iPhone Diversion
Sorry about this, I know that I was supposed to put a post about expiring caches in Rails, and I will. I have been busy with other things lately and have not gotten much past changing my ways to reflect the RailsEnvy cache sweeper methods that I posted last time. Alas, this will be a small post, and a diversion, but I had to put my two cents in about the iPhone. I recently received mine, and there are a couple of things that I wanted to chime in about as a web developer.
The first is the lawsuits, and all the complaints about how the thing only works with AT&T and such. I'm not sure where everyone has been, but cellphones have been coupled to carriers for a long time. I don't agree with it, and would like to see some of the frequency range that will be auctioned off next year go towards developing a system to decouple phones from carriers. However, it is not new, and they told you before you bought the thing. There are a ton of other lawsuits springing up and all I can say is that they reflect just how good the iPhones really are. Nobody was too angry when the Razr was only available from Verizon, were they? Nope. The reality is that the iPhone is just that cool, works that well, and is such a breath of fresh air that people get angry over availability. My answer to all of the "monopoly", "microsofty" talk is that the reason that macs work so well is the level of control they maintain. If you want something that will work with everything, and be plagued with compatibility problems, there are tons of Windows-based mobile devices out there. Quit complaining.
Secondly, my first impression of browsing the web and playing with the iPhone was one of fear and anxiety. Like everyone else, I'm not a huge fan of sudden, titanic changes. Not that the iPhone does that per se, but it re-enforces how behind most websites are now days. The ideas of separating content from functionality and formatting so that you can easily accommodate multiple devices are now REALLY important. Simplifying things so that the user has access to the information that they are looking for without having to find it in a jumble of other things is going to get harder. Screen resolutions, which we have all enjoyed, used to get larger every year, but have now suddenly gotten smaller. The joys of creating a single web presence designed at 980px wide is now replaced by having to create a smaller version that not only looks good at 320px wide, but also flawlessly formats well at 480px wide as well, for when someone is using the panaromic iPhone view. Is there going to be multiple screen resolutions for each device that comes out to meet the new mobile expectations? What about browsers, as I understand that the Mozilla folks are working on a Firefox mobile browser, which means that Microsoft is working on some standards-shattering version of IE for mobile devices as well. What does all of this mean to web developers?
In a nutshell, more work and more money. Just kidding. For the time being it means get familiar with XHTML, CSS2 and CSS3, and JavaScript, because they are your new friends. Website owners should look at what their site offers to mobile users, and think about putting up an iPhone (and other mobile device) version of their site to accommodate iPhone users. In the long run, things are going to get dicy as all the problems with web publishing get amplified, but I'm sure that someone somewhere is working on that. I'll post more when I get a chance to play around and do some development testing.
For now, I'm loving the iPhone, and I have a feeling that it will lead to some interesting and innovative interfaces for upcoming websites.
