Apple just released some insights for iPhone web developers – and everybody who wants to optimize his website or web application for the iPhone will find valuable tips inside. Some remarkable facts:
- The behavior of the Safari iPhone browser, which area will be zoom-in when double-tapping the screen, can be controled by using blocks like DIV, OL, UL or TABLE. Straight and clean CSS-programming comes in handy 😉
- Integration with iPhone applications sounds great, but up to now it is restricted to hand over telephone numbers to the telephony-application by using the anchor-tag <a href="tel:…"> and handing over email addresses with the well known anchor-tag <a href="mailto:…">. The direct integration with the Google-Map-Client is realized with a classic anchor to the maps.google.com URL. This way of integration ensures the compatibility with standard web users coming from a MAC or PC. Other interfaces are still missing.
- Of course, a specific CSS can be created for fit the website to the iPhone GUI.
- On the iPhone web pages are displayed within a “viewportâ€. iPhone-Safari uses a standard-width of 980 pixles for web pages and scales them down to fit the viewport. But standard width, scaling and the option for the user to scale the page can be defined by a new META-Tag.
- There are several restrictions for the maximal file sizes of pictures – but iPhone-optimized websites should not run into problems there.
- Apple is also giving advice for optimizing audio- and video-content for the iPhone.
- iPhone-Safari comes with an integrated PDF-reader which even supports the landscape mode of the phone.
Also the list of features which are NOT supported by the iPhone are quite interesting:
- Adobe is suffering a setback as the iPhone does not support Flash … bye, bye FlashLight.
- Java-applications and applets are not functioning on the iPhone … bye, bye all mobile J2ME applications.
- The iPhone is not able to decode WirelessMarkupLanguage (WML) … no WAP-pages are displayed on the iPhone. No problem for web developers – and those few WAP portals, which are using WML instead of xHTML have to speed up their development anyway. Otherwise they’ll be overrun from the Web2.0 developments.
- Mouseover-events and Hover-styles fall victim to the finger input device. This is a consistent step but may lead to the need of a complete redesign of the website-user-interface.
We can only hope that the iPhone will come to Europe pretty soon.
The Apple rumor mill is once again running overtime on the topic of netbooks. If you believe the reports, Steve Jobs is himself leading the charge. My take: Whatever Apple does, it won?t be a netbook in the usual sense, I also bet that Apple, if it does anything, will itself avoid using the n-word to describe it.