So far I know that Flash is not supported. That’s good for us.
I haven’t been able to determine with certainty whether or not cookies
are supported. That’s important.
I’m assuming that the version of Safari that runs on iPhone supports
Javascript, but you know what they say about assumptions.
Do we know anything about the “user agent” aspects of iPhone yet (i.e. a
way to detect that this is your client)? Hopefully just
“request.env[‘HTTP_USER_AGENT’] =~ /iPhone/” will catch it, but who
knows until Friday night.
Any guesses as to whether or not we’ll be able to figure out from the
requests it makes whether it is in portrait or landscape mode somehow?
Are many of you planning to do some iPhone specific development?
thanks,
jp
This is the agent string that has been seen on the web. THe release
version may be different. The version is the same as Tiger, which
may be true of release, or just be what the beta puts out.
I think it is pretty safe to assume that if the Tiger version of
Safari can do it without plugins then it will work. I was hoping for
a newer version that supports SVG.
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+
(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
Michael
Planning todo the same thing.
I want to try setting up a before_filter that sets the requested
format to “iphone” or “mobile” or something like that so I can create
a separate set of templates for each page. “index.html.erb” for
everyone else and “index.iphone.erb” for the iphone.
One of the selling points of the iphone is that it gets the “real”
internet with CSS and full page layouts.
I can see having specially designed interfaces for some functions
that make use of the iphone easier,
but that would depend on the application. In general the idea is to
not have to have duplicate special
content.
I expect to have a few select views duplicated to have an iphone
optimized experience for things like bulk data entry.
But, in general I am not going to assume I need duplicate layouts
until after actually using one for a while.
Michael
Michael L. wrote:
One of the selling points of the iphone is that it gets the “real”
internet with CSS and full page layouts.
…
Michael
Ok, Michael has a valid point of view. Will have to actually touch an
iPhone before we can see how useable regular sites really are.
I’m thinking that there will be a market for apps that have an iPhone
specific interface, with functionality that is perhaps also geared
towards “on the go” and more “personal information management” oriented.
Perhaps “the rest of the widgets that Apple didn’t include” sort of a
thing.
Any guesses on the cookies or rotation issues in my original post?
cheers,
jp
http://www.apple.com/iphone/pr/20070611iphone.html
It sure sounds like all the goodies are there to me. Web 2.0 is a
huge part of the developer landscape for iPhone. AJAX/JavaScript/CSS/
DHTML. Sounds like it’s all there to me (- Flash at least for now).
Apple is also great at pushing new software updates to their devices.
This is only the beginning, who knows what they might add in later.
On Jun 28, 10:58 am, Jeff P. [email protected]
I think that’s why apple release Safari for windows. If it runs in
safari, it’ll run on the iPhone
On Jun 28, 7:58 am, Jeff P. [email protected]
wrote:
Ok, Michael has a valid point of view. Will have to actually touch an
iPhone before we can see how useable regular sites really are.
I wonder if you’ve touched an iPhone yet. I’ve found the complete web
experience (including Ajax) to work very well with a few exceptions.
There are some Ajax actions, like drag-and-drop, which are overridden
by the phone’s multi-touch. I hope Apple sorts this out so the iPhone
becomes capable of producing a complete Web 2.0 experience.
Jose
Jeff P. wrote:
It does appear to support all the javascript stuff needed to do Rails
and ajaxy things. The site I cooked up while other people were
(humorously) sleeping in front of the apple store, looks funny and you
need good eyes to use it even after zooming in, but it all works,
including “Prototype” ajax stuff.
jp
…but yes, as someone else mentioned, drag and drop would not work with
the multi-touch screen. Apple needs to add some way to turn off the
fancy new stuff they added when necessary to allow use of drag and drop.
That has become such a ubiquitous way of doing things on the Web that
this is a major flaw in an otherwise brilliant solution to Web browsing
on a small device.
jp
Jose Hales-Garcia wrote:
On Jun 28, 7:58 am, Jeff P. [email protected]
wrote:
Ok, Michael has a valid point of view. Will have to actually touch an
iPhone before we can see how useable regular sites really are.
I wonder if you’ve touched an iPhone yet. I’ve found the complete web
experience (including Ajax) to work very well with a few exceptions.
There are some Ajax actions, like drag-and-drop, which are overridden
by the phone’s multi-touch. I hope Apple sorts this out so the iPhone
becomes capable of producing a complete Web 2.0 experience.
Jose
I actually spent some time BEFORE the launch trying to build the
beginnings of an iPhone specific site. Thinking that I had less
real-estate, I attempted to figure out how many pixels I had after
accounting for the various borders and such, and made some little tiny
icons and structured the site so it would all fit in the expected number
of pixels…
…turns out that is backwards. Apple designed the thing with the
intent of having your initial view of a site be a “30,000 foot” view of
the whole page (or a normal sized monitor worth of the whole page). So
my tiny little site was microscopic when viewed with the iPhone. What
you need to do instead is make great big icons and great big text that
will fill up a normal sized window. This would give you a page that
would be easily viewable and useable on iPhone without zooming in.
It does appear to support all the javascript stuff needed to do Rails
and ajaxy things. The site I cooked up while other people were
(humorously) sleeping in front of the apple store, looks funny and you
need good eyes to use it even after zooming in, but it all works,
including “Prototype” ajax stuff.
jp
Hi, I don’t really want to disable any feature of my iPhone so that I
can
use drag-n-drop on a web site. Please remember that the iPhone is more
of a
consumer product. For example, you have armed guards assigned to each
shipment of iPhones to the Apple and ATT Stores in the USA and you have
400+
people waiting to get there hands on it at each Apple Store. Anyway,
just
because you can do drag-n-drop doesn’t mean should do it in the first
place.
Furthermore, most of the sites that support such functionality didn’t
really need it at all. Thus, you should ask the question, “Does
drag-n-drop
add value to the user’s experience and can I do it a better way without
it?”.
Next, one shouldn’t over-engineer a web site. For example, I would like
to
see a normal page from my desktop to be displayed with little to no
modification on the iPhone. I really don’t want to see over-sized text
or
graphics. Why? If you make everything bigger on a normal site, then it
would take much longer to download on the iPhone. Thus, Apple selected
strategy to get the page first, view the page second, and zoom in if I
have
to; this is extremely easy to do. As a designer and developer, I don’t
want
to manage two different code bases to support the same thing (i.e. DRY).
Finally, one should take a detailed look at the internet functionality
in
all the smart phones prior to the iPhone and try to understand that this
leap ahead of what anyone has attempted to do in the past. Thus, the
goal of a web site developer is to create a great user experience
without
over-engineering by adding functionality that doesn’t add value.
Just my 2 cents,
-Conrad
Jeff P. wrote:
So far I know that Flash is not supported. That’s good for us.
I haven’t been able to determine with certainty whether or not cookies
are supported. That’s important.
Yes cookies are supported.
Here’s the info about iPhone Web development from Apple:
Ajaxian has had a number of articles/references to Safari development on
the iPhone:
http://www.ajaxian.com/index.php?s=iphone&searchbutton=Go
Problems with drag and drop have already been mentioned.
Two other problems are no double-click events (used for zooming
functionality) and forms that don’t have an explicit submit button (i.e.
they assume the user will hit Enter/Return).
–
Michael W.
Hi, here’s a very good page in regards to preparing your apps for the
iPhone.
Good luck,
-Conrad
Hi, if you’re looking to create web apps for the iPhone. I would
recommend
taking a look at the iUI being that I attended the iPhoneDevCamp in San
Francisco July 6 - 8 where I had the chance to go geek with my iPhone.
Anyway, you can find more information about the event here:
http://barcamp.org/iPhoneDevCamp
iUI Reference:
http://code.google.com/p/iui/
Peace,
-Conrad