"It's just Web programming"
Jul. 16th, 2007 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurIf I hear one more statement that programming for the iPhone is trivial because it is simply Web programming, I am going to hunt Steve Jobs and put him down.
Let's be clear here: there is no such thing as "just" Web programming, at least if you're doing sophisticated stuff. Each browser is different in its quirks and characteristics -- the same code, executed on IE, Firefox and Safari, will generally perform a little bit differently on each. And the iPhone is more different than most: there are a lot of assumptions about UI built into Web programming that don't hold true for the iPhone. (For instance, the notion that "hover" means something, or the keycodes returned when the user presses "Enter".)
If you're building UIs for the Web, and you want them to be fancy, responsive and cross-browser, be prepared for real work on *each* target browser. While things still aren't as bad as the early days of the Browser Wars, it's still quite a black art.
(This rant brought to you by one too many facile comments online, poo-pooh'ing the notion that Apple needs to provide iPhone developers any technical support, since it's "just Web programming"...)
Let's be clear here: there is no such thing as "just" Web programming, at least if you're doing sophisticated stuff. Each browser is different in its quirks and characteristics -- the same code, executed on IE, Firefox and Safari, will generally perform a little bit differently on each. And the iPhone is more different than most: there are a lot of assumptions about UI built into Web programming that don't hold true for the iPhone. (For instance, the notion that "hover" means something, or the keycodes returned when the user presses "Enter".)
If you're building UIs for the Web, and you want them to be fancy, responsive and cross-browser, be prepared for real work on *each* target browser. While things still aren't as bad as the early days of the Browser Wars, it's still quite a black art.
(This rant brought to you by one too many facile comments online, poo-pooh'ing the notion that Apple needs to provide iPhone developers any technical support, since it's "just Web programming"...)
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-17 10:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-17 12:56 pm (UTC)From all the ducking and weaving they've done over the past few months (*especially* the near-complete blackout of any information to the development community), I believe that this was supposed to be Steve Jobs' dream closed platform -- all Apple, all the time. He's always been prone to that sort of thinking, and it looks to me that he had decided that cell phones were the place where he could get away with it, creating his object of crystalline beauty that no one else would go fiddle in.
AFAICT, they got seriously set back on their heels by the sheer outrage that came out of the rest of the computer community when they announced that it was going to be a closed box, and the "our platform is the Web" thing was pure reaction. Note the timeline: it took *weeks* after the criticism started before they even made the announcement, and they didn't actually develop anything -- they simply came up with spin on what they had already planned.
So no -- I really don't think this was planned as such, and that's why it was so poorly executed. I think that, once again, they got taken aback at the notion that there was a desire for outside software, and they're still trying to figure out how to deal with that...