iPhone “Simulator” released for Windows

iPhone development is typically a Mac OS X only proposition so, naturally, Apple hasn’t released an iPhone simulator for other platforms, such as Windows.

iPhone Simulator

It dawned on developer Shaun Sullivan, however, that Webkit is both available on Windows (within Safari) and that it can render iPhone-specific content well.. so why not combine the two into an iPhone simulator that can display iPhone apps as they would be seen on the device.

Shaun’s iPhone Simulator for Windows is called iBBDemo and you can get it here: http://labs.blackbaud.com/NetCommunity/article?artid=662

A screencast of the program in action is here:
http://labs.blackbaud.com/ibbdemo/ibbdemo.html

This could be a huge and important app in the iPhone’s history.

And why is that, you ask? Well, it gives iPhone webapp developers stuck on Windows a pretty useful tool and if you’re a regular iPhone app developer who has to give a presentation with only a Windows computer to spare, this could be a life saver.

As a “no frills, weekend project” as the developer puts it, it’s pretty simple (no gestures, zoom, scrollbars, shrink to fit..) but perhaps it’ll pave the way for something even better to be developed and perhaps even allow iPhone development on Windows at some point, which would cause the market to explode, no doubt.

Posted on Feb 21st, 2009 by Philip King in iPhone News | 9 Comments

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9 Comments to “iPhone “Simulator” released for Windows”

  1. on 26 Feb 2009 at 3:20 pm1TechMata

    Thanks for the post! This is great since I don’t have a mac! Cheers! ^_^

  2. on 19 Mar 2009 at 8:37 am2HSP

    Great!
    Thanks a lot !
    For many people like me who has not Mac,
    Its a blessing!

  3. on 22 Jul 2009 at 7:41 pm3Ed

    Anyone had luck with this simulator? I get “Run-time error 429: ActiveX component can’t create object. Perhpas this is becuase I have safari 4.0?

  4. on 28 Jul 2009 at 6:58 am4Tom Taylor

    I had the same problem with Safari 4.0 on both WinXP and Vista. Once I uninstalled v4.0, downloaded v3.2.3 from http://www.filehippo.com/download_safari/5638/ and installed on my WinXP SP3 computer, it worked fine.

  5. on 03 Aug 2009 at 10:12 pm5Jon

    This is nice to use as a demo tool for how sites look on the iPhone.

    Only problem I have is that I can’t load an https:// site. He must have added smarts that looks if the starting URL has a “http://” and prepends if not. Unfortunately that makes the URL “http://https://my.url.com”

    It does this whether you add it as a bookmark or just type it on the URL line.

  6. on 04 Aug 2009 at 3:10 pm6Andrew G

    Cool idea. Good for visualization. Unfortunately, some sites don’t render exactly the same in this as they do on an actual iPhone or the iPhone Simulator, so it’s not great for QA testing. There’s no guarantee the site you’re developing and previewing is going to look right until you try it on the actual iPhone.

  7. on 25 Sep 2009 at 9:08 am7Tom

    This is a cool tool. I miss the function to rotate the iPhone (90°), that would be a great Feature!

  8. on 17 Nov 2009 at 2:41 pm8Shameem

    Hi,

    How can we install our own application ?

  9. on 29 Aug 2010 at 9:10 pm9Bed

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