The iPhone has some really cool features for web apps.
One feature that I particularly like is called Web Clips. These are pages that can be installed on your home screen. You can specify an icon for use on the home page just like you would for a native app. If you don’t supply one, then it uses a screen capture of your page. You can also supply a splash screen png that will display while your web page is loading. You can hide the address bar to make it look even more like a native app. There is one small gotcha with this though. If you click on any link inside your webpage, it will open up Safari and close your nice page. The trick then is to make the entire application a one page app. You accomplish this through the use of AJAX.
Another feature that is very cool is new to HTML 5. You can specify a cache manifest file that tells the iPhone which files to cache locally. The cool thing about this is that if you have an application that is static, you can run the app while the iPhone is in airplane mode. This is very cool. You can even specify fallback files that are used when the app is offline. When I tested this out, the application was VERY snappy. Currently only Firefox 3 and Safari 4 support this.
A final feature that I have not explored very much is client side storage. This is also a new HTML 5 feature. All the newest browsers except Chrome support this feature. This is a necessary feature if you want to have some sort of database driven offline capable application for the mobile device.
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