Rob Goodlatte

Steve Jobs announced at Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference that the iPhone needs no SDK — the built-in version of Safari allows developers to build iPhone apps as simple web applications. This isn’t terrible news — the iPhone version of Safari looks to have clever hooks that allow phone numbers to be dialed and address locations to be sent into the iPhone’s custom Google Maps application (microformats? — hopefully).

However, the WWDC demo shown by Apple’s iPhone VP showcased an address book application running inside Safari — not as a standalone app. We want iPhone applications that are accessible from the main menu — not from a Safari bookmark. My suggestion on how Apple should implement menu icons — allow developers to add an application icon to a web page through a <rel> tag (just like a favicon) and present this icon on the main menu if the user chooses to install the app. Simple for both developers and Apple, and there’s no risk of “instability”.

An aside— who approved “Web 2.0” as a set of standards?

 

1. Ted Jacobson June 12th at 3:15 pm

   It would be nice to have applications accessible from the main menu, but I don’t think its completely neccessary. Web applications for desktop users don’t have installable icons in the operating system.

2. Patrick Haney June 13th at 10:04 am

   Rob, I totally agree with you on this. While going to Safari on my iPhone is sure to be simple enough, I don’t want to have to do that, open my bookmarks, find the one I use most, tap on it, and wait for it to open when I could instead get right to it from the main iPhone screen. We’ll just have to wait a few weeks to see if it’ll be possible to create shortcuts to our Safari bookmarks or not.

3. Toby oneal December 13th at 11:17 pm

   WE WANT TEXAS HOLD’EM!!!

 

Name

Mail

Website