With all these new potential iPhone users out there, I have started playing with the idea of making our websites iPhone-compliant. An early attempt can be seen here, but you will need an iPhone to enjoy the full experience. Alternatively, you can use a great little iPhone browser emulator called iPhoney. You can also download the alpha version of my iPhone compatible RapidWeaver theme.

For those of you who are without iPhone and unable to use the Mac-only iPhoney, here’s a summary of what I’ve done.

Creating an iPhone compatible RapidWeaver theme

Before creating a special handheld version of your site by detecting the iPhone’s browser user agent you may already want to play around with your site’s style sheets. With this in mind I have created a very simple RapidWeaver theme that meets the following requirements:

• it works both in landscape and portrait mode;
• focus on readability on the iPhone’s small but high resolution screen ;
• very light to allow reasonable download times for iPhone access over the EDGE network;
• clear link highlighting having finger browsing in mind;
• very quick javascript runtime; and
• clear separation between HTML and CSS.

My iPhone theme is still very much in its infancy and is only meant as a test before rolling out iPhone compliant versions of our RapidWeaver and Wordpress websites. Do not expect iPhone pictures or demos here, the focus is on development of websites versions that can be easily read on the iPhone’s web browser. The RapidWeaver iPhone theme is still in a pre-alpha stage and is made available for testing purposes only. Not that I imagine that anyone would use this very simple theme for production purposes, but be warned that this is certainly not ready for prime time yet. Use at your own risk. You can get it from the download page and adapt it to your needs by following the very few publicly available guidelines on web development for the iPhone.

Developing websites that are compatible with the iPhone

There are only very few resources available at this time, but here are some you may find useful:

• Google iPhoneWebDev Group - discussion group
• BarCamp’s iPhoneDevCamp - devcamp organized on July 6-8
• AddFone - Search Engine/Directory for iPhone Apps
• iPhoney - a nifty iPhone browser emulator for the Mac
• Notes from WWDC 2007: Developing Web Sites for iPhone
• iPhone fan club - hosts a growing list of apps

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[...] website theme done right I will be putting my iPhone website theme development efforts on hold for the time being, as RapidWeaver just released a theme done right. [...]

Thanks for the list of resources! Not much available yet when it comes to developing for the iPhone.

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Thanks for the list of resources!