Wanted: iPhone Menu Access
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
Steve Jobs announced at Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference that the iPhone needs no SDK — the built-in version of Safari allows developers to build iPhone apps as simple web applications. This isn’t terrible news — the iPhone version of Safari looks to have clever hooks that allow phone numbers to be dialed and address locations to be sent into the iPhone’s custom Google Maps application (microformats? — hopefully).
However, the WWDC demo shown by Apple’s iPhone VP showcased an address book application running inside Safari — not as a standalone app. We want iPhone applications that are accessible from the main menu — not from a Safari bookmark. My suggestion on how Apple should implement menu icons — allow developers to add an application icon to a web page through a <rel> tag (just like a favicon) and present this icon on the main menu if the user chooses to install the app. Simple for both developers and Apple, and there’s no risk of “instability”.
An aside— who approved “Web 2.0” as a set of standards?