Professional iPhone™ and iPod® touch Programming: Building Applications for Mobile Safari™

Chapter 7. Integrating with iPhone Services

One of the most intriguing ideas when creating a Web 2.0 application for iPhone is integrating the application with core mobile services, such as dialing phone numbers or sending e-mails. After all, once you break those inside the browser barriers, the application becomes more than just a Web app and extends its functionality across the mobile device.

However, iPhone service integration is a mixed bag; it's a "good news, bad news" situation. On the upside, perhaps the three most important mobile functions (Phone, Mail, and Google Maps) are accessible to the developer. On the downside, there are no means of tapping into other core services, such as SMS messaging, Calendar, Address Book, Camera, Clock, iPod, and Settings.

In order to demonstrate the integration with iPhone services, you'll be working with a sample application called iProspector, which is a mocked up contact management system that emulates the iPhone Contact UI (see Figure 7-1). To create the UI, you will be starting with Joe Hewitt's iUI framework, which is discussed fully in Chapter 3. However, because it does not provide support for the specific controls needed for the Contact UI, this chapter will show you how to extend iUI as service integration is discussed.

Because iPod touch does not provide support for Phone and Mail services, any iPhone-specific integration should degrade gracefully when running on iPod touch.

Figure 7.1. Contact UI

Preparing the iProspector Application ...