Check out this new iPhone JavaScript library, iUI, by Joe Hewitt. The team at Digg has already put this into practice, releasing a beta of an iPhone-optimized version of digg.com. You can view this at digg.com/iphone. If you don’t have an iPhone but want to get a virtual iPhone browsing experience, download iPhoney (mac only).
iUI is about more than just visuals, it aims to make web apps as usable as Apple’s own. One usability problem I kept witnessing in early iPhone web apps was a lack of support for the back button. While using these apps I often found myself hitting back and being sent two or three “pages” backwards. The reason is that most apps are using single-page navigation, which skirts the browser’s own history. The single-page model is the right way to go, but it is imperative that the back button still works, because if I’m going to wait 3 minutes to load a page over EDGE and then have to load it again because the back button accidentally sent me away from your site, I’m not going to be happy.
That’s why I think the best feature of iUI is that it makes single-page navigation usable. It keeps the back and forward buttons working and optionally inserts a captioned back button into your app’s toolbar. It slides smoothly between pages (at least as smoothly as Safari can go, which is about 1/10th as smooth as native apps) instead of the unpleasant flicker and jumpiness that accompanies a fresh page load.
Nice app. I am waiting to get my hands on a iphone just to see it for real. Looks like a very cool phone…
Hi Mike,
In order to keep working with AIR in the Flexbuilder 3 beta I decided to buy FlexBuilder 2 when the demo expired last week. But it just occurred to me that as a result I’ll need to purchase the upgrade too once FlexBuilder 3 moves out of beta. So I would like to recommend that Adobe offer a free upgrade all new buyers to FlexBuilder 3 –provided they purchased Flexbuilder 2 after the Beta was released. I think you’ll find that this offers a greater incentive to developers to try the product out beyond the 30 demo expiration period.
Aptana has a nice plugin for making iPhone-centric ajax apps.
I am waiting to get my hands on a iphone just to see it for real. Looks like a very cool phone…
Hello!
I think this try.
Can a normal website work on the iphone phone or do web designers need to design different to get them to work. I thought they all worked everywhere. Interesting post.
A normal site should work on the iPhone, however it would be better to design according to the display size of the iPhone.