I just put together my first simple website for my new toy – my iPhone. It is a simple iPhone-specific interface for Yelp, my favorite source for restaurant and other local reviews. They have a ton of reviews for just about every local restaurant so I find myself using it all the time to find new restaurants to go to or to find more info about restaurants I already know. I could access the website just fine already on my phone, but it was a bit crowded and difficult to navigate on a small screen, so I decided it take this as a challenge to build my first iPhone web interface.

And yes, I’m probably about the 58th person to build a Yelp interface for the iPhone, but I was looking for something I’d actually use and learn from!

Yelp provides a REST search API that allows you to pass in a location and a search term and they return a JSON object with a list of matching businesses, their ratings, and the business info. I used the Zend Framework and the Prototype JavaScript library to put it together. I could have done a pure JavaScript implementation using script hacks, but figured it’d be better to have the PHP code serve as a basic proxy for the Yelp web service.

Try it out!