Submitted by Apple posted on their developer website guidelines with instructions on optimising web-applications for the iPhone. “Developers can create Web 2.0 applications that look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and provide seamless integration with iPhone applications and services including making a phone call, sending an email, and displaying a location in Google Maps. Third-party applications created using web standards can extend iPhone’s capabilities without compromising its reliability or security.”
“Developers can create Web 2.0 applications that look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone”
Can I write a webapp to capture a picture from the built in camera? No. Can I write a webapp that sits on the home screen, instead of as a bookmark in Safari (with the safari chrome around the screen instead of full screen)? No.
Stop calling these websites, apps. Dynamic websites with server side code have existed for over 10 years now. Having a database hooked up to a web page was not called an App then, and still isn’t now.
The whole “without compromising reliability or security” is such a farce. There are ways to crash Safari with HTML, and web pages can easily be as insecure as they want to be.
I hate that developers are being treated like second class citizens, and that you have to be in the cool-club and paying into Apple’s back pocket to develop a real app *cough*EAiPodGames*cough*
edit: Oh, and no file uploading, Apple don’t even trust us to use competitors websites and services, like Flickr and a million other services. What good is a webbrowser if you can neither download (and save) or upload anything? I thought the whole point of the World Wide Web was that it is supposed to be read / write >:[
Edited 2007-07-04 09:20
iTunes syncs only IE and Safari bookmarks for iPhones, not Firefox, Opera, SeaMonkey or anything else that Apple could freely download to find out where the bookmarks are stored.
Looks like Apple’s two-browser-only view of the Internet is underway.
(edit: 1337’th comment
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Edited 2007-07-04 11:48
It is significant extra work for Apple to support third party software. Every time Mozilla/Opera choose to change how/where their bookmarks are stored Apple would need to update their code.
It isn’t even like Firefox users are missing out, as they can (relatively) easily import their bookmarks to IE and they will then sync anyway.
This also doesn’t affect a lot of us, who use sites like del.icio.us – in fact you could get around this problem by importing your current bookmarks into del.icio.us and accessing them from their.
@Kroc
> Oh, and no file uploading, Apple don’t even trust us to use competitors websites and services, like Flickr and a million other services
Not an answer or a criticism to you comment at all. Just an unrelated hint, that does not diminish at all the validity of your comment: Flickr accepts uploading through e-mailing.
I agree with everything you said, and I hope they simply “didn’t have time” to finish a proper SDK, rather than it being purposely locked down. As for the “no file uploading”, I think this has to do with the fact that the iPhone doesn’t have a user-accessible file system, or at least no interface for it. Of course, that shouldn’t prevent uploading pictures from the picture library, but perhaps they are working on a common interface for it?
On thing that really bothers me is not so much that I can’t access the camera or the phone part from a web app, but that I can’t access the multi-touch capabilities! There where so many interface interaction things I wanted to test on my own apps, taking advantage of it…
Now I know I’m being a bit facetious, but shouldn’t Apple create devices and software that complies with (or at least tries to work within) existing standards instead of laying out their own?
This is isn’t entirely fair, though. There’s a difference between championing your own new standard and offering development guidelines for ‘optimal user experience’.
I am not happy with that level of detail on the document. For example, the OSNews mobile page does not render correctly because “100% width” is interpreted as 960 pixels instead of 320: http://eugenia.blogsome.com/2007/07/01/iphones-web-browser/
If I do what the tutorial suggests:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width = 320″ />
what happens when the user goes into landscape mode? Does the page flows to 480px wide (as it should), or it stays “locked” to 320px? This is not discussed, and it’s crucial for me, and it’s a matter that the desktop Safari version won’t help me test.
Well, obvivously if you set your page to width=320 then width=100% essentially means 320. Likewise, if you set it to 400-something, then it will scroll in portrait mode. I don’t think it supports dynamic scaling at all!
So accept that it’s a full web browser and stop serving the mobile version to iPhones. If I had an iPhone and was served a mobile version of OSNews, I would be mighty angry.
I do not agree with you. No matter what Apple says, the resolution of the screen is 320×480 and OSNews (and most sites) *are* designed for 800×600 screens. So, the mobile version (which is what it’s currently been served btw) *is* the best solution to avoid zooming needlessly. You have to zoom-and-pan to use the full version of osnews and must finger-scroll ALL the time in order to read a news item. I would agree with you if our mobile version was the same as the other sites’ mobile versions, but it’s not. It almost a full-featured version with a real design. So, Alex, don’t try to second guess me — not at this matter anyway. After we fixed the problem as described in my blog, the current serving is the best solution.
Holy crap! What a bunch of whiney babies! Pick up your ball and run on home now. If you don’t like the rules, just don’t play.
“what happens when the user goes into landscape mode? Does the page flows to 480px wide (as it should), or it stays “locked” to 320px? This is not discussed, and it’s crucial for me, and it’s a matter that the desktop Safari version won’t help me test.”
Why not just give it a try. I’m sure some friendly iPhone owners would let you know how it looks.
What the hell are you talking about? If the tutorial does not explicitly explains things how is that my fault as a web developer?
I don’t have an iPhone and I won’t be getting any (not locked anyway). Since I posted the above comment I had someone testing my NEW changes to the mobile version of osnews and they said that it now works better, but the point is, I should not be needing favors by others and it should have been specified for me in the tutorials.
“Holy crap! What a bunch of whiney babies! Pick up your ball and run on home now. If you don’t like the rules, just don’t play. ”
Oh dear, not another iProduct guy. Probably posted that from the Apple store no less.
I don’t know if the tutorial has been updated since you posted Eugenia, but it does specifically address the problem you mention.
From the article:
“For example, if you set the scale to 1.0, Safari assumes the width is 320 pixels in portrait and 480 pixels in landscape mode.”
Also, with [meta name=”viewport” content=”width = 320″ /]:
“This renders the web application with a scale of 1.0 and doesn’t change the layout when you switch to landscape mode.”
iPhone is a revolutionary new mobile phone that allows you to make a call by simply pointing your finger at a name or number in your address book, a favorites list, or a call log
http://www.mp4-converter.net/iphone-converter/iphone-video-converter/