iPhone Simulator: Test Your iPhone Websites Locally

If you create websites or web apps for the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), it’s important to setup a solid local development environment for testing. Using a desktop web browser (even Safari) or one of the many available “emulators” for testing is worthless because the real thing looks different.

The only way to test properly is with Apple’s iPhone Simulator. Since you can’t just type a local file path into the simulator, I’ll show you step-by-step how to get it working (on a Mac).

What You Need

• Latest version of the iPhone SDK
• MAMP for Mac
• A text editor of your choice … I love Textmate. You won’t have to use Dashcode.

1- Install the SDK (with Xcode) and MAMP

The SDK is about 2.8GB so you should give it a while to download. Installation took about ten minutes for me.

What’s MAMP?

MAMP is a great little application that gets you up and running with the local server environment on your Mac in about five minutes. All you need to do is install it like any other application.

Read the full article here

10 reasons to make your site mobile……

Here are ten reasons why you should get a .mobi domain name and make your site mobile:
1. There are four times as many mobile phones sold as PCs. That’s 1.3 billion people who can access the internet on their mobile phones.

2. The mobile web is a new marketing channel that’s predicted to generate $150 billion by 2011.

3. According to Nielsen, mobile internet extends the audience reach of many leading internet sites by an average of 13% over PC traffic alone. That means a mobile web site is likely to increase the overall size of your audience.

4. “.mobi” means “mobile” like “.com” means “commercial” on a “computer.”

5. .mobi is a trustmark that tells your customers your site works on mobile phones and that your content is relevant to their mobile context.

6. There are more than 80,000,000 .com, .net and .org sites, but less than 1% are mobile friendly. With a .mobi name and free dotMobi guides, your site will work on any phone with any operator.

7. You can have first mover advantage in the mobile space with the domain name you want. dotMobi has registered nearly one million names but great ones are available if you secure your names now.

8. Unlike m.domain.com or domain.com/mobile, a .mobi address means a site will work on mobile because dotMobi’s free guides ensure that mobile sites adhere to industry best practices and open standards. Oh, and .mobi is the only ICANN-approved naming convention for the mobile web.

9. Mobile sites using .mobi perform better on search engines. Each domain gets only one entry in the web “zone files” that search engines use for their crawls. Your .com or .net is already used for your PC site, so you won’t get an entry for “m.site.com” or “site.net/mobile,” etc. … but you get one for .mobi.

10. Microsoft predicts most people’s first computing experience will be on a mobile. If your brand is one that people see during that formative experience, you will leave a positive, long-term impression.

Find out more at http://dotmobi.mobi or read http://blog.mobi.

Great tutorials for building your mobile site

Why do we have to care with mobile site?

Simple, because there are billion people who have access to mobile phone. So? What’re you waiting for? Go ahead and check if your website is mobile ready. You can go to ready.mobi

If you don’t want to build everything from zero and just need an instant mobile version of your site, you can check out this tutorial How to Create a Mobile Site with MoFuse.

For blogger with wordpress, you can install mobile plugin for your wordpress. Check this out WordPress Mobile Plugin.

And if you prefer to build mobile site from scratch, maybe this will help you to get started.

1. A Simple Mobile Site with CodeIgniter
2. Build a Mobile and Desktop-Friendly Application in Django in 15 Minutes
3. dotMobi Mobile Web Developer’s Guide
4. A Beginner’s Guide to Mobile Web Development
5. XHTML Mobile Website Templates
6. Character Encoding Issues and the Mobile Web
7. Best and Worst Of The Mobile Web
8. Effective Design for Multiple Screen Sizes
9. A Very Modern Mobile Switching Algorithm – Part I
10. A Very Modern Mobile Switching Algorithm – Part II
11. Mobile App Design: Getting to the Point – Part I
12. Mobile App Design: Getting to the Point – Part II
13. Mobile Web Design – Working with Color
14. 240×320, the new standard screen resolution
15. Mobile Web Design – Beyond Simple XHTML Pages I
16. Mobile Web Design – Beyond Simple XHTML Pages II
17. Mobile Web Design – Beyond Simple XHTML Pages III
18. Creating Mobile Web Sites with Google App Engine
19. Content Delivery for Mobile Devices
    
20. Tips to design your site for mobile devices
    
21. Lightweight device-detection in PHP
22. Make your Site Mobile Friendly
23. Designing for the Mobile Web
24. Making Small Devices Look Great
25. 7 usability guidelines for websites on mobile devices
26. Coding for the mobile web
27. Designing and Developing mobile web sites in the real world, part 1
28. Designing and Developing mobile web sites in the real world, part 2
29. Mobile Web Design ~ The Series