The iPhone is an amazing new platform that developers the world over are chomping at the bit to get their apps on. What we know is that the only way to get your app on an iPhone day one is to create it as a web page. Users will access your content through Safari on the device. iPhone apps are already starting to pop up all over the web, and Apple has graciously provided both Windows and Mac platforms with the “iPhone development kit” (Safari 3).
There are a lot of reasons to complain about their choice to not let us put “real” apps on the phone. But let’s try to get beyond that. Even if Apple will give us no more than lemons, let’s at least try to make the best lemonade possible.
I’ve been playing with some of the more unique aspects of Safari 3 for the last few days. It is a very capable browser. The JavaScript support is much improved over the last version. It can handle the canvas element, as well as SVG. It’s fully ACID2 compliant, and it’s really, really fast. I have no double that, even though we’re restricted to the browser, the community will be coming up with some really brilliant apps.
The biggest limitation, even more than the lack of Flash, seems to be the notoriously slow EDGE network Apple chose for it’s first generation of handsets. The biggest challenge when programming for this device, in my opinion, is going to be to make our apps as responsive as possible when the user is reaching them over the EDGE network.