Are you doing iPhone development on a Mac? Do you use Dreamweaver as your IDE? If your answer to both questions is ‘yes,’ then try this simple tip.

The iPhone SDK has an iPhone simulator that is, effectively, a fully functioning, pixel-perfect iPhone on your Mac. But because it’s an app on your Mac, it is also just another browser on your system. So treating it as such in Dreamweaver is a snap.

First, download and install the free iPhone SDK from Apple’s iPhone Development Center. Since you are not releasing apps through the App Store, you do not need to pay to be a part of the Application Developer Program.  You just need a free developer account on Apple’s site.

Once you download and install the SDK, open up Dreamweaver.

1. Go File > Preferences > Preview in Browser
2. Click the “plus” button to add a new browser to your list
3. Navigate to /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications/
4. Select the iPhone Simulator.app
5. Click Ok, and then close out your preferences
6. Now the iPhone Simulator is in your list of browsers

There’s one quirk. The iPhone Simulator must be running in order for it to accept browser pages from Dreamweaver, so if you trigger it from Dreamwever and all you see is the iPhone’s Home Screen, then do it again in Dreamweaver.  The second time, the page should come up in the iPhone’s browser.

Ages and ages ago when I started coding for the web, I read somewhere that it was more secure to keep the file containing your password and sensitive variables outside of the public web root. I’ve always taken this as law, and I’ve jumped through all kinds of hoops to structure my sites and framework in this manner.

But is it necessary? I’d love your thoughts on the matter.

For Dreamweaver users, this is important for two reasons: 1) the Connections folder is placed automatically in your site definition’s file root, and 2) Dreamweaver freaks out and breaks in all kinds of new and interesting ways when the file root and the public web root are not the same.

If I’m jumping through all of these hoops unnecessarily, I’d like to do something about it and stop banging my head against a wall.

To clarify what I mean, let’s take a linux install where the home directory is “/var/www”, and the public web is served from “/var/www/html”. In this case, you’d set the Dreamweaver file root to “/var/www”. Thus, the Connections folder is kept outside the public web root. In theory, there’s no way this folder could be hacked through human/webmin error (forgetting to turn off apache indexing, for instance), or through some other means.

So my question to you, my loyal readers, is whether this is necessary. What are the implications to keeping the Connections folder inside the public web root? Do you consider this to be dangerous, or am I worrying unnecessarily?

Thoughts? Discuss.

Adobe’s Spry Framework has been revved to v1.6. Get the Spry Updater for Dreamweaver CS3 from the Adobe Labs site.

I was using The Google to find a little more lorem ipsum text than my standard 4 paragraphs when I came across Lorips.com.

http://www.lorips.com/

Very clever.