I’ve just been through most of Apple’s new iPhone Developer Center (ADC membership required), and I find they’ve done a very nice job of aggregating all the info we’ve so far had to dig for, whether through Apple’s own information channels or the countless tidbits published by third parties scattered around the web.
As I’ve voiced through the iPhoneWebDev list earlier tonight, it is great to have one consolidated and dedicated resource to live by in keeping up with the momentum Apple’s mobile devices are reaching.
On the other hand, I would urge the development community to focus on the term guidelines, and not overly fall into design patterns that would ultimately lock them in (just think MSIE/ActiveX). As Apple itself notes, emphasis should be put on accepted standards, which in term allows for greater code and experience portability.
The web is always evolving, and as it does, so will Safari. You’ll want to keep informed of the evolving standards emanating from WHATWG and W3C standards bodies.
Even though the WebKit/WebCore combination is increasingly becoming the mobile industry’s dream team, with examples such as Nokia’s S60WebKit browser and maybe [hopefully] even the yet-to-be-released consumer version of the OpenMoko platform, let’s not dismiss other platforms such as Opera Mini and Mozilla’s revived mobile efforts.
I, on my end, am indeed pretty hyped that our own WPhone app scores very high when it comes to adherence with Apple’s published guidelines, but I’m just as excited by the fact that it in fact support close to any web-capable mobile device released in the last 3-5 years. Unobtrusive Javascript, how I love you so.
This said, now we also want to make the same rich experience available to the Apple user base to the scores of other fun tools and toys that are starting to and will surely flood the market over the next three to five years.
As I often say: fun times ahead! :o)
