Apple

This morning kicked off the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, California. Thousands of developers and press waited in line for the highly anticipated keynote by Phil Schiller.

Twitter was being flooded by attendees giving minute by minute updates using the hash tag #WWDC. At 12pm CST today, there were 78 new tweets per second with the WWDC hash tag attached. There was a lot of momentum and energy surrounding this morning's event -- people were predicting what was going to be announced, a new iPhone or OS, and rumors started to spread that someone saw Steve Jobs in the building, spawning the prediction that Jobs would make an appearance. When it came down to it, everyone just wanted to hear it from the man himself.

Recently, one of our clients asked us to design a website layout specifically for the iPhone. LevelTen has created one iPhone specific web application in our past, but we have little experience with best practices. This prompted me to research some iPhone web applications and find out what makes a good web app vs. a bad web app. These are my findings:

(The web apps I list below can be viewed on an iPhone, if you have one, but may also be viewed on this iPhone emulator on the web.)

1. Simplicity is Key

On October 26th, Apple released it's new "baby".. the new operating system for Mac, OS 10.5 or as many people know it, Leopard. As any dedicated Apple fanatic would, I had this preorderd to ship to my door on the release date. This is the fifth major update to OS X and contains, by Apple's count, up to 300 new features... such as major changes in the OS's interface, updates to several of the OS's built in programs, and improved security. While I don't have the time to go over all 300, I'd like to touch on two of the key new features.

New UI:

By default search inputs are notoriously ugly. Just look at what they are: a plain text input. But Apple had the great idea to make a search widget for Safari that looks like this:

This is probably nothing new, it's been around for quite a while, but the code used to create the field (input type "search" instead of "text") does not validate and only works in Safari. So what happens when you like the search field and what to use it on other browsers?