Great. Another post about the iPhone. Don’t worry, this isn’t my ranting (dis)approval of Apple’s new device, but rather a sad realization after my first encounter with one last evening.
Since the dawn of time, or so it seems, web developers have been required to be well versed in both programming, and juggling. Now I don’t think that many developers would have a very good chance at making a living as street performers, but we are cursed blessed with the obligation to make our sites display properly on different browsers. While we can all rejoice in the fact that IE 5 on the Mac OS has become an increasingly smaller headache, Apple just threw us another curveball.
The iPhone, which supposedly uses the Safari web browser, is quickly gaining a real following among end-users. (I’m actually quite shocked at how quickly they have caught on.) So what’s the big deal? The iPhone leaves developers with another browser to satisfy. Now wait a second, Apple says the iPhone uses Safari. Well that might be true, but from my own personal experience, Safari on the iPhone is not the same as Safari on your Mac or PC.
In my quick test, glitches were minor. Things like incorrect font sizes seemed to be the biggest problem. Thankfully, problems like that are easy to fix. The real problem isn’t that these discrepancies exist (that’s just a pain), it’s that these problems are going to be harder than ever to identify and troubleshoot. They really require access to an iPhone. I can be grateful that I have an Apple Store just a few minutes away from my house, but unfortunately, not everyone is so lucky.
