24Nov/100
Building web apps with iOS 4.2
This week Apple finally rolled out version 4.2 of their iOS. With it multi tasking finally comes to iPad. And, yey for us swedes, so do more international keyboards. But, there are also other, less advertised, changes that are of great interest for iOS developers.
With iOS 4.2, Safari now supports stuff like:
- The accelerometer, allowing you to create web apps with tilt interaction
- Websockets, which allow you to keep a connection open between the client and your server. This is super great news for developers of multiplayer online games, and of update intense applications like gambling or auctions.
- More SVG and canvas support – these are really interesting and powerful tools that finally allow for a rich user experience using web technology. The support between different browsers is still so and so, but if you build specifically for say iPad, the possibilities are really interesting.
- There is also a new class, WebGLRenderingContext, which is part of WebGL, a standard for 3D on the web. Really interesting stuff, but so far it’s very unclear what support there really is for this.
This brings web technology one step closer to being a full fledged solution for creating rich apps for iOS devices. HTML5 and a tool like Phonegap for instance, can provide a much more agile workflow than XCode does.
For more in depth info check out Maximiliano Firtman’s blog entry, or if you’re reading this from an ipad, try out his accelerometer experiment, “Move the ball”.