Apple takes Safari to Windows and iPhone
Apple plans to ship a version of its Safari Web browser for Windows, and third-party developers will be able to get a piece of the iPhone, the company announced Monday.
A beta version of Safari for Windows is available now, CEO Steve Jobs announced during his keynote speech at the company's 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference. Safari will also allow Web developers to create applications for the iPhone using common Web development standards that can interact with the rest of the applications that will ship with the iPhone.
Jobs previewed several features that will be shipped with Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, which is due in October for US$129. But the Safari news was unexpected; the software became available Monday on Apple's Web site for Windows users as a free beta version.
Apple has only a 5 percent share of the browser market, behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox, but Jobs reckons that allowing Windows users to download the browser will help boost market share the same way that making iTunes available for Windows users helped that application.
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This being WWDC, the talk turned to developers and the iPhone. Apple has a new way to create applications for mobile devices, Jobs said, that's based on the full Safari engine inside of the iPhone. This paves the way for Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that integrate perfectly with the iPhone. There's actually no software developer kit required. If developers know how to write Web apps using modern standards, they can go live with their apps on June 29.
Credit: James Martin, CNET News.com
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The new version, Safari 3, is also the key to allowing application developers to create third-party applications for the hotly anticipated iPhone, which is set to go on sale at 6pm on June 29, Jobs announced (an Apple representative could not immediately confirm whether that was 6pm Pacific time or Eastern time, or whether it would be rolling launch). The pitch is that developers can create Web applications using Web 2.0 standards like Ajax that will work just as well as applications that Apple has written natively for the iPhone.
Applications designed with the iPhone in mind will run in a Safari browser on the phone with hooks into other applications, such as voice calling, email and Google Maps.
Scott Forstall, vice president of iPhone software development, demonstrated a sample application that Apple built to access contacts in a corporate database. Clicking on a phone number in a contact record, for example, would automatically dial that contact.
This gives application developers a path to the iPhone, but it falls short of the software development kit that some were hoping for that would allow developers to create native applications for the iPhone.
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