iPhone developer specs leaked online

Details on Apple mobile published on university blog

Shaun Nichols in California, vnunet.com 22 Jun 2007

An article posted on the Washington University technology group blog has revealed new details about Apple's iPhone developer programme.

The posting, which has since been removed, contained notes from a session at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) called 'Designing Web Content for the iPhone'.

The session gave web developers the specifics on the iPhone and best practices for optimising sites for the device.

Apple has released only limited information about the options that developers have with the iPhone. At last week's developer event, the company disclosed that developers will essentially be limited to building websites.

Delegates attending the session were told that the phone will not offer Flash or Java, the two technologies that developers commonly use for online and mobile applications.

JavaScript, meanwhile, will be limited to five seconds of runtime, and HTML pages will be limited to 10MB in size.

The posting also noted that no more than "eight documents" will allowed to run at the same time, but did not clarify whether this refers to websites accessed simultaneously or to cached pages.

Apple will also force developers to encode videos in the H.264 format, which is also being used for the device's built-in YouTube player. Online video services such as YouTube have standardised on the Flash format.

The blog entry was deleted after members of the group realised that posting the notes online may violate the non-disclosure agreement that all WWDC a ttendees are required to sign.

Oren Sreebny, director of the emerging technology department at Washington University, told vnunet.com that the group had never intended to leak confidential information and that the entry was taken down without any request from Apple.

"Our blog is mainly for folks here, and it is not widely read," he explained. "We just were not thinking."

Although the entry has been removed from the site, the web page containing the post is still accessible through Google's cache.

The ability to run Java and Flash on the iPhone has been a point of speculation since Apple chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled the device in January.

The topic picked up steam when Jobs announced at WWDC that all third-party applications for the iPhone would be developed through the Safari browser.

Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile computing at Gartner, told vnunet.com that the decision not to support Java or Flash is merely a case of "Apple being Apple".

"Apple is about tapping into game-changing ideas," he explained. "What they're doing is a whole new way of developing applications, so they're not interested in doing anything with Java."

The analyst does not see the decision having any effect on developers' willingness to write applications for the iPhone. "Everyone is going crazy doing whatever they can for the iPhone," he said.

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