Web Development for iPhone: pretty standard affair

When the iPhone came out, developers wanted to know how they would program it.

Steve Jobs told them: web standards.

Someone posted a helpful entry in their blog that showed the user-agent string that the iPhone sends to web servers to identify its browser.

The blog post also shows how to tune the CSS and Javascript that go along with your XHTML web pages in order to make them extra-friendly to the Apple iPhone that millions of people already own.

So if you are a web developer, you might want to take a gander at Web Development for the iPhone. Then you can make millions of people a little extra happy with your site. Might make your boss a little extra happy with you!

Just imagine them saying, "I heard our site works really well with that Apple iPhone and the new iPod! Did you do anything special for that?" - and being able to say, "Yeah, but not much really - it was very easy."

First impressions on Open Social API from Google

I was going to take a pass on looking at the new Open Social API from Google for a couple of weeks.

I changed my mind this weekend and decided to at least find the Open Social home page at Google. If you have not looked into Open Social yet, you might want to read this post just to set your expectations,

It is very different than I expected. It is a Javascript API. You do all of your application development using whatever standard web technologies you want.

The programming itself you do in Javascript.

The UI your application targets is HTML.

I had expected a UI API but apparently you directly program your open social app to hammer out its own HTML.

Watch the video on the Open Social API home page.

The Google Spokesman introduces the API by showing you actual code. The image is too small to read the letters but if you know the Javascript syntax you can get a general feel for the API. The documentation lets you see the details anyway.

The three API modules are:

1. people - friends, etc.
   
2. activities
3. persistence
   

Next comes the meat of the presentation. Representatives from Ning, Flickster, Sales.com, and many other social network service & software companies are are featured. They each describe and demo a brand new feature for their site that they created with the Open Social API.

An interesting surprise at the end was find that MySpace is participating in Open Social.