Together with the launch of my new homepage I submitted my first iPhone App today. The app was the number one reason to launch bytestrøm as soon as possible: An app will be rejected if it has a link to a non-existing website in it (ars technica App Store Lessons).

Tickers is a handy little app, which lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch to send messages as a marquee. For more info look here: Ticker Infopage

Tickers is my first iPhone application and I decided to use web technology to build it. It's using the open source framework phonegap with some slight modifications to wrap the HTML/CSS/JS into a native app. Tickers was an experiment, if it is possible to create a totally native looking app based on web technology. I used Dashcode as basis and created some own widgets (e.g. the slider).

In summary: It is possible to create a native looking and acting app with web technologies, but it is much more work than using Cocoa, because you have to build all the standard widgets and logic yourself. Dashcode is not much help there, as the provided widgets are too limited and too heavy at the same time.

There are two consequences: I will start learning writing native apps with Cocoa and Objective-C and I will start a new wiki project to collect many snippets and assets needed to build a web based iPhone app.