als. In a cou­ple of min­utes you will have cre­ated a full and pro­fe­sional look­ing web­site. iWe­bKit is a great tool because it is very easy to use, extremely fast, com­pat­i­ble & extend­able. It is sim­ple html that any­one can edit con­trary to some other very com­pli­cated solu­tions based on ajax. Sim­plic­ity is the key!

http://​iwe​bkit​.net

Here is a demo:

WebApp​.Net

WebApp​.Net is a light weight, pow­er­ful javascript frame­work tak­ing advan­tage of AJAX tech­nol­ogy. It pro­vides a full set of ready to use com­po­nents to help you develop, quickly and eas­ily, advanced mobile web applications.

It has the fol­low­ing advantages:

• Under active development
• Active user community
• Has an open license, free to dis­trib­ute as long as you include the copyright/disclaimer

http://​webapp​-net​.com/

iUi

iUI is a frame­work con­sist­ing of a JavaScript library, CSS, and images for devel­op­ing iPhone webapps.

Ini­tialy writ­ten by Joe Hewitt but now main­tained in google code.

Here is Joes intro

“First and fore­most, iUI is not meant as a “JavaScript library”. Its goal is sim­ply to turn ordi­nary standards-based HTML into a pol­ished, usable inter­face that meets the high stan­dards set by Apple’s own native iPhone apps. As much as pos­si­ble, iUI maps com­mon HTML idioms to iPhone inter­face con­ven­tions. For exam­ple, the <ul> and <li> tags are used to cre­ate hier­ar­chi­cal side-scrolling nav­i­ga­tion. Ordi­nary <a> links load with a slid­ing ani­ma­tion while keep­ing you on the orig­i­nal page instead of load­ing an entirely new one. A sim­ple set of CSS classes can be used to des­ig­nate things like modal dialogs, pref­er­ence pan­els, and on/off switches.

Let me re-emphasize that all of this is done with­out the need for you to write any JavaScript. It is meant to feel as though HTML was the iPhone’s own UI language.”

http://​www​.joe​he​witt​.com/​b​l​o​g​/​i​n​t​r​o​d​u​c​i​n​g​_​i​u​i​.​php

jQtouch

A jQuery plu­gin for mobile web devel­op­ment on the iPhone,

iPod Touch, and other forward-thinking devices.

jQTouch is a jQuery plu­gin with native ani­ma­tions, auto­matic nav­i­ga­tion, and themes for mobile WebKit browsers like iPhone, G1, and Pre.

• Easy to install. Get up and run­ning in a few minutes.
• Entirely cus­tomiz­able with selec­tor options
• Theme sup­port, includ­ing default Apple and jQTouch cus­tom themes
• Call­back func­tions through­out, includ­ing swipe and ori­en­ta­tion change detection
• Page his­tory man­age­ment and CSS3 page tran­si­tions, includ­ing 3d flip
• Eas­ily allow apps to run in fullscreen mode with cus­tom icons and startup screens
• The power of jQuery to build AJAX applications
• New demos: Clock and Todo

Oreilly book

• Build­ing iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, 1^st Edition
• By: Jonathan Stark
• Pub­lisher: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
• Pub. Date: Jan­u­ary 28, 2010 Most Recent Edition
• Print ISBN-13: 978−0−596−80578−4
• Pages in Print Edi­tion: 192

http://​www​.jqtouch​.com/

Phone­Gap

What is PhoneGap?

Phone­Gap is an open source devel­op­ment tool for build­ing fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript.

If you’re a web devel­oper who wants to build mobile appli­ca­tions in HTML and JavaScript while still tak­ing advan­tage of the core fea­tures in the iPhone, Android, Palm, Sym­bian and Black­berry SDKs, Phone­Gap is for you.

http://​phone​gap​.com/

Mono­Touch

Mono­Touch allows devel­op­ers to cre­ate C# and .NET based appli­ca­tions that run on Apple’s iPhone and Apple’s iPod Touch devices, while tak­ing advan­tage of the iPhone APIs and reusing both code and libraries that have been built for .NET, as well as exist­ing skills. The cur­rent release includes the new APIs in the new iPho­neOS as well as tool sup­port and Mon­oDe­velop sup­port for devel­op­ing iPad applications.

http://​mono​touch​.net/

http://​code​.google​.com/​p​/​j​q​u​e​r​y​-​i​p​h​o​n​e​-​u​i​/​d​o​w​n​l​o​a​d​s​/​l​ist

jQuery iPhone UI

This is JavaScript library for pro­to­type iPhone inter­face on web pages

http://​code​.google​.com/​p​/​j​q​u​e​r​y​-​i​p​h​o​n​e​-​ui/

Dash­code

Dash­code is every­thing you need to cre­ate great Dash­board wid­gets. Built from the ground up with wid­gets in mind, Dash­code makes it easy for even a novice pro­gram­mer to cre­ate a wid­get, give it a pro­fes­sional look, and pack­age it up so you and your friends can enjoy your creation

http://​devel​oper​.apple​.com/​t​o​o​l​s​/​d​a​s​h​c​o​de/

Xcode

Xcode is Apple’s pre­mière devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment for Mac OS X. In addi­tion to being pack­aged on the DVD with every copy of Mac OS X, the lat­est Xcode devel­oper release is always avail­able for free to ADC mem­bers and includes all the tools you need to cre­ate, debug, and opti­mize your appli­ca­tions. At the heart of the Xcode tools pack­age is the Xcode IDE, a graph­i­cal work­bench that tightly inte­grates a pro­fes­sional text edi­tor, a robust build sys­tem, a debug­ger, and the pow­er­ful GCC com­piler capa­ble of tar­get­ing Intel and Pow­erPC regard­less of host plat­form. Xcode is both easy to use, and yet pow­er­ful enough to build the largest Mac OS X appli­ca­tions. The com­plete Mac OS X devel­oper tools chain is dis­trib­uted as part of Xcode; these tools include Inter­face Builder, Instru­ments, Dash­code, the WebOb­jects frame­work, and the com­plete ref­er­ence doc­u­men­ta­tion, to name just a few.

http://​devel​oper​.apple​.com/​t​o​o​l​s​/​x​c​o​d​e​/​r​e​v​i​e​w​x​c​o​d​e​.​h​tml

Pas­trykit

An inter­nal toolkit used by Apple to make iPxxx based web sites. Not released to the pub­lic but obvi­ously an Ele­phant in the room as it were. Cur­rently appears to be a set of JavaScript libraries. I have added links to dis­cus­sions here.

http://​dar​ing​fire​ball​.net/​2​0​0​9​/​1​2​/​p​a​s​t​r​y​kit

http://​david​b​cal​houn​.com/​2​0​0​9​/​p​a​s​t​r​y​k​i​t​-​d​i​g​g​i​n​g​-​i​n​t​o​-​a​n​-​a​p​p​l​e​-​pie

http://​www​.nxfx​.com/​b​l​o​g​/​i​p​h​o​n​e​-​d​e​v​e​l​o​p​m​e​n​t​/​a​p​p​l​e​s​-​p​a​s​t​r​y​-​k​i​t​-​i​p​h​o​n​e​-​j​a​v​a​s​c​r​i​p​t​-​t​o​o​l​k​it/

On a tech­ni­cal front not a lot, you can use a frame­work like Zend or Kohana or Rails etc. which usu­ally have the abil­ity to replace the con­tent with tags and then fill the tag with the lan­guage of choice at run time. The dif­fer­ent lan­guages reside in appro­pri­ately named direc­to­ries and can be trig­gered by the browser lan­guage tag or another mech­a­nism. If you ate not using a frame­work with this facil­ity then study one to se how it is done. After that and in no par­tic­u­lar order.

• Why mul­ti­lin­gual? you really need a com­pelling rea­son to do it as the work­load you are tak­ing on is large and com­plex and oner­ous. I know all the rea­sons about how and why peo­ple like sites in their native lan­guage but for a multi lin­gual site’s invest­ment in money you need to be mak­ing a proper return on the invest­ment and not just doing it for the sake of it.
• Local­is­ing, L10N or inter­na­tion­al­i­sa­tion i18n, is not just about lan­guage. It is about about cul­tural dif­fer­ences. Anglo Sax­ons like cool restrained san-serif type sites. Latin and Latin Amer­i­can cul­tures like more vibrant colours and cur­sive type faces. And so on. So you need to have a mech­a­nism that will change the css for each lan­guage as well (well to be truly efec­tive you do)
• Who is doing the trans­la­tion? Remem­ber it is an idiomatic trans­la­tion you need, Google Trans­late API will not cut it and you need a native speaker to trans­late from and to the tar­get. So for exam­ple if you are using FIGS (French Ital­ian etc) from an Eng­lish orig­i­nal. YOu need a trans­la­tor for Eng­lish to French, Eng­lish to Ger­man, Eng­lish to Ital­ian, and Eng­lish to Span­ish (see the costs mount­ing?). A good bureau will pro­vide all this for you and man­age the process though.
• Proof read­ing. Can you speak 5 lan­guages well enough to check that above work is correct?
• Main­te­nance. Again assum­ing Eng­lish is the base lan­guage and there is a new page or a page rewrite or even a typo you need to go through the above process and update the site so you need a good work­flow and process con­trol sys­tem to ensure that the changes and updates work effec­tively. The ongo­ing main­te­nance can be crip­pling in time and cost, work it out before you start.
• Beware of advice form peo­ple who localise programmes/applications It is not remotely the same thing.
• Many solu­tions actu­ally use sep­a­rate web sites for each local­i­sa­tion rather than the all in one approach. This can be coun­ter­in­tu­itive when we want to put it all into one “tech­ni­cal” pack­age. How­ever you can by sep­a­rat­ing the sites eas­ily cope with dif­fer­ent styles, and char­ac­ter sets and ltr text etc. You can stag­ger updates and man­age the work­flow more effec­tively, adding new site is far far sim­pler and it allow you to use the dif­fer­ent URL’s tha may be required and allows you to opti­mise each site for SEO

Devel­op­ment of web based sites tar­geted at the iPhone/iPod Touch has increased allow­ing for faster to mar­ket paths and avoid­ing the eso­teric niceties of the app store sub­mis­sion process. I sup­pose the trick in this devel­op­ment is to mimic the UI of the native appli­ca­tions to give the user a proper “no sur­prises” experience.

There have been a num­ber of third party kits come onto the nmar­ket based aroun JavaScript, CSS and HTML.

Quick­Con­nec­ti­Phone, iWe­bkit, WebApp​.net, iUi, jQtouch, Phone­gap, mono­touch as well as Apples Dashcode.

Well also from Apple and com­ing qui­etly onto the scene with Pas­trykit. To see this in action nav­i­gate to iPhone User Guide on your iPhone/Pod or in Safari but change the user agent in the devel­oper bar to iPhone.

There is no offi­cial release from apple so all that is in the wild at the moment is a lot of spec­u­la­tion and some reverse engi­neered assets of the CSS and JavaScript so i sup­pose we will need to wait and see if it gets released offi­cially or just stays in the Apple inter­nal ecosystem.

More infor­ma­tion and most of the assets for pas­trykit here.

From Wayne Pan.

Dis­cus­sion, ques­tions on stack­over­flow.

At a job inter­view the other day i came across the fizz buzz test in the wild for the first time. Sim­ple lit­tle thing but seems to floor people.

In case you have not seen it you out­put the num­bers 1 to 100 but replace those divis­i­ble by 3 with “Fizz” and those divis­i­ble by 5 with “Buzz”.

The real trick is less in the pro­gram­ming than in an easy way to deter­mine the div by 3 & 5 and here the trick is to remem­ber your mod­ulo arithmetic.

So sim­ply put i = 1 to 100

if i%3 == 0 print Fizz

if i%5 == 0 print Buzz

else print i