Dashcode for iPhone web development

Interestingly Apple is applying the Dashcode IDE to iPhone web development. Although Dashcode was designed for makeing Dashboard widgets, this makes a lot of sense - I've written before how similar mobile and widget development is.

The nice thing about Dashcode is that you can get a working prototype going quickly. And it has lots of juicy iPhonish assets right out of the box - saving considerable Photoshop time.

The naughty thing about Dashcode is that it's just not a very good IDE, and the code it generates is rather awful, especially for mobile deployment. I mean, if you want to write a mobile app that degrades to a non-Javascript version, you are essentially out of luck. Additionally, the pages it creates are really heavy, and feature lots of inline JavaScript (which can't be cached.)

Granted, I just discovered Dashcode yesterday, but so far it looks like I'll just be pulling assets out of it and using my old stand by tools.

(Sorry about the lack of hyperlinks - feeling a bit lazy. Use Google!)

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