Blogs

There’s a lot of hype and questions about Apple’s new toy.  I’m interested in what and how we can develop apps for the iPhone.  Ed Burnette has the scoop over at ZDNet on little secrets you may interested in.  I pulled some of the highlights here:

• Will run a version of the Safari browser (419.3, based on the open source WebKit engine
• Resolution is 320×396 for the web viewing area in portrait mode
• no Java/no Flash (YouTube is recoding they’re vids form quicktime)
• 10MB max html size for the web page
• Javascript: 5 seconds of run time and 10MB heap allocation limits
• maximum of 8 documents viewed at once (in tabs)
• iPhone User Agent will be “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3″ – initially anyway
• The iPhone will have built-in support for viewing PDF, MS Word (.doc), and MS Excel (.xls) format files.
• Telephone-specific urls will, for example, allow the user to click on a link and make a phone call. These include “sms:”, “tel:”, and “mailto:”
• Stylesheet device width: 480px
• There are no scroll bars or resize knobs. The iPhone will automatically expand the content.

I’m still curious if us Ajax developers will get access to features like the camera, GPS, call logs, address book etc… And how that’s even possible while the Safari sandbox.

The thing that’s really burning me up is the physical UI though.  How are web apps going work with a multi-touch screen?  I think we’re going to do more than just change the screen size;-)  And maybe this is going to usher some very cool very big innovations in browser (Ajax) UIs.  More on that later though.

Thanks Alexei for the heads up.

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