Finally, Apple have released version 2.0 of their iPhone and iPod Touch firmware. Priced at $9.95 for Touch owners (though free to iPhone owners), i think it delivers excellent value for money, especially considering the previous update for the iPod Touch cost $20 and didn’t include the App Store.
The new features i am interested in however are all tied into the web browser. Specifically, the database support, touch event handling, CSS transforms, and to tie everything together to make more native-looking apps, full-screen support.
So is it worth it?
Well i am pleased to report that most of these features have made their way to the update. My database demo which i posted about previously works fine, though initially i was a bit concerned that i didn’t see a “databases” section in the configuration options in Safari.
Turned out that this only appears when at least 1 database is created. A word of warning though: when i deleted my test database, the section vanished and i could only get it back by restarting the system. So watch out if you are playing about with it.
Sadly it appears that one of the binding features, the full-screen support, hasn’t made it into the update. Supposedly, you are meant to insert the a “apple-touch-fullscreen” meta tag into your HTML document, but i didn’t notice any difference whatsoever when i tried it. A huge disappointment, IMO.
Regardless, i think this is a positive step towards making the iPhone/iPod’s web application development platform actually useful - in a stark contrast to just over a year ago when Apple were promoting a rather limited web development platform with none of these cool features as the only way of getting third party applications on the iPhone.
Let’s not forget that for those not content with working within the limitations of the iPhone’s web development platform, there is now also the native iPhone SDK. So all in all, there’s a bit for everyone in this update.
So is it worth installing? Hell, yes!
