Draconis Software Blog

Just like every other techie in the world, we recently got our hands on some iPhones.  And, as software developers, our first thoughts were: what can we write for this thing?  Well, as everyone else has already pointed out, you’re pretty much limited to writing web apps for the iPhone only, but this doesn’t impact us as much: we’re doing web apps exclusively at the moment anyway!  I’ve been looking into creating an invotrak app for the iPhone recently, and believe I should have something available in the near future.

Craig Hunter has a good article up on his site that discusses some of the limitations of creating applications for the iPhone, though his standpoint is coming as a traditional Mac developer (and he makes great points: it doesn’t make any sense for a user to connect to a web app to input to-do list items):

Business aspects aside, the main issue I see as a traditional developer is that iPhone web app development is still very limited. Outside of some viewport settings, a couple special link types (really only the “tel:” link is new), and some new “-webkit” style attributes, there is little about making iPhone-specific web apps that differs from generic web apps. And that’s possibly the most disappointing aspect of all from my standpoint. Apple’s announcement states that “developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone”, but that’s not the case.

I believe there’s a lot that can still be done with the tools we’re given, and I look forward to Apple creating more tools in the future.