Apple Writes Entire Framework to Build Native-Like iPad WebApps

Similar to what they did for the iPhone, Apple has written an entire framework to build native-like webapps for the iPad.

Done21 reports that the iPad User Guide features a split view which includes scrolling panes that can be manipulated with a single finger, complete with the signature iPhone OS “scroll bars” and elastic transitions.

After extracting the javascript, Done21 confirmed that Apple was manually reading the touch events, calculating the inertia of the scrolling, and manually drawing the scroll bars.


The framework weighes in at 4,300 lines of code and every class and constant is prefixed with the letters 'AD' for example: ADTabBarController, ADScrollPane, ADViewController, ADView, ADToolbar, etc. It's contained in a file called AdLib-ug-ipad.js, so Done21 has dubbed it AdLib for now.

It would be great if Apple documented and made this framework public; however, they have not done so with the iPhone one.

Maybe we'll hear something tomorrow...