What iOS 6 Mobile Safari Offers Front End Devs
Update: Now that iOS 6 is out and the NDA is no more, Max Firtman has posted an excellent summary of new iPhone 5 and iOS 6 mobile Safari enhancements and regressions. It goes into further detail and mentions features that couldn’t be publicly announced while still under NDA (not that I was, I’m not a registered dev).
Corrections: Although I recommend checking out the above link, I received two corrections via email from Apple. One regarding smart banner documentation and one clarifying css filter support.
Here’s what we know about Mobile Safari in iOS 6 so far, and what it brings to the table for front end developers. I expect there’s more to come in future betas and as people experiment with the current beta more.
Web Inspector via Remote Debugging
The pre-existing developer tools for iOS are limited to say the least. A console.log is flattened to a single level, without actually presenting the contents. iOS 6 introduces the Safari Web Inspector to both the iPhone and the iPad via the Safari ‘Remote Debugging’ interface.
It implements a similar interface to how the Chrome for Android remote debugging works. Safari remote debugging acts in a similar fashion, such that when you select an item in the Safari desktop inspector, it is highlighted on the iOS device.
Prior to this, the only alternative was embedding Firebug Lite, which while powerful, is not designed for touch screen devices.
As far as I can tell, the old, flawed Developer Console has been removed.
Many thanks to Andrew Harrison for fact checking and screenshots.
<input type=”file”>
Finally, it’s here. You can now upload photos and videos from the Photo Library using a regular input element. This was previously only possible via the use of Phonegap etc.
This is a real game changer for mobile apps.
No word yet on if it allows you to capture a new photo. It does.
Real time camera streaming has been confirmed as not supported.
Smart App Banners
The new Smart App Banners are a way of showing Safari users a message indicating that a native app for the website is available in the App Store. While not really a great thing for those of us hoping to move apps back towards the web, it’s still a good experience for the end user. It’s also possible to preserve the page/state/view and send this to the native app. Documentation is available on the Safari Developer Library.
Picture via Wired.
Web Audio API
How useful this is remains to be seen. Web audio tends to be fairly handicapped, regardless of browser, operating system or device. Microsoft’s HTML5 Cut The Rope game still used Flash to play the sound effects. I truly hope the iOS implementation changes that, but I’m also a realist.
CSS Filters
According to the Can I Use report, these are only supported in Chrome 18+ with a -webkit- prefix. CSS Filters are also supported in Safari 6, on Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion (10.7 and 10.8, respectively).
Full Screen View in Landscape Mode
Interesting by itself, but with desktop browsers beginning to land support for a full screen API - can this be triggered progammatically?
requestAnimationFrame
This has landed, albeit with a webkit prefix.
You should be using the Paul Irish polyfill anyway.
App Cache Upped from 5MB to 25MB
I believe it used to show you a dialog asking for more if you exceeded the 5MB limit.
JPEG Downsampling Ceiling Lifted
JPEG downsampling no longer occurs at 2MP, and instead kicks in around the 5MP on supported devices. The iPhone 3GS and 4th gen iPod touch remain at 2MP. That’s if your carrier isn’t downsampling for you (AT&T, Optus in Australia).
Faster JavaScript Performance
This happens every year, so it’s not really news. Nitro was previously brought to home screen apps giving them a massive performance boost. Nitro hasn’t yet been brought across to UIWebViews, one of the many reasons that the Facebook app is a steaming pile of shit. Maybe future iOS 6 betas will bring Nitro to UIWebViews? Maybe it’s already in iOS 6?
Tools like these make it more and more exciting to be a front end dev every day.
Paul Irish covers some of the impressive new Chrome Developer Tools. It’s no surprise he was named .net’s Developer of the Year
@font-face Smoothing in Windows Chrome
WARNING: THE FIX BELOW IS DEPRECATED IN CHROME 16 + 17. SAD-FACE :(
You may have noticed the issue in which @font-face embeds rendered in Windows Chrome look mighty jagged. Fixes such as -webkit-font-smoothing barely do anything, so this hack relies on a fairly well known fact about Windows Chrome: putting text-shadow on anything makes it blurry as shit. Original implementations of the hack relied on a solid text-shadow colour, but this no longer works in recent updates. It is now vital to enter an rgba() value instead.
Hopefully you will end up with something like this:
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 {
font-family: ‘TodaySHOP-BoldRegular’;
text-shadow: 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.01);
}
Real World Examples:
A real world example of this is best demonstrated on my own Front End Development Guidelines. My header tags were smoothed out with a solid hex colour, prior to the rgba() update. They’re still broken to date. Oops.
But the problem is much more widespread. Consider this ironic blog post on IE font smoothing by @Koodoz, in which the Chrome problem rears its ugly head again. It leads to some interesting accidental changes, where “hate” has become “hale”.
Caveats:
Be aware that this can modify the kerning of the text. There are also situations where the font is hinted in a way that this hack is detrimental. The over-used League Gothic, for example, does not bode well with this method at smaller font-sizes. There were also some comments that this makes Chrome on Mac even blurrier than usual.
Credit:
I’ve been trying to track down who taught me this little trick for a while now. I originally assumed it was @Koodoz, as he invests heavily in @font-face in his designs - but it was news to him. I thought it might be @Rainerbird, as we both read the same kind of stuff online. No dice there either. This blog post also describes the method, but I have probably been using the method just as long and don’t recall visiting that site. The comments and feedback on that blog post are great for further explaining the method and its shortfalls. ■
