Better Browsing on Mobile
The partial port of the SR web page shows that it's not difficult to move a subset of a company's web-based applications onto the iPhone. I was able to locate and use an off-the-shelf framework and custom Javascript software to impart an iPhone look and feel to the SR web page. Would using an iPhone for SR reporting risk vendor lock-in? Not really, which brings us back to the point I made at the start of this article. Apple's iPhone has raised the bar on what's acceptable for a smartphone browser. Mobile users will demand that their browsers be fully capable of viewing the web—albeit painfully slow at times—and executing light-weight web applications. Over time, the performance of both the platform and Javascript will improve; thereby expanding what a mobile phone is capable of doing for us. It should come as no surprise that Apple's added SquirrelFish, a high-speed Javascript interpreter, to the WebKit rendering engine.
You can expect other smartphone vendors to improve the capabilities of their browsers as fast as they can. When that happens, then we'll run web apps on any phone that we choose. That's an outcome that will be good for all of us.
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Steps to Writing an iPhone Web Page
1. Prototype and write the page's code on a standards-compliant desktop browser, such as FireFox 3 or Opera 9.x I prefer FireFox because then I can apply Aptana's Firebug to debug the Javascript. Note that for these two browsers that iUI's buttons don't render well, but it's good enough for code testing.
2. If you haven't already, modify the application's interfaces so that they don't use mouseover events.
3. Test and fix the page with the desktop version of Safari 3.x. The iUI buttons render fine on this browser. Clean up any quirks with events or side-effects to CSS selectors.
4. Do final test and revisions on the iPhone. Be prepared for another round of fixes for quirks and CSS side-effects. Also, you may have to tweak the interface for the small screen. Don't forget to re-orient the phone and verify that you haven't hard-coded the screen positions of any of the application's elements or controls! |
