[Trey]

Hello, I have download Mobione iphone dev and emu for some iTouch web development. I have done several simple web projects over the last 15 years and I have read Jonathan Stark’s book iPhone Apps with HTML. I know enough to be dangerous but I’m sure others know much more than me. I only looked at the iPhone emu, not the Palm.

These are my comments, feel free to do with as needed (including ignoring).

I would vote for another emulator, the iPad.

The iPhone emu is really good. After developing on the emulator, my website showed up as planned. However, I did have a few quirks that has to do with the onscreen keyboard. On the emu, I couldn’t find the graphical Qwerty keyboard that comes up on the iTouch/iPhone. I have a <input type=”text”> where I capture the enter key. It turns out, the “Go” key returns ASCII 10 rather than 13 for the enter key. Bottom line, my site worked on the emu but not the real iTouch because I needed to capture the “Go” return key (ASCII 10) but the computer keyboard enter key is ASCII 13 (make sense?). It would be nice to have the Qwerty keyboard come up on the emu for testing just like the actual device.

The help and tutorials link on the software menu go to a page “Coming soon…”. I suggest in the mean time to put the short video you have at this web site.

My personal preference: I don’t like the visual design tools. The one here is very good but the auto coders usually generate code that isn’t human readable. Since I always have to edit somewhere where the Mobione test center isn’t available, I end up editing the .html, .css, etc files by hand. I would prefer a paradigm like TexShop for the Mac. Basically, I would like a split screen solution that has a tabbed editor of the native html, css files on one half the screen and the test emu on the other half (like the visual designer setup). When I save the html, css code, it would auto load into the emu to see my work. I am the type that knows the html, css, javascript stuff and prefer to code it by hand. I understand the visual tool really helps the new users and advanced users for dev’ing up quick concepts. My current setup is I use PSPad to edit my html, save it, then do a reload on the emu.

I’m not sure how to integrate jQTouch with the visual tool. I assume that to integrate, I hand edit the auto gen’ed html.

Just my thoughts so far.

[wayne]

Thanks Trey,

Your feedback is very helpful as we move forward. We have intentionally held off on emulating the virtual keyboard feature in order to get a few other things in place. Your scenario for a GO button makes good sense. We will be reevaluating this feature w.r.t. a few other features on the roadmap.

The long range vision of the Design Center is to provide a full round trip design-coding experience. But it may not be so simple. As you can tell MobiOne currently only forward engineers from design to code. Your sync’ed design-code editor is something we have previously developed in our MyEclipse product. But a hold-up for bringing this to MobiOne directly is that we have been considering a loose design-code model such that code generation is not restricted to HTML5. For example we plan to open up the code-gen model to enable DOM->your-favorite-code translators. Given that, there will be no correspondence between design elements and their code. So we have a few things to think through as we expand beyond mock-up to full developer support.

Wayne
Genuitec Mobile Team

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