Apple iPhone Tech Talk Debriefing - Part 1

I attended Apple’s iPhone Tech Talk in San Francisco yesterday (24 Aug 2007). Although I’ve stayed on top of everything related to iPhone Web 2.0 app development since the iPhone hit the streets on 26 June 2007, it was nice to finally attend an Apple sanctioned event. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t alot of new information (there was one very important piece of info about Canvas which I address in Part 2 of this series), but it was interesting to hear Apple’s opinion on iPhone web app design.

There were roughly 100-150 attendees. The Apple contingent included: John Geleynse - Apple User Experience Evangelist Mark Malone - Apple Internet Technologies Evangelist Matt Drance - Apple Sharing Technologies Evangelist Mike Jurewitz - Apple Developer Tools Evangelist Allan Schaffer - Apple Graphics Technologies Evangelist Linda Ouandji - Apple Developer Tech Support Allison Vanderby - Apple Bug Reporter Stephen Tonna - Apple QuickTime Product Manager I’m going to post separately my raw notes from the Apple iPhone Tech Talk, however over the next few days I’ll be summarizing each presentation. Today I cover the presentation by Mark Malone (Internet Technologies Evangelist) about Safari on iPhone. Safari on iPhone (Mark Malone, Internet Technologies Evangelist) The Safari browser presentation was chock full of good information, most of it clarifying info mixed with a good bit of “under the hood” stuff. Mark Malone explained that Safari 3.0 for iPhone, Safari 3.0 Beta for Windows, and Safari 3.0 Beta for OS X Tiger all share the same WebKit rendering engine. He presented an“Ensuring iPhone Safari Compatability Top 10″ list: 1. Be aware that users can set browser preferences on the iPhone. 2. Separate page content into .html, .js, and .css files to take advantage of iPhone caching. 3. Make content is well-formed to HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, CSS 2.1 (and some CSS 3) and ECMAScript 3. 4. Be browser agnostic — don’t sniff and present different content based on user-agent. Apple recommends instead using objectDetection. 5. Leverage CSS 3 media queries. 6. Know the resource limits per resource (see my raw notes for details). 7. Use supported windows and dialogs (see my raw notes for details). 8. Be aware of natively supported content types such as .doc, .pdf, .xls, etc. Mark weaved into this bullet the fact that Canvas content and <canvas> tags are Apple’s recommended approach to including vector animations in iPhone web apps. More on this later. 9. Know the built-in fonts: Arial, Courier/Courier New, Georgia, Trebuchet, Zapfino, Helvetica, Times/Times New Roman, and Verdana. 10. Test and debug using Safari 3.0 on the desktop using the Element Inspector feature and Drosera third-party tool. For more details please see my raw notes from the Apple iPhone Tech Talk. My summaries on the other presentations will follow over the next few days. Continue to Part 2 > Vector Graphics and Animation on the iPhone