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Selected Quotations From The iPhone HIG

As you prepare your web content to display successfully on iPhone, you face a decision. Should you modify your webpage (if necessary) so that it looks great on iPhone or create an iPhone application? Before you make this decision, you need to understand what distinguishes a webpage and an iPhone application.

Source: iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, Content on iPhone: Is It a Webpage or an Application?

The applications are those things that are built right into the phone, so even if your network connection goes down you can get at them. They get total integration into the iPhone. Things like full use of the screen, local data storage, even having an icon!

Webpages are those things that Steve Jobs wants us to write.

An iPhone application minimizes the user’s awareness of the browser experience.

Although an iPhone application is, by definition, a web application that users open in Safari on iPhone, it suppresses the browser’s presence in its user interface. As a result, users perceive the application as a standalone solution. One way to achieve this effect is to set viewport properties so that the iPhone application displays correctly in Safari on iPhone and requires no zooming or panning. Another way is to provide custom navigation controls embedded in the webpage so users don’t have to use the Safari on iPhone navigation controls.

Source: iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, Decide How to Position Your Content

I get that you don’t have the API ready, or don’t want to share it, or whatever your reasoning is. I don’t really care anymore. But please stop insulting my intelligence. Stop telling me how I should be happy to run my code in a browser and then turning around and telling me that it’d really be a good idea if the user didn’t notice how they were in a browser.

Use Helvetica, 20-pixel size, in black for all text.

Source: iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, Consider the List Approach

The Daring Fireball is gonna love that.

Safari on iPhone, like Safari on the desktop, provides a back button (it’s the left-pointing arrow on the left end of the button bar, as shown in Figure 4-3).

Source: iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, Provide a Custom Navigation Solution

I’m glad they explained this to the developers. Now how are the users ever going to figure it out?

Note: Please don’t read this as an anti-iPhone post. It’s not. If Apple released an SDK, I’d be pushing to the front of the crowd for it like a teenager on speed at a ska show. I’ve got a head full of ideas and a clipboard full of UI sketches, but I’m just not willing to play along with the delusion that I can offer the same thing to my users with a web browser.

Edit: fixed a spelling error. You’re and Your are not the same word.

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