Blaze New Media

After this morning’s announcement from Apple, it’s interesting to consider the possible impact of the iPod touch on a web developer’s world.

The iPod touch is Apple’s new touch screen iPod offering. It’s essentially an iPhone without the phone features. It includes Wi-Fi, as well as the Safari web browser for internet access.

The crucial difference between the iPod touch and iPhone however, is the fact Apple is selling the iPod touch worldwide from the end of September.

Apple have already sold over 100m iPods, not all of which were full sized versions, but it gives an idea of the numbers. This means there is the possibility of many millions of people with the ability to browse the web on a quality mobile device. As Steve Jobs said, this is not the watered-down mobile web, this is the full web experience.

What does this mean for Web Developers?

With the potential for millions of people to use their iPod to browse the web, it could become a significant platform. It definitely will become a platform that needs to be tested on by developers, making sure that sites work with the screen-size and interface.

However, the bigger question is when will clients start requesting “iPod enabled” websites? We have already seen the likes of Digg and Facebook creating iPhone specific interfaces, making use of the iPhone’s screen size and touch interface.

I wonder if it will ever get to a point in time where people head on over to your website or web app and expect an “iPod enabled” interface?

Lots of things to consider, but you can see how the inclusion of a web browser on the iPod opens the doors to many new possibilities.

What are your thoughts?

I picked up Dan Cederholm’s book “Bulletproof Web Design” about six or seven months ago. I really enjoyed it, and it highlighted a number of great techniques. Now, with the release of IE7 a few months back, I can’t help but think a couple of the techniques days are numbered.

Personally, since reading the book and even before that, I’ve made programming flexible and scalable (aka bulletproof) designs one of my top priorities.

The only trouble is I find it takes a whole lot longer to program something to be bulletproof, than it does just to whip it up the old fashioned way. It’s absolutely worth it, but it’s a lot more fiddling with images and extra markup in any case, which takes time.

Now, the aim for many of these bulletproof techniques is to keep your site design together when the browsers text is resized. Take a look at Dan’s site and resize the text in Firefox as an example of a great bulletproof design (he is the author after all!).

If you have a copy of IE7 installed, try bringing up Dan’s site and resizing the text again in there. See the difference?

IE7 has taken on something called “page zoom” which basically resizes everything on the page in unison. The first time I saw this was in Opera, and it’s a really nice feature. So instead of the text on your page bursting at the design seams when it’s resized, all the containing boxes and graphics will also resize at the same time.

When Opera was the only browser using page zoom it didn’t really matter, as Opera only counts for a very small percentage of users. Now that IE7 is using page zoom, it becomes a very different matter. We may end up with 70-80% of web users with page zoom as their default behavior.

If Firefox chipped into that, and switched to page zoom in their next version, we’re looking at perhaps 95% of internet users with page zoom instead of simple text resizing.

If that becomes the case, then would it be right to say that it’s pointless to do the extra work to make your designs bulletproof for text resizing? I personally think so.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself a little, it’ll take some time before IE7 picks up and overtakes IE6 as the major player. Its numbers however are moving fast thanks to the Windows automatic updates feature (and the fact IE6 is a security train wreck). IE7’s page zoom is also not up to the standard of Opera’s just yet.

So for now at least, I’m continuing with the good practice of bulletproofing for text resizing. I’m sure however, that in the next year or so, the practice will become close to redundant. Then we can all relax knowing that our sites will look great at any size.

At least, until we start talking about resolution independence.

If you’re a regular user of CSS, you may have come to realize that there are many limitations with borders and backgrounds.

Kevin Lawyer, who is AOL’s representative to the CSS Working Group is looking for your feedback on the CSS3 Borders and Backgrounds module. This is a rare opportunity to put forward your ideas, and perhaps influence the final recommendation.

Some of the things that really interest me are the ability to set the radius of individual corners of a border, as well as multiple backgrounds for an element. Gradients would also be a plus, as long as they were highly customizable, and will degrade gracefully at lower bit depths. Without that I think people would skip it, and just use photoshop to get the exact gradient they want.

Go ahead and have your say.

The W3C has announced that they are starting the Mobile Web Initiative, which aims at “concentrating on the application of existing recommendations for mobile content”.

This is good news, no doubt this new initiative will move the mobile web forward, something that’s needed to be done for some time now. Not only that, they have some solid support from current cell providers like Vodafone and France Telecom. Not to mention Hewlett Packard.

I can see this moving forward very fast, I guess it’s in everyones interest. Due to the big financial backing, and huge practical implications, there’s obviously some money to be made through the mobile web.

This morning I and two other students in my program gave a presentation to 50 final year BSc Multimedia Technology & Design students.

I have to say I think that the presentation was well received, there are quite a few budding web designers and developers on the course currently, and I think that showing them the potential of CSS really opened their eyes to new possibilities.

We also distributed hand-outs to everyone that attended with answers to frequently asked questions, as well as a list of interesting websites – including many of the well known design blogs out there.

It was also interesting to hear the questions that people had to ask about standards based design. One of them was infact directed at our lecturer, asking “Why have we not been taught this method of design on our course?”

We do have a web-design module on our course, but it’s in the first year of our studies, and to be perfectly honest the content for the module is a good 4 years out of date… tags anyone?

View Presentation (pdf)