First Impressions of MobileSafari ★
MobileSafari(Safari on the iPod touch) comes quite close to how a web browser on a computer works but it still needs polish.
My theme had a footer which would remain fixed even while scrolling up or down. This footer rendered my website useless on MobileSafari. What it did was align itself on the bottom while loading the page. After that it would scroll along with the content thus constantly overlapping on some of the text. Now even though this is a flaw in MobileSafari, I have had to remove the footer and position the links on the right just like I have had to make this theme IE friendly.
Basically, what MobileSafari does is make all the fixed position div tags absolute in -place. Which means the div tag loads in the correct position initially, subsequently becomes absolute and starts scrolling along with the rest of the content. This is somewhat irritating.
The bigger pain-in-the-arse is media support. Many, not all, YouTube videos work fine because of native H264 support. But when you have a great touch screen device that behaves like a pocket computer, you have greater expectations. When you see Safari listed as an application, you expect to see a browser that’s equivalent to Safari on Mac OS X or Windows. You want Flash support even though Apple wont let you have it. Adobe is ready to make a Flash application, Apple wont publish it on the App Store. Forget Flash, there isn’t any Java support either. If there’s no Flash and Java, you can stop dreaming about Silverlight coming to the iPhone OS anytime soon.
Copy+Paste is the almost easily noticeable as a missing feature, the absense of which affects not only MobileSafari but all applications.
Other than all this, I’ve faced no other issues on MobileSafari. Gmail works beautifully on MobileSafari, both the regular version and the iPhone version. So do Facebook, WordPress and Twitter.
I find it really ‘cute’ how Apple lovers try to defend the flaws in Apple software, a la -
“Yes, it doesn’t do sleep mode when the laptop lid is closed, but who needs it right? [nervous laugh]”
Let’s just admit it. Mobile Safari isn’t that great. Opera Mobile is.
Omai gawd, you use Twitter instead of Jaiku. ;)
BTW, you previous and next post links at the bottom aren’t working.
I don’t think I am defending Apple here. Android Applications are like Windows Mobile applications. Google is not creating a sense of uniformity and showing developers the difference between a good application design and poor application design. I think it lacks integrity as of now. But as soon as the Android has a device as capable as the iphone supporting it and Apps that respect it’s potential, I might just switch.
Survival of the fittest. That’s how the open source community thrives. Creativity doesn’t flourish with a guard at the door approving which app should get through (like the iPhone app store).
Maybe so. But do you think Apple will let Android grow faster than the iPhone platform does? I don’t think that’s going to happen. If it does, it’s good for us. The more the competition, the merrier. This Thursday we are going to see the new Nokia that maybe the biggest threat to the iPhone yet. Also with Palm developing it’s next generation mobile platform and Microsoft trying to do the same thing, the future looks good for us. I feel Google has made a big mistake by allowing T-Mobile to launch a phone that doesn’t make use of half the things the Android is capable of. Anyhow, I don’t see any device replacing my iPod touch anytime soon.
Yes, I also feel that Google has jumped the gun by releasing Android on a production model this early.
PS - Why don’t you use the ‘Subscribe to comments’ plugin? It becomes really difficult otherwise to keep track of commented posts.
As far as I can see, the plugin isn’t really compatible.