The iPhone and iPod Touch web development workshop that I attended in Sydney on Thursday and Friday last week was excellent.
Apple have a lot of extremely interesting innovations available in these devices that are also finding their way into the desktop version of Apple's Safari web browser. Subsequently, these new features are also finding their way into the Opera web browser as it is based heavily on the same core engine as Safari, the Webkit rendering engine. Unfortunately, I can't go into the exact details of these new features, but you can be sure that I will be incorporating this new functionality everywhere that is suitable in all of our new designs.
The Gecko rendering engine used by Mozilla's Firefox browser and a number of other smaller browsers has implemented some similar features, but they are not yet up to the same level as the Webkit rendering engine.
Unfortunately, Internet Explorer does not yet support any of these features, even in Internet Explorer 7. So you can expect that any designs including these features will degrade gracefully so that they still look great on Internet Explorer. As roughly 50% of internet users use either Internet Explorer 6 or Internet Explorer 7, this does limit the amount of creativity that can be had with these new features, but putting them there will hopefully push Microsoft to include some similar features in new versions of the Internet Explorer browser.
As far as mobile functionality goes, Apple have almost entirely replaced the need for any plug-ins and hopefully Opera Mobile will follow suit, making designing mobile browser applications much easier. Internet Explorer Mobile is of course much more limited than the current versions of both Safari Mobile and Opera Mobile. We can only hope that Microsoft's next version of Internet Explorer Mobile includes greatly increased functionality features similar to those present in Safari Mobile.
In addition to our current test systems, our future website designs will also be tested on the iPhone using Safari Mobile and we will be more than happy to provide iPhone specific designs should you desire them.
Have you got an iPhone? Let us know in the comments below what you think of the internet functionality on it and what you would like to see done in an iPhone web application.
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