There’s a lot of buzz in the web development community about developing for the iPhone. I’ve been following this topic since the Apple announcement last month.
I’m all for it. This is a big step for web development on portable devices. I hope other pda and smartphone makers follow Apple’s lead. I took a quick look at the developer documentation today and found some interesting things I wanted to point out.
- Integrate phone calls, maps and emails using links. Mail and map links are not different from what we use on normal browsers (“mailto:anemail@domain.com” and ” http://maps.google.com?address”) but phone links use a new url format which starts with “tel:”.
Here’s an example:1
<a href="tel:1-123-444-5555">Call Me</a>
- Assign an iPhone style sheet with the link tag.
1 2 3 4 5
<link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" href="iPhone.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" />
This is new to me. Seems like its part of the CSS3 recommendation.
- iPhone doesn’t support window.showModalDialog(), mouse-overs, hover styles, tool tips, java applets, flash, plugin installation or custom x.509 certificates.
- PDFs, Cookies and user-initiated window-open calls are supported but there’s a limit of 8 pages (8 open windows) in page view.
Here are some iPhone third party apps:
http://www.launchpadhq.com/
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/502-ta-da-list-for-iphone
http://digg.com/iphone
