Pathfinder Announces Noel Rappin’s Newest Installment of “Developing iPhone Applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse,” is Now Available on IBM’s developerWorks Site

(Chicago, IL) Pathfinder, a leading software development and user experience design firm, announced the second in a series of articles: ‘Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse, Part 2: Displaying iPhone content to the client’ by Pathfinder’s Noel Rappin is now available at IBM’s developerWorks site.

“Due to the iPhone’s popularity, Mobile Safari has quickly become the most commonly used mobile web browser in the United States, and it’s market share continues to increase”, stated Noel Rappin, author of ‘Professional Ruby on Rails’ and Pathfinder’s Vice President of Rails Development. “Many developers are choosing to redesign their sites to take advantage of the unique features and user model provided by the iPhone and iPod touch.”

‘Part 2: Displaying iPhone content to the client’ concentrates on display site navigation using a list look and feel that matches iPhone user expectations and will load quickly even under slower Edge network conditions.

“iPhone Web development cannot be a game of seeing how much you can cram on the screen at once”, said Rappin “the goal of iPhone Web development is a clean, simple UI that allows mobile users to get to the features that are most important”.

The articles are designed to help developers leverage Mobile Safari’s new paradigm for web browsing that utilizes the iPhone’s popular touch screen display along with new styles of interactions that include tap, pinch and zoom for bringing the content into view. Included are several examples, source code, and resources needed to build dynamic Ruby on Rails applications.

IBM developerWorks is a premier technical resource for software developers, providing a wide range of tools, code, and education on a wide array of web-based technologies.

Noel Rappin is a Ruby on Rails expert and has authored “Professional Ruby on Rails”. He builds Rails applications for a variety of Pathfinder clients and is a regular contributor to the Agile Ajax blog. Noel also participates in open source projects and has recently created the Rails-iUI plug-in which is a Rails wrapper that leverages the iUI toolkit for building iPhone enabled web applications.

“While developing my latest mobile web application with iUI, I realized I was building up a library, so I converted everything to a Rails plug-in,” stated Rappin. “Open source is all about sharing what you have learned and making contributions to support the community.”

Currently the plug-in focuses on automating common tasks and streamlining development. Future enhancements include improvements in documentation, testing and leveraging the Rails framework to enhance interactions, especially related to history and back behavior.

For more detailed information or to download the plug-in, visit: Rails Plug-in for the iPhone

About Pathfinder Development

Pathfinder is a consulting firm specializing in software development and user experience design. Pathfinder delivers applications that are easy to use, providing clients with the technology to enable business breakthroughs and competitive advantage. Pathfinder’s clients range from early stage start-ups to Fortune 5 companies across a wide array of industries, including energy, health care, insurance, financial services, media and publishing. For more information contact Eleanor Taylor at 312-372-1058, email to etaylor@pathf.com, or visit http://www.pathf.com.