“This is not a watered down version of the internet.” That’s the claim made by Apple in the fourth of its recent US TV ads. But Apple’s specifications for web developers that were recently posted on the University of Washington website (now deleted but available on MacRumors), suggest otherwise.
Key web technologies Flash and Java will not be available on the iPhone’s Safari web browser, and even Javascript apps will be limited to five-second running time. Offering a reduced browsing experience will not play well for Apple if hyped-up new iPhone owners start complaining. It might have a hard time advertising the iPhone in the UK; misleading claims don’t go down well with the Advertising Standards Authority.
On the upside, web developers will be able to create live links to iPhone Google Maps directions, and to telephone numbers. And although Apple has already convinced YouTube to offer its content in an iPhone-compatible Quicktime video format rather than Flash-based, it’s browsing the other 99.9% of the internet that we’re worried about.
The full specs and notes from MacRumors are reproduced below:
Apple listed what the iPhone offers for websites:
- the page view feature lets you look at multiple websites and documents by scrolling thru them one after another
- Full PDF support
- double tap for zoom in
- one finger as a mouse used to
– pan page
– press and hold to display the information bubble
- two fingers as a mouse used to
– pinch content to shrink - zoom out
– pan page
– scroll wheel events
- new telephone links allows you to integrate phone calls directly from your webpage. remember this is only on safari.
- built in google maps client for integrated mapping from your website
- 10MB max html size for web page
- Javascript limited to 5 seconds run time
- Javascript allocations limited to 10MB
- 8 documents maximum loaded on the iPhone due to page view limitations
- Quicktime used for audio and video
- separate html and css
- use well structured and valid html
- size images appropriately dont rely on browser scaling
- tile small images in backgrounds, dont use large backgroung images
- iPhone supports both EDGE and WiFi. EDGE pipe is smaller than WIFI pipe so think about bandwidth when developing.
- XHTML mobile documents supported
- stylesheet device width:480px
- apply different css for the iPhone. For example displaying a one column page for iphone vs a 3 column page on a desktop.
- there are no scroll bars or resize knobs. the iphone will automatically expand the content
- Avoid framesets, scrollable frames are automatically expanded to fit the content
- iPhone User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3
- Video: H.264 baseline profile level 3.0 up to 640 x 480
It would be alot better if they made it play Flash files, its now a main core of the internet, and alot of ‘fun’ things, cant be bothered to name them. But online games etc, are created with Flash. I can understand that Apple want to use their own products only, (in this case Quicktime). But thats a little too limited. This kind of thing would put me off purchasing the phone.
Isn’t YouTube’s videos driven by flash?
Apple has convinced YouTube to convert its entire video back catalogue into iPhone-friendly H.264 format.
How about “aren’t”?
Chris Jun 21st, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Isn’t YouTube’s videos driven by flash?
I believe the reason they don’t support flash is for battery life. The iPhone has a dedicated h.264 decoder chip, so playing back video doesn’t use much CPU power, and hence saves battery. Flash and Java don’t get this, so running them uses the CPU more, killing your battery.
What’s the big deal. According to Adobe’s site, only two hand held devices support Flash.
http://www.adobe.com/mobile/supported_devices/pda.html
So we beat up Apple for not providing it? What about Palm or RIM?
The big deal is that, as far we we know, RIM and Palm are not going around telling the world that their handsets don’t offer, ‘The watered down internet’. Apple is making claims that - in terms of its own device - don’t seem to hold water (s’cuse the pun).
Adobe’s Flash Lite technology runs dedicated Flash apps/ games/ movies on dozens of handsets (including many Nokias and Sony Ericssons), but that’s obviously a different thing to in-browser support, as you say.