iPhone WebKit Goodness: 3D CSS Transforms and ontouch events
Written by on April 7th, 2008 in Ajax News.
Apple is secretive. I normally don’t mind so much, as they always come through on yet another cool Mac product. If I could know one thing though, it wouldn’t be when the next Macbook Pro is coming out, or when we will see the 3G iPhone. Instead, I wish I knew the attentions in the battle of “what can we develop with on the iPhone”.
We started out with only being able to use JavaScript, and folks like Joe Hewitt quickly mastered the restrictive tools such as meta viewport and co.
Then we got the final word of the iPhone SDK, and the Cocoa developers rejoiced as they went from being the cool kids to the “now you will pay me to help in the land grab yO”.
There was one shoutout to the WebKit lovers. We got ongesture* events.
Now we got a glimpse of new updates for the iPhone Ajaxians:
Safari 3.1 showed us CSS transforms, which are 2D. On the iPhone though, we can now do 3D transforms which means you can do true coverflow through the browser.
The other new thing I found are new touch screen events. We already knew about the ongesture* events, but now there are ontouch* events, and new DOM interfaces Touch, TouchList, and TouchEvent.
This is great progress.
The optimist in me thinks: Wow, WebKit is going to be a first class citizen and Apple will continue to open up more and more of the innards as JavaScript APIs.
The cynic in me thinks: Yeah, they will support it, kinda like how Java is supported on the Mac. One poor bugger has to do all of the work and make people care. In this case, when Apple starts making 30% on all of the native applications, what will their incentive be to help people develop apps using the Web?
The hope is that they realize that the Web is the long term winner, and that they want to win in that market too. Please, Mr. Jobs.
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/265437189/iphone-webkit-goodness-3d-css-transforms-and-ontouch-events