iPhoney – Useful Tool For Web Developers
No, this is NOT the same as iPhony, the Palm OS app for Treo that emulates the iPhone look and feel – this is iPhoney, a “pixel-accurate web browsing environment” to help web developers design web sites for the iPhone. And in case you’re wondering, it’s also not a full-featured iPhone emulator, so you can’t make phone calls with it.
Simply put, iPhoney is an iPhone Browser Emulator – it uses the Safari rendering engine to give you a canvas on which to test the visual quality of your web site designs. iPhoney allows you to zoom in and out, rotate the view, simulate the iPhone User Agent (to test browser redirection scripts), and turn off plug-ins not currently supported by the real iPhone (flash, javascript, etc).
While iPhoney still has a few limitations, it’s open-source, and developers are encouraged to participate in making it even better and more useful (maybe even some actual Apple iPhone developers will pitch in? C’mon, it’s in Apple’s best interest to make the iPhone as useful as possible, and this tool will certainly help!).
iPhoney currently requires Mac OS X 10.4.7 or later, but hopefully a PC version will come along soon.
For more information or to download iPhoney, visit MarketCircle.com/iphoney/ or if you’re a developer and would like to contribute to this project, visit the SourceForge iPhoney Project page.
Another useful link for web site designers is Apple’s iPhone Web Development Guidelines.