The iPhone’s Safari

Well, we decided to hold back our app for a day or two. Unfortunately, there were a number of surprises in store for us on the iPhone’s Safari. Things we were not expecting, to be sure.

First of all, it’s not the same Safari you’re used to. Not even Safari 3 Beta, actually. Quite a few sites that we use frequently, such as Basecamp, have rendering issues, as do pages in the New York Times and even Apple’s site! I would imagine that Apple has some updates in store, so I’m not too worried, but the rendering issues hit our app pretty hard.

We’ll probably take the weekend to iron out some of the kinks. Besides getting used to the keyboard, the interface widgets take some getting used to, as well. They’re not regular Aqua widgets, they’re different. And drop-downs open a half-screen interface that’s really weird. It’s like a wheel that you spin to view your choices. So our whole fancy AJAX interface for choosing between different options is almost a drawback! We’ll have to think about whether we want to keep this interface, or just use Apple’s fancy drop-down thing. In no way did I anticipate that widget.

Playing with the iPhone is certainly a learning experience, and John Gruber has posted a good list of first impressions that summarize much of what we noticed. For now, we’re still very much looking and learning, but it’s a beautiful day outside, so we’re not in any hurry.

So we’ll keep you posted.

Raymond Brigleb

Creative Director, dreamer, partner, father, musician, photographer. Has been known to ride the rails. Pulls one heck of a shot.