Hybrid iPhone Applications
Following several months in development, design, hoop-jumping and approval by Apple Igoshi has gone on sale in the Apple Appstore. We’re embarking on a simple marketing campaign using Twitter, RSS, a multilingual website and emailing of promotion codes. Thanks to all who have helped so far.
Hybrid applications
Igoshi is a stateless application using web standards technology in an Objective-C wrapper. It’s an example of what’s being called a hybrid iPhone application. Igoshi uses HTML 5, CSS and jQuery and sits in an Objective-C UIWebview. The design and development process is rather similar to normal web development with the real advantage of only being targeted at one quality browser rendering engine – webkit. Consequently it’s possible to take advantage of some natty CSS like -webkit-border-radius and -webkit-transform. jQuery takes care of the simple logic.
Simplicity
I’m not a fan of complexity and we purposely steered away from the temptation to over-engineer Igoshi. It was easy to come with whizzy things we could do and the really difficult part was paring down any complexity for the wider benefit. For example we avoided any language dependencies common in the iPhone UI elements such as UIButtons. And although we thought about using location awareness as a nice touch, we rejected it because the app was for travel and roaming charges would apply for users. These things and others would have added to the cost of development and use by the end user. Best keep it simple we thought.
Localization on a budget
We do want non-English speakers to buy Igoshi. To that end we have initiated a simple multilingual website. Currently we have French, German and English available with plans to add other main languages as we go. We have a team of very kind translators helping us with our 100 word marketing campaign. We are also adding extra languages to the iTunes Appstore page in iTunes to make the application searchable in other languages apart from English. A friend, who has experience in localization projects for Flash, warned us about in-app multilingual support and we listened.
Igoshi for sale
iPhone users can try Igoshi out from today. We think people will like the ability to order multiple beers and pizza in any locale from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe without struggling to find the right words. It’s a nice thing to have in your back pocket when you’re off having adventures. Or you could just take it on holiday.
Igoshi is available to buy from Itunes. Let us know what you think.
Tags: css, Hybrid iPhone Applications, Igoshi, iPhone, Objective-C, stateless application using web standards, Twitter
