Subtitles of the Movie

We've reached the end of this tutorial but there's a lot of work left to do. You've seen what's possible to do with iPhone web apps and now it's time to get busy and produce your own killer web apps. One of the things that I'd like you to remember is what I started out right at the beginning by saying is that keep track of what it is you want to accomplish. It's easy to get started and to say oh, I want to build a web app that will do this, that will show off this and so forth but think of your users. Think of the people who are going to be holding their iPhones in their hands. Think of the people who are going to use your app for some specific reason, whether it's to play games, whether it's to meet new friends, whether it's to look up information, doesn't matter in a sense what they're doing but you have to get inside their head and figure out what they are doing and how they want to do it and then you have the tools built in to Dashcode and iPhone web apps to do what you want. We've looked at all sorts of interface tools such as lists where you can drill down. I've show you how to do a multi-level list. I've shown you how to do a grid where you have a number of items without going through scrolling lists where they all are on one page, where you can click on them and see the data right there. We've seen indicators where you can see not just information like an address and a phone number but you can dial or pinpoint on a map but where you can also look at events that are upcoming and have an indicator that shows you how likely it is that you'll be able to get a seat if you go to a specific event. And this applies to libraries, it applies to other types of gatherings, it applies to stores, it applies to all sorts of things. If you can define the information in a simple dataSource, you can display it on an iPhone web app and remember, the data sources can be XML or JSON files. They can be static files or they can be files that you access at runtime from wherever they are. They could be files placed on the net, they could be files that are created by a PHP program that are generated and returned from that program with up to the minute data. But it has to be information that's one line at a time with multiple fields within each line. That's simple database structure and if you are using something that lets you drill down through categories, you can use for example the name as a category. You could use as we've seen with national parks the region as a category. The idea is that when you get down to the final level of details, only that data needs to be loaded and you can do all sorts of analyses and mathematicians will help you discover that you can have a database of perhaps 5,000 items and if you structure it properly, you know, with perhaps ten top-level layers and ten sub-layers of each layer, you actually come down to very small amounts of data that need to be loaded. So iPhone can be very, very efficient and once it's loaded, people have it in their hand, they can see where they are, they can see where something they're looking at is, they can call, they can send text messages. So what you've done is to enable all of this to happen and you can do it for fun, you can do it to help someone out as a volunteer for a non-profit, you can do it to be paid by someone who wants an iPhone web app to supplement a website or in some cases if a small business doesn't have a website, maybe they want to start with an iPhone web app because it's easier in some ways. So it can supplement the website, it can replace a website, doesn't matter. It's a different animal and thinking about presenting information on that very small and incredibly powerful device is a great challenge and I hope that this tutorial has helped you take a look at some of the opportunities. Remember, most of what I've shown you here is Dashcode templates that have been modified and enhanced in a number of ways. The code that I've shown you here you can download from the Work Files that are either on the disk or on the website depending on how you've purchased the tutorial. So enjoy, have a good time and let's push the boundaries further as we explore iPhone web apps.