I haven't done any iPhone development yet but I always figured when I do it will be with the iPhone SDK in Objective-C, not a web browser application in JavaScript. Why? Because I didn't think JavaScript supported multi-touch until I read this great post on Ajaxian.com.Apparently, Apple provides a pretty good multi-touch API to the Safari browser on the iPhone so now you can create web applications that are multi-touch. I suspect that this doesn't work on anything other than the iPhone web browser but its a solid first step to enablinig web developers to leverage multi-touch. That's something that will be come very important as more and more desktop and notbook computers ship with multi-touch screens.
It will be interseting to see if the iPhone multi-touch JavaScript API is ported to other browsers on other devices or if something different is used. Right now I would guess that Apple will not open up its JavaScript multi-touch API to other plateforms which means that different browsers will probably support different multi-touch JavaScript APIs until someone (W3C?) defines a standard.
If you have an iPhone than visit this iPhone LightBox applicaiton to see a multi-touch web application at work. The application doesn't work on anything other than the Safari browser. In Firefox and IE on my Vista desktop it won't run. It works great, however, on my iPhone and, using a mouse, in my Safari browser on my Vista machine. If you have a multi-touch desktop or laptop with Safari on it, try it out and let me know if it works.
To learn more about developing multi-touch JavaScript web applications for the iPhone (and possibly Safari desktop) I suggest starting with this blog post by Neil Roberts which is very well written and should provide you with the jump you need to get started.
2 comments:
glad i ran into this post! Has anyone tried using this on a multitouch desktop yet? i'm very curious, as i have a diy surface table, but it's been stripped down for the winter.
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