Question

I’d like to be able to make some simple desktop apps using web technology. I can easily open up XCode, bundle a web view with my HTML (or just pointing to a web site?)

But can I remove the cross domain restrictions for XHR? It seems like you should be able to for desktop apps. It’s not like if I wrote it in Objective-C it’s insecure to access any domain.

How do you do it? Or what’s the best framework/environment to make native wrappers for OS X that would let me do this automatically?

Answer 1

You should look at the excellent PhoneGap framework: http://phonegap.com/. It is basically a wrapper around a web view that exposes a nice API so that you an integrate with the camera and other native features. It is also cross-platform, so you could have the same app on Android, for example, with minimal additional code.

As for getting around cross-domain restriction, you can white-list URLs in the PhoneGap .plist file. More details on that available here: Domain Whitelist Guide.

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For OS X development, this question and its answers give a few options that might help you: Phonegap like platform for Mac App Store?.

As for creating an interface with a native look and feel, jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch are two popular web technology frameworks for mobile devices, and for the most part they work well for desktop applications too. I’ve worked on some jQuery Mobile projects that were designed as web apps for desktops, but also worked as mobile web apps through responsive web design tools like media queries.