If you’ve got a Mac, making iPhone apps is easy, but if not, you’re out of luck. Kind of. Thanks to the wonders of HTML5, you can create a full offline application using just web pages, and actually install it on any iPhone, iPod touch or iPad’s home screen just like any other app.

Rather than put together a lengthy tutorial, I though it would be better to build a basic sample application that makes use of all of the standard WebClip features on the iPhone.

This sample application is a single-page simple recreation of the iPhone settings app.  It demonstrates enabling WebClip app mode, settings the status bar mode, configuring an icon, enabling a custom start-up image, correcting screen scaling, imageless top bar gradients, and list views.

Apple has a nice guide on the iOS Developer Library to using the standard WebClip features.  HTML 5 Rocks has a good guide on Application Caching (offline mode).

Download the WebClip Demo App

View on your device at alanaktion.com/webclipdemo