Apple’s Safari 3.1 as the iPhone SDK

Apple is pushing the web browser envelope with their Safari web browser, using the WebKit open source application project since last fall. Safari had grown a lot since it was first introduce as the OSX browser. There is a version of Safari for Windows. It (WebKit), also runs on mobile devices, the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

And the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK might just be based only on Safari, here is why.

AppleInsider reports, Safari 3.1 the release which underwent private testing this week have several cool enhancement. It will have the ability to download and immediately render non-standard web fonts. If you are a web developer, someone who have been designing website for quite sometime, you would already know that there are no way to know what fonts are installed on the visitor’s machine. You’ll have a limited set of fonts to play with. Most common solution is to use an image for the heading with the custom font or use Flash. Check out sIFR, a nifty little Flash trick for displaying custom fonts.

Other features included are CSS Transforms and CSS Animations. CSS Transform if I’m not mistaken will allow web developer to add the availability of scaling, rotate, skew and more on HTML boxes in real-time. CSS Animation will offer a much easier way to create effects like slides or fades. This Java Script effects you could achieve using libraries like Script.aculo.us or Mootools. This will allow web developers to create a more dynamic, feature-rich, better look-and-feel web based apps.

Most significant addition to Safari 3.1 would be the support for HTML5’s SQL storage API. A client-side database storage programming interface that will allow web apps to access the client-side local disc to store structured data locally.

Imagine the possibility of developing a web app that could write data on the users local disc and sync with the remote web server when needed. You could have an offline version of the web apps when you are offline and sync with the server once you get back online.

You might want to check out Adobe’s AIR framework if you are interested on something like this.

I could see where this is going. The whole iPhone/iPod Touch SDK will be based on Safari and only Safari. As for now the only way you could build a iPhone/iPod Touch app is by building a web based app that you have to access via Safari on the devices. I’m not talking about Jail broken iPhone or iPod Touch here, that is a whole other story.

This arrangement sucks. The drawbacks of having web based apps as apps for your iPhone or iPod Touch is that you will need to be connected to the Internet in order to use the apps. The apps can’t store any data on the device.

This is where the new development of Safari came in handy. With the addition of HTML5’s SQL storege API Safari on the devices, one could create web apps that could go offline. I could imagine someone, or myself, writing a RSS reader app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that grabs feeds and store it offline so you could read it later even when you are not connected.

Or a Google Docs type of web app that you can use offline that saves the data locally when you are not connected.

This might just be the route Apple is going with their iPhone and iPod Touch SDK. This way they don’t need to open up their precious devices with a complicated SDK. Hardcore programmers/hackers will hate this because they can’t really go under the hood with the SDK as everything is contained within Safari.

If this happens, I guess people will still have to Jail Break their devices for fancy apps that have more control on hardware level.

I can’t wait to try this out.

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