We received a comment on Basic AJAX Scroll Animation w/ YUI from Joel saying,

These javascript libraries will equal more than 80K. For an iPhone that's just way too much. Especially if it's EDGE.

Any other suggestions for slide?

I agree Joel, you have an excellent point, an iPhone loading a web page on EDGE is much slower than on 3G or WiFi. While I don't have any other suggestions for a slide technique, as a developer I do my best to keep the load times to a minimum, and in all reality the user should only have to load your site once. After the initial load, no more data should be transmitted.

Let's keep this simple; an iPhone application should be "small, lightweight, and portable." Sound familiar? Yeah, that's exactly how Apple describes the iPhone. So we're not stretching far away from the overall goal of the iPhone. "At the touch of a finger." I believe was one of the many slogans used during the initial iPhone ramp-up. We should develop our web applications with the same intent.

While normally loading these AJAX libraries on mobile devices is tedious and increases the load time, I personally have no problem loading YUI libraries on our development iPhone. The way I see it, users of the iPhone expect a slight delay when loading a web page, much like I expected it on my old SideKick. However, when developing these iPhone applications, if you load all your content, whether visible or not to the user, then make AJAX animation calls to bring the content to the iPhone's screen when needed, the overall user model will not take a hit and it will be an experience of the lifetime.

To summarize:

• Keep AJAX Libraries to a minimum.


• Limit the number of pages to load.


• Define a user model that relates to the user.

iPhone web applications rely on solid user models. Build a good one, and you won't have any issues with my methods.

// Jay, aka W3prodigy

With the iPhone SDK out, and iPhone applications moving away from the web, I never thought I'd post here again. Lucky for you, we received an awesome question from Dan in the UK about Animation on the iPhone. Yay Dan!

Hey iPhonemind.com guys,

I was wondering if you could help me with a quick question I have pondering about in my mind relating to the wonderful invention called iPhone. I'm a multimedia student at Stafford College in the UK and having learnt the "designer" side of computing fancied turning to the dark side and have a go at programming. I've done bits of programming here and there before and know Action-script pretty well etc, but since the iPhone currently doesn't support flash yet here is where my question lies.
I want to create an interactive application where the user taps the screen and random squiggles or images will pop up to create a sort of abstract image animation, I've been looking on Apple's Developer website and had a look through most content on their but to no avail I'm still not sure on what the right sort of API's or frameworks to use. The UIKit would be a major player in the making of it but I'm not sure what else to read up on, just hoping someone out there might be able to point out roughly what I should be looking for?
The application is going to include shapes, colours, images, video maybe, sound hopefully, vector graphics and maybe a bit of text, the whole thing is going to be totally random for a college project and have no real purpose other than being one of them cool things you show your mates.

Your website is great by the way, loads of useful tips and tricks that I will be having a tinker with after I've figured all this out.

Many Thanks,

Dan

Well Dan, That's an excellent question! Since we'll never truly know when Flash will become available on the iPhone, I'm very glad you asked. We've all seen ways to animate a web page through the use of AJAX [cough]dhtml[/cough], including my post on creating a Basic AJAX Scroll Animation w/ YUI that was featured on the YUI developers blog.

As of right now, AJAX is the way to go for animation on the web. Here's a few of my favorites...

• Yahoo! UI Library: Animation - A little more advanced, but one of my favorites.


• Script.Aculo.Us - Simple to implement, a little more restricted.


• jQuery - Takes time to learn, but definitely worth the effort.


• MooTools - This one seems to be a popular one, maybe not the best for the iPhone, but definitely fun to work with.

What I suggest is that you sketch out your idea, step by step, then determine from the libraries listed above which would work best for you. JavaScript is relatively simple, and with your ActionScript experience it should be a quick run-through for you. Try to stick to one library to reduce load times. While the iPhone is an amazing device, the technology it runs on (EDGE) isn't completely up to speed for large applications.

I hope this helps you out Dan, I look forward to answering more questions like this. If you have a question about iPhone development, hit us up at ask [at] iphoneminds.com.

// Jay, aka W3prodigy

Labels: actionscript, ajax, animation, flash, iphone development, uikit, yui