In the NYC Learning Network projects, we've been doing a lot recently with using a webapp on an iPhone (here's our first stab at a search engine using Eric Sanderson's brilliant Mannahatta data). There's all kinds of ways to do this (we're most excited by PhoneGap). For me, as a Ubuntu Linux user, this is pretty great--I can help develop large pieces of the application without dealing with Apple and its locked-down way of doing things. There's just one problem--I really need to see how it works with WebKit, the engine behind Safari and other browsers.

Fortunately, there's an open-source hack for everything open source. A friend sent me a somewhat older link on how to do this, which encouraged me that this was at least possible. After a bit of digging, I found instructions on how to make it work with Intrepid.

Getting it to run on Jaunty, as of WebKit revision 45311, required a few extra dependencies. The apt-get command I used was this:


sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool bison flex gperf libicu-dev libxslt-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libsqlite3-dev libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev libglibmm-2.4-dev libgtk2.0-dev build-essential libxt-dev gtk-doc-tools libenchant-dev libgail-dev libsoup2.4-dev


which is just four extra packages beyond what the Intrepid directions asked for. Then, I just had to do:


./autogen.sh

make

and then, to run WebKit:


./Programs/GtkLauncher


The only difference was that I didn't seem to need to add in a customized configure command, per the Intrepid directions--all the SVG stuff was enabled.

Anyway, I'm excited to have the guts of Safari running on my work machines. And I'm really excited to see where our Mannahatta work will go, so stay tuned for that.