12 Great Tips for iPhone Web Development

I just ran across this great article on SitePoint by Stoyan Stefanov, a Yahoo engineer and author of Object-Oriented JavaScript. It's called iPhone Development: 12 Tips To Get You Started. Since SitePoint is all about web development, they left the Web out of iPhone Development, but it's a great article nonetheless.

Stoyan covers just about everything you might want to do with HTML, CSS and JavaScript to customize your site for the small screen:

1. use the iPhone Simulator and SDK documentation
2. add the correct CSS @media declaration
3. set the viewport meta tag
4. handle orientation changes with JavaScript
5. set orientation specific styles
6. hide the Mobile Safari toolbar
7. use CSS to create rounded corners
8. handle touch events
9. handle gestures
10. add links to make voice calls and send text messages
11. add an app icon
12. debug using JavaScript and Xcode

Unfortunately he doesn't cover anything specific to the iPad—the article is actually from April 2009. Still, whether you want to optimize your site for iPhone and iPod touch users or need to show some custom web content in a UIWebView in your native app, just about everything you need to know is summarized right here. Check it out!