What iOS 6 Mobile Safari Offers Front End Devs | Hacker News Reader

What iOS 6 Mobile Safari Offers Front End Devs

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48 pointstaitems20 comments

My favourite by far is the smart app banners. Because I almost never want to download your app. It annoys me to no end having a full screen advertisement to download an application appear every time I go to a lot of sites, instead of taking me directly to the regular site that works fine in Safari...

So I really hope that websites move over to this new method, because at worst it is far less intrusive, and at best it will be able to be completely disabled so I don't have to see it at all!

There aren't any docs yet according to the article, but this is almost definitely an un-standardized meta tag or something. For mobile devs, it removes some (boilerplate) code and standardizes the user experience, which is good. My only hope is that they made the syntax open enough that it will support other app stores (so a similar tag can be used if android decides to follow along). If it's <itunes> or something, well, screw them.

I'm completely speculating (my agent hasn't approved iOS 6 SDK License yet and I can't access the docs), but if I were to implement this feature, I'd bake it into the App Store. Say you created IMDB.app. You can specify (in a plist) which domains your app operates on (imdb.com, imdb.de) and Safari would automatically open up that banner when you visited those domain IF YOU DON'T HAVE IT INSTALLED ALREADY. Something like <itunes='imdb' lang='en/us'> is the worst option I think. AND, would cause confusion. What if all websites decided to include this little tag on behalf of an advertiser to promote an app? That's the nightmare scenario IMO.

This was how I thought it would work too (I haven't seen the docs yet). I figured that you would specify either when you build your app or somewhere in iTunes connect and when the app store itself will tell safari what sites it should show the notification banner for.

She agreed to the license now, and I took a look at docs. As my parent had mentioned (and I apparently missed it!), there are no docs regarding those Smart Banners yet. And release notes says:

    In iOS 6 beta 1, Smart App Banners in Safari show App Store information
    for an app above web content. In this seed, the app launching UI and 
    functionality portion of Smart App Banners is not available.

So it seems we have to wait till seed 2.

This quora question is about the same thing, but without any answers (yet): http://www.quora.com/iOS-6/How-will-Smart-App-Banners-work

> It annoys me to no end having a full screen advertisement to download an application appear every time I go to a lot of sites

Some french news sites manage to do worse: they display a javascript alert suggesting downloading their shitty application.

The forum software used by HomebrewTalk does the same thing. Always annoys me when I'm just trying to get to a thread that I had bookmarked to look at while I'm mid-brew.

Do you mean the 'This forum is TapTalk enabled' alert - I hate that too.

Any improvements to the 'web app'* experience? For example, background audio, faster JS performance?

  * using <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

I've long wondered what Apple's plan for that. They still haven't added a way to specify an @2x splash screen for fullscreen web apps, so it feels pretty abandoned.

That's technically true, but they don't need to. You can use the same markup as the @1x splash screens and target retina devices with media queries. I wrote a blog post explaining exactly how to do it: http://taylor.fausak.me/2012/03/27/ios-web-app-icons-and-sta...

Finally support for input type="file"!

It is almost... too easy now...

Am really surprised (and pleased) to see web audio API on the list. But a part of me wonders if it is true. It hasn't yet come to ship in Safari on the desktop and is only available via nightlies afaik.

I hear web audio is in Safari 6.

Looks pretty nice. I wonder if the web audio improvements also mean they ditched the 'click to play' bug/feature for audio and video elements.

Still no support for NavigationTiming so stats tools like Google Analytics won't be able to tell you how long pages take to load.

So, does the remote debugging also work with Safari for Windows?

I wonder if they support IndexedDB

That would be a blessing.

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