Web Applications
For the first year of the iPhone's existence, there was no App Store. There were no add-on programs that you could install, no way to make the iPhone do new, cool stuff (at least not without hacking it). For that first year, Apple gave would-be iPhone programmers only one little bit of freedom: They could write special, iPhone-shaped Web pages tailored for the iPhone.
Some of these iPhone Web applications look like desktop widgets that do one thing really well—like showing you a Doppler radar map for your local weather. Some are minipages that tap directly into popular social networking sites like Flickr and Twitter. Some even let you tap into Web-based word processing sites if you need to create a document right this very instant.
Today, regular iPhone programs duplicate most of what those Web apps once did. Sure, Web apps are great because they don't eat up any storage on your iPhone. But you can get to Web apps only when you're online, and they can't store anything (like data) on your phone. The truth is, Web apps were essentially a workaround, a placeholder solution until Apple could get its App Store going (Chapter 11). So Web apps may well fade away now that the App Store is in business.
In the meantime, hundreds of these free minisites let you pull down movie listings, the nearest place to get cheap gas, the latest headlines, and so on.
You get to any Web app the same way: Punch up Safari on the iPhone and tap in the address for the application's site. If you ...
Get iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
