On Oct 25, 2:22 pm, anmldr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have developed apps for Palm and now Windows Mobile devices for
> about 7 years. I don't have an iPhone yet (I will this weekend) but I
> would like to make some of my commercial eBooks available for iPhone
> users.
>
> I develop on Windows. Is there a step-by-step tutorial for what I
> need to use to develop for the iPhone? I have downloaded
> Safari303BetaSetup.exe
> WebKit-SVN-r26759.zip
> But, I am stuck. I am NOT an accomplished developer. What else do I
> need? Perhaps I am mistaked even about what I have downloaded.
>
> Many of my eBooks are already in a simple HTML format.
You should have no problems at all in serving them to iPhone.
> My concerns though are that I would like to be able to offer say 1
> year subscription to my customers. How do you limit the use to just
> the one customer?
Via a web medium, that is impossible unless you have some kind of
biometric device that can guarantee that the person accessing your
site is the same person who registered. Otherwise, you can only hope
that people do not share their usernames and passwords.
> Is there a way to check a device ID for instance?
Without user assistance and using only HTML and javascript: no.
> Not just password protect the site because someone could "give" their
> user name and password to all of their friends and only pay for one
> subscription.
There is no mechanism within web standards to identify a unique device
or person. It is not an issue unique to iPhone (or any other
platform). It is a very deliberate strategy of web standards to
ensure that access to information is as abstracted from the technology
as possible. Even the ECMAScript Language specification does not
specify the implementation, only what should happen.
> I would also like to limit access to just iPhone users
Absolutely impossible using HTML and javascript, which is all you have
available for iPhone development. Of course Apple may release a more
functional application development environment in February 2008 that
provides such capability, but I wouldn't count on it. It goes against
one of the fundamental tenants of web development to restrict access
to information to particular devices or platforms.
> since I already
> have the apps or eBooks available for sale for Palm or Pocket PC
> (Windows Mobile) devices.
Unless those apps are based solely on HTML and javascript, they are
absolutely irrelevant to iPhone I'm afraid.
> I really do not want to cater to desktop
> computer web access primarily because some of these eBooks are already
> for sale for Windows desktop by the publishers (print version).
Then you are out of luck, there is absolutely no way to reliably tell
what kind of device is accessing your site. None.
> I am
> the developer for handheld versions of these eBooks. I would be going
> beyond my contract if people had access through their desktop.
Then you can't use an application that is restricted to only HTML and
javascript web standards, which is all that iPhone has available right
now.
> Some of the human medical eBook developers are now making their eBooks
> available for the iPhone, and I would like to do something similar for
> veterinarians.
A good place to start would be to let us know how they are doing
that. Do you have any links? What technologies are they using?
--
Rob
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