Benjamin M. Hill

I have an iPhone, but no Mac to code up some experiments with. Nothing major, just enough to satisfy the basic curiosity: what is this toy? What can it do that couldn't be done before ? (and let's face it, it is a toy. With multi-touch hardware-accelerated geo-located interactive goodness, but a toy – just like every computing device any self-admitted geek has ever owned) So that leaves building an iPhone web app . Normally there is some web page of documentation, and you read the documentation, and build it. Not so with mobile Safari development. Dust off the old map in the attic, and begin the treasure hunt. Like any good treasure hunt, you get a whiff that "thar might be GOLD out thar." The skull-shaped island on the map is HTML5's canvas element – it's the new black with its 2D flash-less graphics, AND guaranteed to be supported consistently on the iPhone. So I play with it for a bit, and yes, it can draw shapes. And circles, and gradients, and stam...

The balance is shifting, what was once impossible using WAP-only cellphone technology is now possible with the new breed of smart-phones supporting the latest HTML 5 technologies. But all is not where it should be... yet. Good news first, bad news second. (And Apple, if you'd like to fix the bad news in the iPhone 3.1 update, that would be great, thanks in advance!) New reasons to be optimistic with web-based mobile application development: Freedom to Draw : the newly supported canvas element Freedom to Remember : local sqlite DB support now an official standard Freedom to Know Where (location): HTML5 JavaScript location support moving from the early-access Geode plugin to common usage Freedom to Animate Smoothly : 2d and 3d accelerated drawing support moves towards a standard Freedom to Iterate Instantly : server-hosted JavaScript code (ok this is an old one, but the App Store approval cycle highlights it) Freedom to Load Rapidly : application caching controls and wid...