Some people have been dogging the iPhone and Mobile Safari as “the new IE6”. The sentiment being that we’re going back to the “Best Viewed in XXX Browser” era. I am unabashedly in favor of this particular icing on the internet cake mostly because we are still living with IE6. :^)
What I mean to say is that having a locked down platform that is guaranteed to support all of HTML5’s new features means that web developers can innovate using the shiny new tools in the toolbox and hopefully those uses will make their way back into web development at large.
In addition, if you give an executive the choice between supporting IE6 and doing up a good iPhone / mobile implementation I think we’re at the tipping point where decision-makers are leaning away from IE6 and towards these newer technologies.
Like icing, however, too much of it can ruin a good cake. I don’t really want iPhone-only sites, but instead good small-screen experiences driving improvements which in turn drive faster and ~nicer~ desktop experiences.
My six month prediction sees an increase in “IE6 is officially not supported” messaging with IE6 phased out for the internet at large within a year or so (ie: one of the major JS frameworks drops IE6 support, makes it optional, or drops active testing against it).
A neat trick you can start playing with now is the following mojo to trigger different mobile Safari keyboards on web pages (nice!) which all devolve into <input type=”text”>:
Browser Support
What’s most interesting is that we’re starting to see some of these features
get implemented into browsers.
<input type=”number”> - iPhone keypad loads with numerics
<input type=”url”> - iPhone keypad loads with “.com” button
<input type=”email”> - iPhone keypad loads with “@” sign
Mobile Safari (on the iPhone) was quick out of the gate by adding support for
number, email and url. No validation is performed but special keyboards for
each input type are presented to aid in entering a value.
Most recently, Chrome 5 beta has support for the placeholder attribute.
And if you want to see state of the art on iPhone web experiences, check out the following:
NextStop.com - uses geolocation, local caching / storage, in-page ajax
m.expatliving.sg - uses page transitions, inline flick-scroll, and good URL-hiding
Joe Hewitt’s iUI - an older, general purpose library that managed to fool me into thining I had Belle & Sebastian on my iPhone when I accidentally left it up on the artist page.
Edit: *jQTouch - just ran into this one, looks like the jQuery toolkit for apps, lots of neat animations although in some ways it doesn’t feel as native
If the airline charges $1 per ticket of course the plane will fill, but
the total revenue of $150 barely pays for an hour of a pilot’s salary. If
they charge $1000 a ticket then if they could fill the plane they’d make a
fortune, but only a small number of people are willing to fly at that price,
so again they can’t equal the fixed costs of flying a plane. But if the
airline can make those who are willing to pay it pay $1000, and others pay
$800, and others $500, maybe down to $100 or so, then the sum total over all
passengers is sufficient to pay for the fixed costs. In fact, some estimates
put the incremental cost of flying a single passenger as low as $30 (for the
meal and baggage and ticket handling), so that once the airline has committed
to flying the plane it is in their interest to sell a ticket for $30 rather
than let a seat go empty. But they must keep those who can pay more from
buying their ticket at low prices, a tough balancing act.
At Google, we generally program in three languages: C++, Java, and Python.
None of them are functional languages: are all state-heavy, imperative,
object-oriented languages. But the more I’ve read and written code in this
code-base, the more I’ve found that functional code is the best way of
building large things.
Actually, I lie. It’s not Deep Space Nine (DS9), but instead The Original Series (TOS), but I’m taking some poetic liberty here on account of its awesomeness.
Star Trek + NIN Closer == Awesome.
In other news, I’m attempting to aggregate my social media again. Hopefully I’ll get my tweets, my delicious links, other RSS, etc. Oh, the perils of not giving in and just using facebook.
Thank you Mr. McCain for your decency and honesty. I sincerely appreciate it and think that a respectful “tone” like the one you demonstrated is one of the most important issues for this presidential election.
I don’t want someone who thinks that suspending habeus corpus is the right thing to do. Or that ignoring subpoenas is the right thing to do. Or that warrantless wiretapping is the right thing to do.
I don’t want someone who (through inaction) tacitly condones these types of actions. I don’t want someone who sets that type of example. I want someone who sees something that is wrong and says: “No way.”
I think that Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden have at least talked about significant improvements in the tone or character of U.S. government. One video that did a lot to convince me of this was this one. It’s a standard “political promise” video but look at what the topics he chooses to tackle are. “I will put any bill that I’m going to sign online for five days before I sign it.” Who is asking for that? Why is he offering that? Do you want that? That’s what I mean about setting the tone.
