Apple has released a set of documents for developing your iPhone optimized web based application. I’ve been working on an iPhone styled app over the last few weeks and this document will certainly provide me some of the tools I need to provide a nice looking application.
In this document, Apple covers five areas developing and designing websites optimized for the iPhone. The areas include the new type of UI (finger events), keeping with standards, integration with iPhone apps, page readability, audio and video and safari supported technologies. In the iPhone apps integration is where you will find iPhone specific properties and meta tags you can use to control the size of your design area as well as how to talk to the phone, email and maps programs all which use basic html. The document is a must for ensuring a great user experience when browsing with Safari on your iPhone.
Enjoy.
Rich CSS, DHTML, JavaScript, iPhone
Development for mobile devices will see a big change in style once the iPhone is released in a few weeks.
Currently, most mobile web sites are light in features and style mostly because of the size of the screen and the limited bandwidth on phone networks. Mobile sites often look a little too bland, boring, and are static in their nature since you can’t interact with the page elements. Part of this is due to any browser scripting support, and partly due to not being very usable considering the user interface doesn’t lend itself well enough to interact with page elements. Pages also have to be written with a limited set of HTML with poor to no CSS support. It’s like being back in 1996 when I surf the web with a phone.
Enter iPhone.
Last week at the WWDC, Apple announced quasi-third-party development using HTML/CSS/Javascript/AJAX through the mobile Safari browser. With this setup you can build a fully functioning web-based application without holding back on cool web 2.0 features. With a full set of tools and a fully standards compliant browser, mobile web apps are going to be wicked powerful. Take a look at this emulated site built with Javascript/CSS and the digg API. The iPhone will surely innovate the mobile web and without a doubt influence other phone manufacturers to build better web browsers. If this is any indication of where phone apps are going, I am looking forward to the future mobile web platform. What do you think, is this the next cool development platform?
Rich Apple, CSS, DHTML, iPhone, mobile
Outside of designing cool Third Rail products, I design and build websites full time at my firm for small to medium sized businesses. More often than not, they have some preconceived idea of what they want their site to do, and more often than not they are thinking something along the lines of a broadway spectacle, complete with music, animation and maybe even fireworks for a finale. Then they also want to be number one on Google when someone types in ‘enter_generic_keyword’. Oy.
We of course have to explain a little on how things work and that it’s not so easy, if even possible you can get your name on top or even first few pages for such a keyword. And if they should even be so concerned about being on top at all. For the ones who do want some SEO built into their site, along with a light marketing campaign the only answer as far as I am concerned is XHTML/JS/CSS aka DHTML.
I usually tend to discount Flash for most projects partly because of SEO problems, and partly because of any possible regular maintenance. I’ll use Flash if it fits the project, and if SEO isn’t a major requirement as is with many local businesses. With so much changing happening on the web in the last year or two, you can achieve Flash like websites without sacrificing indexable content. Just to a search for CSS Javascript gallery, you’ll find dozens of excellent solutions with beautiful fades, images sliding right to left and anything else they’ve thought up. Even menu’s can be animated like FLash, I’ve seen sliding tabs, OS X dock magnification, image loupes and so forth. So with the many, many tools available you can (with some spit and bubble gum of course) get your site loaded with many of the bells and whistles Flash has to offer.
Rich CSS, DHTML, Flash, JavaScript, SEO
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