iPhone Previewer

Have you ever wondered what your website looks like on an iPhone? Are you optimizing your website for display on the iPhone and do you need to see what you are doing? Do you need to show iPhone optimized websites to others who do not have access to an iPhone? The free iPhone Previewer is the tool for you!

The iPhone Previewer is available in two versions:

• Mobile Safari Previewer for Any Website

  The Mobile Safari previewer shows you how your website will display inside the Mobile Safari browser on the iPhone. Your website is scaled down to display on the 320-pixels wide iPhone screen in the same way that Mobile Safari does this. You can zoom in and scroll just as on the iPhone itself. The scroll bars are the same size as on the iPhone so your image aspect ratio is correct.

  This is purely a visual previewer and you do not have any of the site functionality. The Mobile Safari Previewer sets the same user-agent as the iPhone. If your website has a switch to display different content if the user agent is set for the iPhone then this content will be displayed.

  In most cases the image shown in the Mobile Safari Previewer is very close to what you will see on iPhone itself. As you are aware there are rendering differences between the different web browsers. Although the previewer is not a web browser it still uses underlying web browser libraries and some pages may render differently.

• Moonshell Emulator for iPhone Optimized Websites

  The Moonshell Emulator was created to emulate websites that are already scaled to the 320 pixels wide display of the iPhone. For this reason the emulator does not scale itself. The emulator is an ideal tool to use to test your website while you are developing it if you don't have access to an iPhone all the time. The emulator is also a great tool to use when you need to show a website or iPhone app functionality to customers or co-workers on other locations. The emulator does have functionality: you can click on the buttons in your website and the next page will be shown. As with the Mobile Safari previewer the Moonshell Emulator is very close but there are some rendering differences between the Moonshell Emulator and the iPhone.

  Web sites and web applications can be submitted to Apple as a native app for inclusion in Apple's iTunes App store. This means that once you have adjusted the HTML and CSS of your site for display on a 320 pixels wide screen you have done all the work to get your site or web app into Apple's App Store. Distribution through the App Store will dramatically increase visibility and use of your site or app.

  The Moonshell Emulator shows how your website will look and function when displayed inside a so called 'UIWebView' object in Apple's Objective-C programming language. If you have Objective-C programmers on staff you can write an Objective-C shell to wrap around your website and submit it to Apple yourself. Moonshadow eCommerce can submit your app using our Moonshell software if you do not have Objective-C programmers on staff or if you do not want to deal with the tedious submission process yourself.