My iPhone SDK

By Dimitri Glazkov
Posted on 10/17/07

So, my good friend Steve spills the beans about the upcoming SDK. The crowd screams like girls at the Beatles concert. Even ever-curmudgeonly Dave eeks a "hooray". And that's a big deal, my reading acquaintance. Now, I don't own an iPhone, but I play with one at the local store every other week. And I also am a gearhead, as we've discussed before. And, I watch google-gears and WHATWG groups like a hawk whenever there's talk about gear-related stuff.

With all that, it is only logical to assume that I am siding with Chris on the mournful thoughts for the Web-based application development on the delectable slice of glass-sided aluminum. Because in my opinion, Safari 3 is only five tiny steps away from being a full-fledged application platform.

These steps are:

The "nice-to-haves" and "coming-soons" may include direct TCP Network connections, history and browsing context management, and other neat things from the HTML5 spec, but those first five is what could really make the Web applications first-class. Think about it.

Comments

  1. Re: My iPhone SDK
    Posted by Chris Messina on 10/18/07

    Great stuff. And totally agree about the HTML5 technologies you mentioned and why certain parties would be taking an interest in them lately... ;)

  2. Posted by Dave on 10/18/07

    Simple qustion... when navagating a web app in an iPhone, can you completely hide the address bar?

    Until you manage that small (yet important) item, web apps will always be second-class citizens on an iPhone.

  3. Chromeless = No Address Bar
    Posted by Dimitri Glazkov on 10/18/07
    Dave, that's what step 4 takes care of :) Take a look at WebRunner.
  4. Re: My iPhone SDK
    Posted by Chris Messina on 10/29/07

    @Dave: yep, you sure can. Take a look at pockettweets.com. Basically you use Javascript to scroll the URL bar out of the viewing area and it looks like a regular app. While I think you're right -- the one good thing about forcing the accessibility of the URL bar is that it (ideally) reduces the possibility of phishing and other faked-URL schemes.

  5. Re: My iPhone SDK
    Posted by Chris Jay on 11/10/07

    There's one additional step required to turn Safari into the ultimate application platform - support for sensors. We've got to be able to access them in code.

    That includes screen touches, the proximity sensor, the camera, the microphone, and the gyroscope.

    I have a <a href="http://chrisfjay.blogspot.com/2007/05/sensors.html">proposal for how to do this</a> using javascript.

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