Slashdot Mirror
Will You Change Your Web Site For the iPhone?
An anonymous reader calls to our attention a blog post about the way the iPhone's multi-touch UI will strain the interface conventions of Web 2.0. This looming clash comes clearer as Apple releases more details of the iPhone's UI. Much has been made about the iPhone including Safari to provide a full web browsing experience. But this reader is wondering how compatible certain sites will be with the iPhone's input. From the post: "[Web 2.0-style interaction] makes somewhat heavy use of 'onmouse' events and cursor changes... along with CSS a:hover styles. The iPhone challenges those particular Web 2.0 conventions, though, because it is a device that not only adds support for another pointer, but at the same time eliminates them as interface objects... [T]he user doesn't get to express their attention with the iPhone... They only get to express their immediate action." This reader asks, "What other pitfalls lurk in the multi-touch web? Do any Slashdot readers plan to adjust their sites to ensure they work with the iPhone, and can you think of any similar issues that will crop up with such a different browsing experience?"
Sure sounded that way. Lets just release the damn thing and see what it does.
Sites that don't support the fancy things will simply probably zoom in (and out) some preset amount on a double click, and a user will still be able to zoom an arbitrary amount with multi-touch (e.g., pinch and unpinch).
Simple.
For those who don't know, iPhone uses some tricks to detect "zones" or "areas" on web pages that will automatically zoom to fit when double clicked, like a photo with caption, or a story column on a newspaper web page.
This person is overcomplicating things, and overreacting ("pitfalls"? "adjust [...] sites to ensure they work with iPhone"?) No sites need to be changed to work well with the browser (or, at least as well as, and, from all of the demos and appearances, probably quite a bit better than, any other mobile browser). The user wants to zoom in, they zoom in. So what if it's not perfect. Sure, some sites can offer a better "experience" specifically for iPhone if they choose, but they don't need to.
That's why this thing having a real, full browser, able to be viewed in portrait or landscape, is great. It will be nice to have a full browser on a phone that doesn't suck, even if I can't double-click and perfectly zoom to fit on a photo and instead have to zoom on an area of interest manually. Some might say "but it's not consistent!" Well, what do you think it does when you double click? If a special "zone" isn't present, it will probably just zoom as close to where you clicked as it can. If it's not perfect, you can even drag the display around with your finger, or pinch/unpinch to zoom more/less as appropriate.
Disclaimer: yeah, we don't "know" any of this yet, but just look at the demos and how the phone works. And anyone can try it out next Friday. It will probably be a much better browsing experience than on nearly any, if not all, other mobile browsers.
My stuff is writen to XHTML 1.0 Strict standards. If it doesn't work on the iPhone, it's not my problem.
That's the whole damn point of standards. Write to them you don't have to worry if something will work. Use quirks and tricks, and you're going to be dealing with a tone of headaches every time something new comes out.
BTW, "Hey, Microsoft! Fuck you and your shitty standards-ignoring browser!"
-- Will program for bandwidth
Websites will accommodate the iPhone if want to continue receiving traffic. If a site doesn't, it will be left in the dust by sites who do.
viewing websites on my current cell phone is a very lynx-esque experience -- arrowing between various links on the page, the pressing enter.
i have downloaded "mobile" versions of gmail and google maps for my cell phone.
i just don't see that this is a big deal. besides, to me, the most attractive thing about the iphone is that it will perfectly sync with my mac -- address book, calendar, itunes, iphoto, etc.
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
This is an entire non-event that is barely slashdot worthy at best. This issue is the exact same one faced by every other touch screen in existence. It is not a pitfall in any way at all. Simply a circumstance of the technology. I've seen some excellent touch screen interfaces that do provide a good level of feedback anyway - flashy colours when you punch a button, dragging fingers across the screen to move windows...
Do we really need to make stories from nothing?
I'm having enough headaches working on my webcomic's site, now you're telling me I gotta account for mobile viewing, too? I've shrunken that thing small enough for the rest of the internet, it's not fitting in the iPhone's screen!
I may as well be designing for the DS... though speaking of the DS, wouldn't it have similar UI issues too?
Most people here won't go out of their way to make a site work with Internet Explorer, and IE has 70% of the market... and you want to know of they'll accommodate the quirks of a cel phone?
Three Squirrels
On my production sites, I simply give the user a nice error message when they attempt to visit the site using broken web browsers such as Safari, and in some cases Internet Explorer.
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
I design my sites for compatibility. Sure I might tweak a small feature here and there in special cases, but compatability remains key. If the site is not compatible, then I lose some viewership somewhere. Google in many ways is what we all strive for, since they manage to add cool features, but still manage to provide backwards compatibility.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Not specifically for the iPhone. Maybe a simple low graphics version for PDA's and phones in general, but I'm not going to do anything special for the iPhone. If the mobile version of pages is simple/lite and standards compliant, then it should work with pretty much all mobile devices. If it doesn't, then it's probably the device maker's fault for using a shitty browser/rendering engine.
Realistically, the normal non-mobile versions of websites are not going to work well on mobile devices, period, because of the small size of their screens and limit forms of input. And the iPhones certainly not going to change that, especially given its lack of true 3G which will make the full versions of most sites horribly slow as well.
Mobile browsing is nothing new - Most major sites that people would frequently access from a mobile device (ie webmail, news/homepages, search engines, etc) already have mobile versions of their sites that work reasonably well. With its pretty high price tag, lack of 3G, and very few third party apps (compared with BB, Windows Mobile, and Palm), I highly doubt that it will spark a "revolution" in web browsing. It may look very slick, but technologically speaking it probably won't be earth-shattering.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
The web, and for that matter an application, is not designed to be input-device-specific. If a site actually cares that I'm using a mouse, then it already has some pretty fundamental problems that the iPhone did not introduce, that you would in fact see on any phone. (Not long ago, I could browse any site I wanted to from a terminal with Lynx. In fact, I still use this as a basic compatibility metric.)
Applications should respond to requests for action. How that action is performed, on some level, should be of no interest to the application code. This is one of many reasons why abstracts in code are important.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
onmouse and :hover can be nice eye candy, but if a website doesn't work without them (and doesn't degrade nicely), maybe it's broken.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
that goes on the top, left side, and bottom of the page declaring the site eto be "iPhone Friendly".
I would add a feature where the user touches the banner on the screen, it acts like a iPhone with swiped scenes left and right and so on.
In Soviet Cupertino iPhone changes YOU!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
To make sure that iPhone users can't view it. Before you douchebags attack me for being a troll or whatever, my websites have 0 viewers to begin with so it serves no purpose other than to make me feel better.
In related news, iPhone is going to bomb so it won't be of much concern anyway. Also, "Web 2.0" is still one of the stupidest words/phrases ever created on the Internet.
The Farewell Tour II
I'm building a complicated multi-user ajax game that I plan to get working on iPhone. At first, testing it was fairly difficult because I didn't have a Mac. For a while I was trying a webkit hack that ran on windows, then I got the Mac emulator to run the actual Safari. I was so glad when a Windows Safari was released!
I have found that Safari is quite compatible, most stuff works great if it was designed to strict standards. I have had some issues with listbox controls, so I wrote my own which look nicer anyway.
I do have a concern about how mouse events are going to be handled on the iPhone. I watch the demos and wonder how weather the gesture recognizer will get out of the way and not do wacky things at the wrong time. Time will tell. I suspect there will be problems, but I also expect to be able to work around them.
What's with the Mac'o'crap'o'matic everything these days? Mac is such a free software/open source pandering rip off. I am sick of their occult idiots who worship a hypocritical #(*$& that likes to get on stage with Gates. I'm about to puke. Gotta go. Who gives a SHIT!
It is a good point that the future will bring new input devices that will require completely rethinking the way we expect users to input data. The new multi-touch inputs are just one good example. How do you process multiple "onchange" events at the same time? What sorts of deadlocks and race conditions will we see when onchange1 is interrupted by onchange2? I'm sure many "web apps" (is that a most hated word?) already have these problems, but they are never evident because a user can not click on two controls fast enough to cause the error to actually be evident. I guess the point is, no matter how good of a programmer you are, there always future actions that you can not anticipate that will come up and bite you in the ass. This has nothing to do with whether or not you follow the standards.
every time I read stuff like this, I think about what makes me visit webpages. Content. You can have it in bold clashing flashing colors if it pleases you, but if I _want_ to read it, I'll put up with it, or at least bypass your presentation. If my device won't co-operate, I still want your information, so I'll use another device.
This image of webmasters throwing their hands up in the air and running around "We've lost another random passer-by.. noooo!" makes me chuckle. It all comes back to content. If your site has something worthwhile, people will make the effort.
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
You know, people have been browsing the web on Blackberries and Treos for quite a while now, right? While many sites decided to go the "mobile." route, a good chunk of the web works just fine on a smartphone. Has for a long time.
Mostly it's things like tables and oddball CSS that bugger up smartphones. I can't say that I've ever experienced an "OMG NO MOUSEOVER" moment with my Crackberry.
Shit, Google even has several of its apps specifically released for smartphones, because they realize the AJAX stuff only half works right. Google Maps + Blackberry == invaluable when travelling in another city.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Look at the trailers page. Pointlessly large and confusing to anyone used to a normal webpage.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
I'm dying to try out new security exploits against Safari. I think it'll really be cool to pwn an i-phone!
I thought Apple's ads say you don't need a special mobile web page, cut-down site version, etc. that it just worked with the normal internet. Thus, why bother? OK, nothing is ever as perfect as advertized, but considering the ads I'd let Apple fix things that don't work. Really, how long will it take for iphone users to be knocking on my door in large enough numbers to be worth their own version of a web site?
http://www.marketcircle.com/iphoney/
It only works on the Mac.
I wonder how they got the information to build this....
As if generalizations are not bad enough, you have
some pathetic need to generalize everyone who buys
some particular product and then hate them all?
Mommy didn't give you enough hugs as a child?
Anonymous squawked that : Websites will accommodate the iPhone if want to continue receiving traffic. If a site doesn't, it will be left in the dust by sites who do.
g old-chains-and-medallions-/-bling-,-honest-,-no-re ally-,-stop-laughing".
To which I simply say "Bullshite". The iPhone is just another problem in search of a solution it needs in order to be a solution in need of a problem.
Mobile web-surfing is, and will for the foreseeable future remain, crap. A pointless waste of time, dedicated solely to those who value being gadget laden over being effective. The iPhone will not solve this. Nothing short of retinal-projected or mediumless holographic projection will solve this. "Paper-screen" technology might come close someday.
Face it. The iPhone will be too big for a phone and too small for everything else. It's simply another chance to worship at the altar of "not-quite-good-,-but-oh-so-sparkly geek toys", a deity also claimed by the schismed sects of "more-money-than-sense" and "breakable-yuppie-toys-are-not-the-equivalent-of-
I might pick one up myself in a year or three when they hit the junkpiles, purely out of morbid curiosity.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Correct me if I am wrong but I am thinking that "multi-touch" does not necessarily mean "another pointer".
I'm sure I remember a quote from Dean Kamen claiming cities will be rebuild to accomodate the Segway. Yeah, they're almost done I think.
Next question!
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I'm a developer and and as long as Safari for windows has been out my company has been validating my pages on it, we validate all the windows platform browsers as well as *nix browsers and PIE.. Pages that view perfectly on every other browser I've tried, on Safari do not work. Most pages have funny layout problems as expected, and I can fix that stuff. However, Some pages just don't show up at all, like it decided not to render anything, especially large intranet pages that contain tables with 100+ rows. Also, it has some weird issues with the and how it renders pages that, on the server side, render the select options in different indexes (e.g.:you choose option 3 so it renders option 3 at the top rather than use the 'selected' property). The problems, with the windows version at least are so big I can't even begin to figure out how to 'work' around them. What the hell do you do when the page just does not render at all? If someone wants to give me a safe place that won't get /.'ed I'll gladly upload examples of this. Simple HTML 4.01 trans. using nothing but a few simple tables causes it to display a blank page (mind you with the proper background-color).
So no, I can't write HTML for the iPhone unless they fix some major issues with Safari. Though I may buy one and to hell with viewing certain pages.
It will if the iPhone supports XHTML strict. If not, then no, my sites will not work on the iPhone. Ever.
Task Mangler
Can someone please tell me how Apple pulls this off? I mean the frigging phone isn't even on the market yet, and we have Slashdot stories talking about redesigning the web to work on this thing. Give me a break. It appears "multitouch" is the next buzzword. The issues the article discuses, like mouse over events and hovering, isn't even specific to a multitouch panel in the first place. These are issues that have surfaced decades ago, and are typically addressed by a tap-hold style action.
Sorry, but this is just getting to me. It's like there is a certain percentage of the population (and press), that is willing to give Apple a wink and a nod, and pretend that every last freaking thing the iPhone encompasses was just invented by Apple. Wee! It can browse the web (never mind that its display has 1/2 the pixels of a VGA Pocket PC). Wow! It can play MP3s (boy the music sounds extra special somehow on an iPhone). Neat! It has a soft input panel (lets ignore that there is no tactile feedback, thus typing requires visual stimuli to make sure you're pressing the right areas). Yeehaw! What battery life (even though you can't swap batteries, preventing the user from purchasing as many extra batteries as necessary to meet their usage needs).
For every true innovation there's three caveats. Maybe once this thing actually hits the market we can get at least a small dose of reality.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
... both AT&T and Apple (both significant advertisers) will provide some subtle inducements for site owners to provide a view of their pages that works well with the iPhone.
And if a site is well-designed, separating the "view" from the "data" using CSS or javascript or whatever, it should not require a massive overhaul of a site to provide an iPhone-friendly view. And it certainly shouldn't require any non-standard web page syntax to do so.
Anyone know what the user-agent string is for the iPhone?
Good point. Anyone know what the user agent string is for iPhone/Safari? That way we can detect these morons and do unpleasant things to their "user experience." :)
You bet I'll change it...I'll make damn sure my site is completely incompatible with that thing :-)
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
(I don't even have a cellphone), but I do believe the iphone is going to be totally-fricken-huge. This is personal technology we'll all be using soon - it's just that r/evolutionary. Watch the guided tour at the Apple website; it looks rediculously cool and easy to use. [ Ack, I want to spit when I talk like this! ].
However, as a webmaster and marketer, I'm betting two things will be ubiquitous with the future: Google and the Apple iphone. Best we come to terms with it now.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Uhh... WHAT!
I don't test my site except with the browsers I use anyway. If your browser is broken, not my problem. Also, my UI is simple. I dislike using JS, and try to minimize it.
As a sidenote, I believe the iPhone will be an overhyped failure (not in sales, but as a product). My coworker disagrees with me. Other than shorting Apple stock, with the expectation that I can buy it back two quarters after the iPhone's arrival (after a long enough period of time that inital sales, which I expect to be extreme, will die down), is there any way you can recommend for the two of us to use for us to put money on it?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
NO
The only things that are mentioned in this article about the question of whether or not we will change our websites to better suit the iPhone are things that are already present in current mobile devices!
Why do the majority of iPhone related articles on slashdot ignore the fact that it's nothing new?
Sure there is the zoom stuff, that's one difference, but that has nothing to do with me adapting my website for the iPhone and everything to do with the iPhone adapting itself to be able to view the full-version of websites instead of mobile-versions.
Only if my employer buys me one in order to test the site.
Now I am sad.
And I serve all my pages in a binary version of Morse code. If it doesn't work on the iPhone, it's not my problem.
What really confuses me is that there are ancient interfaces in the browser that are universally implemented, but never standardized. Meanwhile there are conflicting modern interface "standards" where the vast majority of people are running the evil "standard" that is to be shunned.
I know, blame Microsoft, but the use of the word "standard" when it comes to the web seems like a bit of a joke. Standards are supposed to be written to reflect common practise, preferably successful common practise. Instead it seems like the W3C grinds out idealistic documents and then waits 5 years for a few more idealists with limited market share to implement their unproven ideas.
Yeah yeah, flame away... I'm just bitter because I'm working in JavaScript and *every single thing I do* involves checking compatibility tables. And the WC3 standards show up there as an annoying recent addition of relatively unimplemented cruft. Some days I'm left thinking "for the love of god, just standardize something that IE is doing so I can actually use it some day."
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
If you have a problem with this, you're probably the kind of customer that'll use up the value of your purchase, and word of mouth, many times over in tech support.
iPhone to offer revolutionary zooming and scrolling technology. News at 11.
Nope.
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3
Will you redesign your cities for IT???
Only because I am getting an iPhone and I want an iPhone optimized version of it for personal use. If I had not been getting an iPhone, chances are I wouldn't do it. I am going to guess the same holds true for many site owners.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
No. Wait...nah, still no. I ain't redesigning any site so some rich gadget fetishist can feel justified in his investment of an impractical web surfing device.
Unless Jobs is going to pay me, I'm not going to bother. Nobody's going to read my site from a phone.
It's called backwards compatibility. When you have something that is better (at least you say/think it is), you emulate the functionality of the existing, older standards.
Tablet PCs have done this... forever. The mouse cursor moves to and clicks wherever the user touched. The browser will probably do something like this, and as for handling multitouch... use it for zooming or whatever, but for normal cursor operations, ignore it! Problem solved.
With onmouseover/out stuff, they would be triggered immediately before the click event. Of course, this is just the obvious, simple solution to the problem, although it ideally would display a cursor to explain otherwise curious looking mouseover highlights caused by an invisible cursor... and using a cursor seems to go against the UI design if I read the summary correctly.
I'm sure there are other, more creative ones, and even in my solution there are several variants which allow for normal mouse usage (but which make it far more complex to be worth sharing). But this one at least isn't likely to cause compatibility problems, imo.
I mean, iPhone is not going to overwhelm the mobile browsing, and even if it did, still, why should anyone change things just for apple-maniacs?
Mobile browsing is fine, nothing against that, but come on, it is enough trying to cope with IE and non-standard desktop-browsers, who really needs the overtime-work of just another adjustment to their sites only because of just another mobile browser?
iPhone is not here, nor there, to change anything.
-Is the meaning of life vanity, or is vanity the meaning of life?
Why should we have to change our sites just because they cannot make a better phone-based web browser?
Didn't the commercials say it is the full Internet or something in that regards? What is up with this article?
Just support Zimbra please, Apple toy thingy.
I tried when the webtv came out, then i realized that if i just wrote with standards, while it may not look great on non-pc platforms, it looked good enough that you could get what you needed. Now if the page did not work at all on the iphone, that owuld be one thing, but my guess is that it will display just fine, just not be "Optimized" for it. And quite frankly, my site is probably not something people are going to want to be browsing from a mobile device anyway. I point this out to our users all the time when they grip about their blackberries not having all the features of Outlook - Your mobile device is there as a CONVIENIENCE, not as a replacement for your desktop / laptop. Quite frankly, I do not see the lure of mobile devices. I want my phone to make phone calls and do text messaging. I am not going to try to type out an e-mail on one of those tiny keypads (omg, have you tried typing on a Pearl?), the screen is really too small to read anything more than maybe a rss feed, data plans are astronomical, and speeds suck.
This reminds me of people complaining about the quality of stuff on the itunes music store. So before videos were not at full dvd resolution. Guess what, the ipod doesn't support that resolution. So what if the songs are at 128k, the majority of people are listening on earbuds anyways, not on a full stereo system.
The point is, the trouble of rewrittign a site for the iPhone is just not worth it unless you are something like CNN or BBC or Google. You are not going to be browsing your church website, pepsi.com or a porn site on your iPhone, are you? (Okay, SOMEONE will, but not the majority of people).
When I was even running highly popular sites, in the days when webtv was popular, with the hundreds of hits I got a day, I may get a hit once every two weeks from a webtv. I spent hours pulling out my hair trying to get it all looking pretty for them, and in the end, the tradeoff just wasn't there. It worked, it just was not optimized before.
I mean, I am sorry, but unless you are running one of the top 20 internet sites, there is just no reason to optimize your site for the iPhone. Its pointless, its a waste of time, and people are not going to want to view your myspace profile from a mobile device, you just are not that popular.
fuck no.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
As soon as apple gives me a free phone and 1 year subscription for testing purposes.
When is your execution scheduled?
Most of the stuff on
One of the big marketing points they've been pushing in their ads for the iPhone is that you don't have to browse a "watered down Internet" on the iPhone. Go watch the ad called Watered Down.
If Apple thinks their browser is good/robust enough to browse the "real" web, then making my site look fine in Safari (which any web developer should be doing anyway) is all I should have to do.
Care to argue otherwise?
Why couldn't they have made the iPhone more like a DS? You could hone your "mouse-pen" skills as you browsed the web from the comfort of your own phone.
Redesigning a web app that uses a significant amount of AJAX functionality is going to take hundreds of hours of developer time. Suppose the average AJAX developer costs $50/hr. For 600 hours of work, we would need to make MORE THAN $50x600 = $30,000 worth of developer time to redesign!
For the redesign to be worth it, we would need to pull more than $30,000 in AFTER TAX, AFTER RISK profit! Not revenue--profit.
Since web businesses have lower margins than "traditional" businesses, we are going to require many hundreds of thousands of potential iPhone-only dollars being spent at our site before we consider it.
Show me the study with killodollars (per site) of potential iPhone purchases, and have it coming from Gardner, or Forester, or whichever "reputable" BS analysis company--and we'll start to consider it.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I know a few folks who spent a fair amount of time tweaking their sites to make them work with WebTV, back in the day. According to some, WebTV was going to someday comprise an appreciable portion of Web viewing, so we were all supposed to craft all sorts of tricky solutions. Of course, WebTV never panned out.
My point is not that we shouldn't be cognizant of how a new device will display websites. But until your logfiles start showing some actual traffic from said device, it's not worth losing sleep over.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
At the iPhone release :-(
Over the last 14 years it's generally been the job of the client to adhere to both published standards and common convention, and really, if I can get to my site and use it with a POC Windows Mobile phone, a Blackberry, every common Windows, Mac and Linux browser, and Lynx (yeah, I still test with Lynx) then if a client can't handle the site, that's the problem of the client. Not me. I never bothered worrying about people using the AOL Browser nor the benighted people stuck on WebTV, and my standard response was, "get a normal browser."
---------------------------------------
Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
Almost every "Web 2.0" site I visit actually works less well than equivalent sites did years ago. Now, photo galleries use ajax and javascript to switch pages, making it impossible to, say, open each page in a new tab and switch between them. Obscenely huge tables are loaded and sorted using javascript instead of letting me sort on the server side. Forum software prevents me from replying in a new window, or heck, even gracefully switching between threads. Keyboard support is often non-existent, since everyone thinks it's cool to reimplement the button element with sixteen DIVs and a Javascript widget framework.
You know what the worst is, though? The most useless example of sheep-like trend following?
Go to eBay.com's front page, and mouseover one of the menus at the top. The damn server PERFORMS AN AJAX QUERY to eBay to get the four items in the menu. They should know better.
Please, just wake me up when the "web 2.0" fad is over.
Sensitive point for me, as I own one of the oldest Segways in America and have two of them. There are some parts of suburboland that really OUGHT to be reconfigured for bikes, Segways and other non-fossil-burners. But of course they won't.
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
Unfortunately there are these things that cellular phones often require, called contracts, and *most* people I know are not serviced by AT&T/Cingular, which the iphone requires. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not changing cell companies for this phone. I have a fairly average cell phone and I can already do most of the things I've seen in the TV ads.. I can listen to music, I can use google maps, I can surf the internet, I can watch videos.. I see no reason why I need the iphone. Plus my phone has real buttons! (A feature I consider superior to the iphone -- I'm not a fan of having to clean off fingerprints from the screen, and I can text without having to look at the phone).. so I'm perfectly happy with my "average" cell phone.
Browsing the internet on a cellphone is like masturbating with scissors:
Look, if I went around adjusting my web site for every niche browser out there, I'd never get anything done. If the few thousand iPhone users can't look at my site properly, let them get to a proper computer. The web just isn't made for tiny phone screens.
[html]
[!-- some CGI crap: if browser == iphone then [size=6]HANG THAT MOTHER FSCKER THE FSCK UP AND DRIVE!!!!![/size] -->
[/html]
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
good luck with this time too.
Assuming it turns out to be worthwhile to make web pages that work well on Apple's multi-touch screens, there are two big issues. On the one hand, multiple touches are possible. On the other, fingers are blunt instruments and the user can't see through them. Targets have to be big. Look at any touch screen in retail. The buttons there are huge.
Rearranging playlists and changing channels should work fine, but anything that needs real input will be tough.
Interestingly enough, apple.com just got a redesign. One of the new things added was menus that require hovering to expand. See here for an example. The menus in question are on the right. I wonder what this means for the iPhone?
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3
For example, if you have a FORM that submits when the mouse "leaves" the drop down box.
I think you need to adjust the question - why would anyone do a form submit when the CURSOR leaves a form element? I click in a form element to type and move the mouse out of the way, all the time.
What I think you meant to ask is, what about a form element that submits when it looses focus - the answer there is, the keypad has a return key and I assume pressing it means you are done, which in turn would seem to be to trigger loss of focus in that element.
Now things like menus and the like that do rely on the cursor, I could see that being an issue... but you can click on links so again I assume that if you just press in place it's treated as the cursor being there, which in turn I would assume brings up the menu desired or whatever else was to be triggered by the presence of the mouse.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not specifically for the iPhone. Maybe a simple low graphics version for PDA's and phones in general,
Then your site will suck on the iPhone compared to other sites. Why do that? Code as normal, make sure it works in safari, and make sure that even without a lot of mouse events the page still works OK (which you do anyway for those of us who like Javascript off by default, right?).
Shrink it down for other mobile phones, fine, but don't degrade my iPhone browsing just because you lump all mobile browsing together.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry, but this is just getting to me. It's like there is a certain percentage of the population (and press), that is willing to give Apple a wink and a nod, and pretend that every last freaking thing the iPhone encompasses was just invented by Apple. Wee!
Please pick up your official "Curmudgeon" hat down at the Elks Lodge. Thanks!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They'll eventually catch up.
Be seeing you.
scott
Apple's own stated target is 1% of cell phone users.
Given relatively few sites take their time to optimize for Safari on the Mac (which has 5% of the desktop market), what are the odds they'd optimize for Safari on an iPhone that has 1% of it?
Even Opera has 1.5% of the web market and, other than its robustness saving it, most web developers don't even bother to check if sites work in it.
Next question: What percentage of users are partially sighted? That dwarfs the 1% of the iPhone. What percentage of sites actually worry that much about genuine scalable text/high contrast/alt/title etc.?
In short, most companies won't pay to develop their websites for the just greater percentages that have Opera or Safari. Until the legal threat of the Target lawsuit, most wouldn't even pay to support the much larger percentage who needed accessible websites - and many still won't.
If they won't pay for that, when the necessary changes are relatively minor, do you really think they'll pay for radically greater changes just to woo the targeted 1% of cell phone users who'll still go home and use Safari on their Macs or PCs that don't have multi touch interfaces?
God bless Steve Jobs for managing to make the entire world think his latest thing is all critical. The truth is, it's a damn cool gimmick that even Apple aren't hoping for more than 1% adoption from.
Now, in two years to five years... When Microsoft's table is all the rage and has filtered in to home PCs, laptops, etc., when your $250 iPod can jump on to your wifi network and you can surf from the couch... Then, yes, multi touch, non-focused interfaces will be something we'll all be building for. Though the smart devs will be learning the tricks now so they can demand the high salaries when it reaches the point that everyone suddenly realizes they need it, 1% of cellphones right now just isn't enough to move the industry.
Most mobile web browsing is a lot like WebTV in a smaller form-factor. Neither one can display much text without scrolling.
The iWhat? Oh, apple's new pda with mobile telephony? I'm too old for this...
I hope you're caught driving behind one of those cell phoners.
:)
Have a nice commute.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Don't short the stock, especially when you claim to know that you're betting on the stock movement for exactly two quarters. Instead, buy a "put". That way, you limit your potential losses, and you also avoid getting scared out of you position if the stock goes up for a while before going down (plus, you don't risk a margin call, etc.) Similarly, your friend can buy a "call" and get the same sort of advantages.
I wouldn't ignore the iPhone, if I wanted a viable website that customers use. Don't repeat history, as Creative ignored the iPod, and they got the proverbial boot to the head. Remember all the people who said that no non geeks would want a MP3 player when the first iPod came out?
The Web changes. You had Java, then Flash, now AJAX and Web 2.0. Not having your site able to work with the iPhone is trying to net customers with just HTML written for Mosaic.
Evolve and learn the spec, or join the COBOL programmers in history's dustbin.
The iPhone, as Jobs proudly dubbed the device to thunderous applause, will be three devices in one: a cell phone, a wide-screen iPod with touch controls, and an Internet communications device
http://www.avi-converter.net/avi_to_iphone/
Mod Parent Up!!!!
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I've never liked iAnything but hearing that the iPhone is incapable of making 'use' of the useless shiny flashy pretty crap (sometimes referred to as 'features') on the 'new' internet is rather refreshing.
pr0n
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
I own an HTC Universal (Qtek 9000) which uses a stylus and I already have difficulty using the onmouse features of many websites. The best thing the manufacturers can do is to include a mini-trackball interface on their devices, as appeared on HTC 3300.
Stop it. Just stop it. I know "web 2.0" is considered evil here and all problems are probably caused by it, but mouseover or a:hover is absolutely, completely unrelated to "web 2.0", nor is it an convention of it. That is just nonsense and the same as saying javascript or a div are web 2.0 inventions, just because someone used those elements for what he calls a web 2.0 site. Although I'd be pretty interested to find out how someone can either do Ajax calls with a:hover or how it does perform a social function for the community. Surely web 2.0 deserves all the cliche rants that this article results in here, but there is a time and place for things, and a different interface paradigm of the iphone and possible problems with mouseovers on existing web pages isn't one.
Because I will shit myself if I ever get one. I don't really want to hover over anything to see if it changes. I'll just stick my finger right in and git'r'done.
Anonymous muttered "Remember all the people who said that no non geeks would want a MP3 player when the first iPod came out?"
No, actually I don't. Apple were late to the party with the iPod. There had been literally dozens of highly successful portable MP3 players before the iPod hit the shelves. I do remember plenty of people pointing out that the iPod was overpriced and overspecc'd, but no-one claimed at that point that MP3's were geek only.
As for Java, Flash, Ajax and the mythical Web 2.0, well, really, not that big a deal. Most useful websites avoid them all on the front end, and in high load situations avoid them on the back end too. Most of those that do use flash are better off without it to boot.
CSS on the other hand has done a lot for web sites and the structure thereof. Strange you missed out just about the only genuinely beneficial addition since Mosaic.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
So, I spent the 20 minutes watching it and I'm impressed - by the lack of memory. My 4 GB iPod nano is full, my wife's 8 GB is nearly always so, and between us, we never have the songs we want on the road.
Now to add my contacts, photos, and even more stuff (that I could carry on my nano, but don't) - I'm not worried about Web 2.0 - I'm worried that "the best iPod ever" is a kinda a step backwards if I take back even more music....
Please don't even get me started about how desparately I'd like integrated GPS. I think it's an iPod and a neo1973 (or later) shaping up for yours truly.... (with nods to open music stds, etc, etc, etc -ok?)
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
The internet on phones is a very small portion of hits, a tiny percentage, then take into account the iphone is aiming for a 1% market share of that already small (web-wise) market. Anyone reprogramming their whole website for that few people is a little insane methinks.
We should definitely make sure the best ever experience for the iPhone! Right!
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Some stats based upon web client hype as of late:
1. iPhone: 5 million publications of iPhone taking over the world
2. Safari for Win: 3.2 million benchmarks proving Safari is teh greatest Windows browser ever.
3. Firefox: 2.1 million "take the web back" propaganda blog posts.
612. IE6: 1 positive article and 40 million "I hate IE" quotes from IRC Efnet.
And now, let's see the web client stats:
1. IE6: 448 million people
2. IE7: 128 million people
3. Firefox: 96 million people
821. iPhone: 11 people (including Steve Jobs)
Puts things in perspective.
Your grasp of W3C's standards seems very limited then. W3C has been pushing accessibility across devices for years. It's nothing new that there are "hoverless" devices, even CSS spec says it excplicitly:
Almost every "Web 2.0" site I visit actually works less well than equivalent sites did years ago. [...] Forum software prevents me from replying in a new window, or heck, even gracefully switching between threads.
Remember, a lot of sites sucked pre-web-2.0 too. Many a time I've seen web 1.0 sites which break if you want to perform two searches for different strings at the same time - instead they store your search against your 'session ID' cookie and overwrite the first search when you do your second - then terminate your session for inactivity after about 30 seconds.
I think part of the appeal of 'web 2.0' was that, initially, it was being done only by competent designers - if it was web 2.0 you knew it would be okay with tabs and multiple windows. However, web 2.0 is now popular, so the crap designers who designed the crap web 1.0 sites are now designing crap web 2.0 sites, and so the cycle begins anew.
I have a 3G phone with a great screen, and I still use all the mobile versions of web sites on it. The iPhone an EDGE device with a tiny screen (even if it's not quite as tiny as other EDGE devices). You will not want to browse regular "Web 2.0" web sites with this even if the browser can (sort of) render it and you can get to each part of the page with a lot of scrolling.
No, I don't foresee a lot of web sites changing because of this. There will be some die-hard iPhone web sites that will make sure that they only render correctly on the iPhone, but everybody else will have desktop and mobile sites, and the mobile sites will aim for usability on something between a 120x120 and 240x240 screen (the smaller dimensions of common landscape/portrait screens), with larger screens seeing a bit more.
Regular web sites start becoming usable on a mobile device at 640x480 and 3G speeds.
fix and uh, there's more of it
This is no big problem. The MacBooks have multitouch pads and the iPhone will have multitouch. Modern mice have tiltweels (allthough mine from logitech sux big time). What I see lurking around the corner, also enforced by the ever growing amount of widescreens is that horizontal scrolling probably will become more common. Just as the mouseweel change vertical bannerisation of websites (and factually made the one-month per html doc blog as we know it possible) mutlitouch + widescreen + tiltweel might introduce horizontal scrolling or something like it to websites and documents. Sidescrolling with a MacBook multitouch pad is a breeze and could easyly turn it from a no-no to a standard. Look at the iPhone commercial scrolling around the New York Times and you get an impression that we might move away from the vertical blog to the pane blog.
I'm actually thinking of building a site with 5 columns instead of the usual 3 because of all this. Designers will adapt and within a year adaption will be complete.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What's an iPhone?
The way I see it, if my stds compliant site doesn't work on **any** device/browser, that's not my problem. I don't change my website for IE, why would I change it for something I haven't heard of? Heck, my picture gallery doesn't work with IE (for some reason, don't really care), so my extended family had to switch to Firefox/something else to see the baby pictures. They all did. A few years ago, I did change a small part of it to support my BlackBerry, but that was personal.
At work, if the website has special browser needs, that will be built into the requirements. If not, it is just more hours/money to make it the way the customer wanted but didn't document in requirements. Either way, I'm paid by the hour. Happy to do it.
So, when can I expect the article author's "Designing Web Sites for the iPhone" book to hit store shelves?
As several dozen people have pointed out before me, if you design a site to degrade gracefully, this should be a non-issue. I don't expect that Apple is going to somehow graft multi-touch interaction on to web applications (I suspect even their lauded interaction with the phone book is just an implementation of the WTAI standards that have been around for ages; click to call and all that).
But I do expect publishers to already be working on rehashing some of their existing web design titles, grafting on a few pages or a chapter outlining the technical specs of the iPhone, slapping a glossy of the device on the cover and getting some poor out-of-work web developers to plunk down 50 bucks on lessons in developing for the hot new thing.
Why should I have to change my website when the iPhone is capable of accessing "the real internet" using its full-featured Safari web browser, like Apple claims in the ads? Let's just wait and see just how "real" the "internet" is on the iPhone and AT&T's data services before we start making potentially expensive and time consuming concessions for a single device they may very well fail.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Are websites in general, or Web 2.0 sites, driven by mobile computing standards? HAhahahahardly. I've had various devices supporting old WAP, PocketIE, other net-browsing clients, for seven or eight years now. It's only in the past two or three years I've seen anyone giving decent consideration to mobile platforms -- GoDaddy has a mobile version of their webmail, Google of course is offering more and more mobile-friendly or mobile-centric services.
In general, however, mobile computing has failed to be the tail that wags the dog. Posing this question overinflates the importance of the iPhone. We've had mobile computing struggling to get dedicated web apps for years. We've had touch screens available from Palm and Pocket PC devices for years. Why would the iPhone succeed in changing the way developers design their websites or web apps where these other significant market forces have failed? It's nothing more than a shiny screen and shiny box wrapped around and slapped on a years-old paradigm. Every day I see developers coming to MSDN asking where to go to learn about designing for small screens, for touch screens -- which is great, but the sheer number of them indicates the failure of this body of knowledge and set of skills to fully permeate development world.
No, I won't be changing my sites or apps to accommodate the iPhone, but I will certainly continue to do my best to appeal to as wide as possible an audience, without leaving my target demographics in the dust.
I am, therefore you think.
The phone is a thin client. Currently, only a few phones really qualify as being a robust thin client, but the smart phone is really the first widely accepted consumer thin client. And currently, the portion of the total cell phone market that is smart phones/thin clients is small. But this is going to change in a big way relatively quickly as the technology (both in the phones and in the networks) becomes ubiquitous.
I'm not sure of the numbers, but I believe that the number of phones surpasses the number of computers on the internet by a wide margin. So anyone who wants to target an audience bigger than the current one that uses desktops and laptops better get their rears in gear and begin to at least plan for this whole new market.
Apple and Google have been planning (and I think creating) a part of the network tailored to phone devices. Or more than just the phone devices. The release of Safari for Windows makes more sense if Google and Apple are about to open their own structured section of the net that will be putting more services on the browser while giving more capabilities to the user and developer. Safari gives them more control over the browser, but it's not exactly a return to the MS "embrace and extend" paradigm because (so far this Millennium) Apple and Google have been good about supporting open standards. Watch for Apple and Google to begin offering more tools to developers and businesses to create their own niches in this new environment.
When you start looking for a grand strategy, and I mean a really grand, audacious, breathtaking strategy, all these recent moves by both Apple and Google make a lot more sense. Apple has Safari (and the open source WebKit), the iPhone and iTunes (as well as the iLife suite on the OS X computer platform). Google has Google Labs, Calendar, mail, maps, marketplace, YouTube, Google Gears, Blogger, Picasa, the list goes on. Google has a huge latent infrastructure, if the stories of shipping containers are true. Apple has OS X server which now runs on intel hardware. And WebObjects. Could Google and Apple offer a virtual(ized) OS X server to businesses and individuals (hosted on Google's servers)? (This could also be a way to move more developers to Macs. Remember, Apple is all about selling hardware.)
All of this is just a wild guess, of course. There's a lot of clues, but it might all be coincidental.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
the day after your boss gets an iphone.
My website is full of porn. Adult, human, hetero porn. What would be the point accommodating iPhone users?
No more than anyone did for web browsing on the PSP. Will this question arise every time another form of web browsing appears? Will we someday have to have about a dozen different versions of web pages in order to cater to a dozen different methods of accessing the web? I sure hope not. Complying to web standards should be enough. I dream of a day when browsers have to comply with web standards, not the other way around.
did they come and ask anyone in conferences ? conventions ? any standards body/organization ? heck, even any developer forum ?
there are enough troubles trying to make websites work with 4 different type of notable browsers and their versions and wap already. we developers wont be giving a jack about ipone or its follies and change zillions of lines of code for just one fancy dandy trendy company's fancy dandy product. fanatics of that particular company can do whatever they want with their seemingly limitless blogs, yet commercial developer scene wont be interested.
Read radical news here
No it isn't. The page http://www.geekbiker.net/ is served with the content type text/html, not the correct application/xhtml+xml.
One question: In HTML 4.01 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Strict, or subsequent versions of XHTML, the value attribute of the li element is removed. So in these languages, how do you make an ordered list with values other than starting at 1 and increasing by 1? For instance, how would you express a top ten list where natural reading order of the elements is from the element numbered 10 to the element numbered 1 rather than from 1 to 10, or the track listing of Follow the Leader by Korn where the first element is numbered 13? Are people supposed to make lists with a dozen empty li elements that are styled display: none?
The mistaken deprecations of some attributes such as the value attribute of the li element are why I continue to use the Transitional DTD despite following the spirit of Strict. The inability of the web user agent with 80 percent market share to correctly interpret XHTML's correct DOCTYPE (application/xhtml+xml which results in a download rather than a displayed page), combined with the idiotic gyrations needed to incorporate CSS and script into an "appendix C" XHTML file due to the change from CDATA to PCDATA and the fact that XHTML served as text/html is actually tag soup, are why I continue to use HTML 4.01.
Moderator Dudes. This was intended to be funny, as in, "your hostility toward an obviously cool new gadget like iPhone is clearly just sour grapes, because your execution date is probably scheduled for June 28, 2007, the day before iPhone is available for purchase." Granted, it's kinda subtle, but it's mildly amusing. Perhaps it isn't worthy of a Funny mod, but it's not a Troll.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You are my hero!
Most of the stuff on
I'm waiting for web 2.718... and web 3.141...
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
by many handheld browsers anyway. Pocket IE is utter and total crap (at least the version that comes with Windows Mobile 2003). No key events (which ideally should be there since there is an analogous input), button elements are not rendered, etc.
LedgerSMB is designed to work on hand-helds, but we do not support Pocket IE. Heck, we don't even support IE6 or lower on Windows because of broken support for button elements. (MSDN is wrong both about the standard behavior *and* what IE7 does. Talk about silent bugfixes.)
I foresee no problems with LedgerSMB and the iPhone as long as you tell the system that you want to use the suitable interface. However, unless it becomes a requirement by an important user, I dont see us going out of our way for it. But then we are willing to drop support for IE6 in order to have proper i18n support...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Like it or not, touch screens are going to become increasingly prevalent. If updating your site for the iPhone means that it will work with other touch screen devices, then you're ahead of the game. The main thing that's different about a touch screen device is that there is no mouse-over or hovering of the cursor. There is no real cursor either, just clicks at specific coordinates. As long as your site navigation doesn't depend on mouse-over events, and you've implemented some kind of workaround if you're relying on Flash for navigation, then you should be golden. It could be that there is some technical reason Flash is not present on iPhone-class devices (CPU/memory requirements maybe), and you'll start seeing more similar devices ship without Flash support. If you can have the flexibility to target those kinds of devices without too much effort, it would be stupid not to.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Would it be possible to detect two fingers placed on the screen simultaneously as seperate signals? If it is couldn't you set the presence of two somewhat approximately parallel signals as a means to activate a hover mode? does that makes sense to anyone else? just set the left or right signal as the hover enabled cursor
Who the fuck cares about the iShit? There are several other phones with better features, true 3G/EDGE etc available *today* at lower prices. Opera and IE run on these phones.
Shameless plug, but I wrote a little more in-depth on this topic last week.
I strongly believe that economy of motion is going to be key for usability on touch sensitive devices, and it's somewhat disappointing that you won't be able to drag or hold due to the scrolling gestures on the iPhone. In the back of my head, I'd started formulating a drag & drop form interface that would be clunky in a traditional browser, but very quick on small touchscreens.
I do think that segment is poised to explode over the next couple of years. Just take a look at your web logs on your sites... how many mobile users/pageviews do you have right now? Close to none? That's going to change very soon.
It strikes me as interesting that developing usable apps for the iPhone is remarkably similar to building pages for those with disabilities from a usability standpoint -- no hovers, no hover drill-down menus, large targets on click.
Yes in the case of a normal web application, graceful degradation will work and doesn't constitute much of a problem.
But for a game I think this is pretty interesting, since action should occur fluidly as things happen, not just when you press a button. As you move your mouse, for example, your opponent is going to track those motions and behave accordingly.
It seems like gestures, where you rub your finger continuously on the screen, might substitute for this. The problem is that we then get into the question of an API to read these gestures, which is precisely what developers are complaining about, that they cannot do so at this point. Furthermore, your ability to read the screen while making these gestures is reduced significantly.
Do mouse events fire under these circumstances? Clearly we are not going to know until we get our hands on an actual iPhone, or one of its successors.
D
If Apple's exposing multiple pointers and not providing some analog of the normal mouse actions through Safari on the iPhone, then they're going to cause problems for iPhone users for more than just the so-called "web 2.0" sites.
If there *is* a problem with these sites with the iPhone, then file bug reports with Apple. It's their job to fix them.
You mean like this one: http://www.apple.com/iphone/?
I also got the impression that it may not be as bad as people think. A swipe across a page vs a drag and drop action are two different actions. DND is slower than swipe, so if the UI is tuned to that then there should not be a problem. I could be wrong. CSS menues should work fine, because mouse over == finger on, and mouse click == finger tap. There are finger taps that simulate double click and single click.
Also you should be designing your UI for the visually impaired anyway. If your site is done properly, then it should not be a problem.
I can't wait to see how much iPhones go for sale on ebay! (ROTFLOL.. you know they will)
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Back when I had a Handspring Visor with a modem, I used it to dial up the net for a time. There was a web browser called Palmscape that I used. Palmscape connected to the web through a proxy server and resized images, etc., to make the tiny screen and UI of the Visor workable.
The Iphone will be serviced by a single wireless provider. Let that provider filter the web for these things. Provide one big proxy, or a bunch of distributed proxies, that the Iphone connects through.
My only hope is that you meta-moderate, every day, so that we can weed some of these idiots out of the mod pool. This place is getting to be as bad as digg.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The big problem, of course, is that cellphone companies are greedy and not visionary; they've been making scads of money selling 10-cent text messaging to teenagers and selling old-pager-priced data services to businesses, and they don't want to let go of that mindset just because the technology's changed and the users want something different. And so far it's working for them:-)
To cut them some slack, though, there are two parts to their cost - the underlying internet, for which there's really no excuse not to allow unlimited bandwidth, but also the hardware and operational cost for their radio equipment and spectrum. The per-bit cost for the radio side has come way down with the newer technologies, probably by a couple of orders of magnitude, but the capacity still has limits, and if they offered actually unlimited unlimited service at a cheap price, they'd burn through it pretty fast and their service would start to degrade.
I don't know if they know what the real capacity is, or what the real market is, but we've seen with several other technologies what happens when you offer people "unlimited" service without being prepared for customers having a different idea of what they want to do with the service than you did. I don't mind too much if they aren't willing to go there - but they shouldn't be calling their service "unlimited" when it's actually "very limited".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I dont underestimate the iPhone's impact, rather I disagree with most people posting here about how either won't matter, or will require every custom U/I Web 2.0 site be rethought immediately.
.mobi domains incredibly easy. I'm not sure if anybody else in the e-commerce industry does that yet. ??
While it's true that it's Apple's responsibility to ensure compatibility - can we all be honest and say "they won't." Apples image is all about being edgy and fun, and DIFFERENT and if that means that some conformist IE "tested" sites don't work, it's not their problem. Apple has a track record of introducing disruptive products, so I don't think breaking a few websites will cause them to lose any sleep.
The reality is that the Web 2.0+AJAX is around to stay, and big popular sites offering "rich content" which utilize the latest and greatest technology to deliver a better experience will end up with more users, regardless of their impact of the iPhone. If your site gets enough traffic, you can afford to detect the browser type (even if it's just Safari in general and screw the rest of the mac population - let 'em use firefox) and then redirect + downgrade the experience e.g. http://www.safari.domain.com/ -- this will be necessary in order to monetize the most traffic possible - it's just common business sense.
If you run an e-commerce site, looking into a platform that offers a CMS (Content Management System) that allows you to have one product & content database, with multiple different websites is certainly what you're looking for if you want to maximize your revenue. Platforms like Zoovy http://www.zoovy.com/ offer the ability to display different sites to different users pretty easily, in addition to being able to do very cool A/B multi-variable testing. This makes supporting everything between Web 2.0/AJAX &
But having multiple websites built from the same content is relatively easy.
Hope that helps.
On the other hand, why should he go out of his way for the iPhone? It seems pretty clear that he isn't making special versions for all the other phone/PDA type devices out there, so why should the iPhone be any different?
That's what I'm saying. Just design websites that work well, and worry about the browser handling them well - it's sipposed to. Don't make a mobile version just to suit the iPhone, if you weren't going to anyway (or even if you were).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Will You Change Your Web Site For the iPhone?
When Apple cuts me a check I'll be happy to change my website for the iPhone.
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
I can't see expending the money to buy an iPhone service contract just to test against the iPhone. If Apple provides a web page that shows me what my page looks like on the the iPhone screen, I'll use it, but I haven't heard about such a page.
I've experimented with making some of my pages work against various "smart phones", but experimenting with friends' phones has taught me that this is a hopless task. The browsers on every phone and handheld are different and idiosyncratic, and there's no way I can guess how they'll garble my stuff.
I do take pains to make my own web pages as standard-compliant as possible, and I avoid using anything very tricky. But even with this, I've seen garbling of the simplest things that I just can't learn how to handle.
Thus, two of my web sites return music notation, in the form of GIF, PNG, PS or PDF files. Users request the GIF 90% of the time, and I've seen that on most phones, GIFs are munged to fit on the screen with a range of algorithms. And most of them make most of the thin horizontal lines disappear. This makes the result utterly unreadable. Experimenting with the size and shape of the GIFs doesn't fix the problem. Even if the GIF's pixel count is smaller than the phone's screen, some munging is almost always done, and the staff lines disappear. If this were done the same on all small screens, I'd have hope, but the lines that disappear are different on different screens. This tells me that the task is hopeless.
I've also had some fun trying to get Chinese, Japanese and Arabic to display on friends' smart/dumb phones, with little success. Now, most of these were manufactured in Asia, so this is a bit baffling. But I'm in the US, where most commercial computers have all non-English stuff damaged beyond repair, even when it worked at the factory. It'll be interesting to see if the iPhone handles non-Western languages correctly, but I don't expect much.
In any case, there seems to be nothing I can find that tells me how to deal with this sort of problem. US vendors don't care (because the whole world should just use English, y'know).
So is there a way that a random web developer can find out how a page will look on the iPhone? For that matter, is there a way to do this for any handheld, phone or otherwise?
I can't personally afford a service contract for every model that's on the market.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
And you didn't even mention the futility of bookmarking a page whose state was altered using AJAX.
AJAX is for web applications and portals where there is an advantage of updating a portion of the page (instead of the whole) for long-term interaction with the same content. For normal sites it is overkill - and as you describe, incurs an overhead in the amounts of Javascript needed.
Best case scenario with the iPhone held horizontally, a column of text 7-9 words across will be viewed at about 12 point text. Most website columns are 15 words across. That means your copy will look like 9 Point text. Too small. iPhone Widget List has diagrams of the iPhone with 12 point copy in columns. Vertically, you get 5-7 words across, Landscape, you get 7-9 words. See it here (with more commentary on designing for iPhone):
http://iphonewidgetlist.com/why.html
#2: The 5-15 million (this year) iPhone users represent a market that is willing to pay a lot of money for a shiny thing.
That's a great self selected demographic for your advertisers. I know at My First Mac, we will do something to accomodate them.
Apple has released the FIRST TOUCHSCREEN EVER! Everybody drop what they're doing and hurmph about the problems this causes!
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
I'm sure there's someone out there that cares, but personally I find mouse-overs annoying. Most annoying is when I'm reading a somewhat in depth article on tomshardware and I get a mouse over pop-up giving the definition for some pretty basic things.
And nobody else should either. If it can't handle standards then it isn't my fault.
Yes, the iPhone made me create a whole new site. 2 in fact.
http://iphonetester.com/ and http://iphone.wikidot.com/
Mountain/\Ash