Using Google Forms to create a simple iPhone app
To help manage and plan the cycling clothes I need to wear through the Canberra winter, I decided to create an iPhone app. For a lot of reasons I decided to use HTML5 and some trickery rather than create a native app.
The idea of the app is to record basic weather into, what I wore, and how hot or cold I was. I planned to look into HTML5 offline data storage etc, but realised that Google Forms would do most of the work for me, if I was happy to live without offline capability.
Forms is so simple it's not worth explaining. Once you've set a form up, it gives you a URL to access it from, and even the iframe code to embed it into an HTML page. And that's just what I did. Below is the code.
You can seen I'm using a viewport and some Apple-specific meta tags. These allow you to 'install' the app by pressing the "+" button in Safari and choosing " Add to Home screen". You then get the icon you specified in the meta tag, which the iPhone kindly rounds and beautifies for you.
When you launch the app, it opens in it's own window, rather than in Safari. There's no address bar or browser navigation: it just looks like an app.
