Professional iPhone™ and iPod® touch Programming: Building Applications for Mobile Safari™
by Richard Wagner
Chapter 2. Designing a User Interface
User interface design has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary over the past decade. Most would argue that Mac OS X and Windows Vista both have much more refined UIs than their predecessors. As true as that may be, their changes improve upon existing ideas rather than offer groundbreaking new ways of interacting with the computer. Web design is no different. All of the innovations that have transpired — such as AJAX and XHTML — have revolutionized the structure and composition of a Web site, but not how users interact with it. Moreover, mobile and handheld devices offered a variety of new platforms to design for, but these were either lightweight versions of a desktop OS or a simplistic character-based menu.
Enter iPhone and iPod touch.
An iPhone/iPod touch interface (I'll refer to it as an "iPhone interface" for short) is not a traditional desktop interface, though it is has a codebase closely based on Mac OS X. It is not a traditional mobile interface, though iPhone and iPod touch are mobile devices. Despite the fact that you build apps using Web technologies, an iPhone interface is not a normal Web application interface either. iPhone is clearly the first groundbreaking UI platform that many developers will have ever worked with.
Because the underlying guts of iPhone applications are based on Web 2.0 technologies, many Web developers will come to the iPhone platform and naturally think they are just creating a Web application that runs ...