What iOS 6 Mobile Safari Offers Front End Devs

http://taitems.tumblr.com/post/24936855546/what-ios-6-mobile-safari-offers-front-end-devs

by taitems • 14 years ago

48 20 14 years ago

taitems.tumblr.com

stephen_g2• 14 years ago

My favourite by far is the smart app banners. Because I almost never want to download your app. It annoys me to no end having a full screen advertisement to download an application appear every time I go to a lot of sites, instead of taking me directly to the regular site that works fine in Safari...

So I really hope that websites move over to this new method, because at worst it is far less intrusive, and at best it will be able to be completely disabled so I don't have to see it at all!

miniatureape• 14 years ago

There aren't any docs yet according to the article, but this is almost definitely an un-standardized meta tag or something. For mobile devs, it removes some (boilerplate) code and standardizes the user experience, which is good. My only hope is that they made the syntax open enough that it will support other app stores (so a similar tag can be used if android decides to follow along). If it's <itunes> or something, well, screw them.

pooriaazimi2• 14 years ago

I'm completely speculating (my agent hasn't approved iOS 6 SDK License yet and I can't access the docs), but if I were to implement this feature, I'd bake it into the App Store. Say you created IMDB.app. You can specify (in a plist) which domains your app operates on (imdb.com, imdb.de) and Safari would automatically open up that banner when you visited those domain IF YOU DON'T HAVE IT INSTALLED ALREADY. Something like <itunes='imdb' lang='en/us'> is the worst option I think. AND, would cause confusion. What if all websites decided to include this little tag on behalf of an advertiser to promote an app? That's the nightmare scenario IMO.

masklinn• 14 years ago

> It annoys me to no end having a full screen advertisement to download an application appear every time I go to a lot of sites

Some french news sites manage to do worse: they display a javascript alert suggesting downloading their shitty application.

endersshadow• 14 years ago

The forum software used by HomebrewTalk does the same thing. Always annoys me when I'm just trying to get to a thread that I had bookmarked to look at while I'm mid-brew.

huskyr• 14 years ago

Looks pretty nice. I wonder if the web audio improvements also mean they ditched the 'click to play' bug/feature for audio and video elements.

aufreak3• 14 years ago

Am really surprised (and pleased) to see web audio API on the list. But a part of me wonders if it is true. It hasn't yet come to ship in Safari on the desktop and is only available via nightlies afaik.

i386• 14 years ago

I hear web audio is in Safari 6.

highpixels• 14 years ago

Finally support for input type="file"!

cheeze• 14 years ago

It is almost... too easy now...

tosh• 14 years ago

I wonder if they support IndexedDB

tegansnyder• 14 years ago

That would be a blessing.

youngtaff• 14 years ago

Still no support for NavigationTiming so stats tools like Google Analytics won't be able to tell you how long pages take to load.

ooobo• 14 years ago

Any improvements to the 'web app'* experience? For example, background audio, faster JS performance?

  * using <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

ceejayoz• 14 years ago

I've long wondered what Apple's plan for that. They still haven't added a way to specify an @2x splash screen for fullscreen web apps, so it feels pretty abandoned.

taylorfausak• 14 years ago

That's technically true, but they don't need to. You can use the same markup as the @1x splash screens and target retina devices with media queries. I wrote a blog post explaining exactly how to do it: http://taylor.fausak.me/2012/03/27/ios-web-app-icons-and-sta...

luchs• 14 years ago

So, does the remote debugging also work with Safari for Windows?

What iOS 6 Mobile Safari Offers Front End Devs

Related Stories