Web 2.0, what is/is not supported on iPhone?

rubyonrails-talk
1

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

2

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.

3

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

4

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.

5

I think that's why apple release Safari for windows. If it runs in safari, it'll run on the iPhone

6

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

7

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