So, Steve Jobs gives us web developers a double shot today with “One More Thing” of Safari on 3.0 on Windows and a “One Last Thing” of iPhone application development being ‘web standards’ based — just a another HTML, CSS & Ajax application.
While its absolutely great that Apple is embracing web standards in this way — great on many levels not the least of which is that it allows me as a web developer a few new avenues for work opportunities — I’m still left with a bit of a feeling of unease and anxiety.
Why? Though its great that so much can be done with these same technologies I also worry about deployment and having to target so many different specific platforms and manage different versions of the same site. Desktop browsers, WAP browsers, Ajax enhanced mobiles, Wii.. what’s next?
Now don’t jump all over me and tell me that no one is forcing me to create different targeted versions of a site or application or that the iPhone will read a standard web page just fine — I get that. Its just that in reality the need, requirements or desires to tailor user experiences to the given platform or form factor dictate that this can’t always be the case.
So while we’re deploying all the same technologies, we’re still designing, managing multiple interfaces to the applications we’re asked to build.
P.S. Is there a DOM events documentation floating around yet for the iPhone’s touchscreen gesture based interaction?
Comments
Well first, in the iPhone’s case, the Safari “whole page view” feature will be pretty useless. Can you imagine someone doing a huge forms application and expecting you to zoom in on each section to fill it out? No. So developers will hardcode for 320×480 pixels. (Actually probably more like 320×240, with doubling in the 240 axis). Now what happens in the future with a higher resolution iPhone?
As far as “knowing” it’s running on an iPhone, well of course, you’d check for the plugin that lets you access the dialer, etc. I suppose this means you’ll also have to click on a warning to allow the potentially harmful app to run on your phone, same as with ActiveXs on IE.
Re: special gesture events. No need, is there? Just return keystrokes for forward / back / up / down and perhaps special one for zoom / unzoom. Easy. Actually for scolling, nothing is needed, it just does it.
Comment by: Kevin @ Jun 11, 11:12 PM #good article. I still love itouch!
Comment by: MA Wedding Videographer @ Mar 5, 02:46 PM #