A Better Web Experience is on The Horizon

Recently Apple announced the iPhone 2.0, renamed "OS X iPhone" and an interested new Operating System Upgrade called "Snow Leopard 10.6.” The interesting part about these is how the two releases interact together.

"Snow Leopard" will not be a major upgrade like "Leopard" but a more of a speed and stability upgrade which will allow its devices to operate smoother. They are also going with a full Intel 64 bit processing for speed and more stability thus dropping Power PC support.

This New OS X iPhone will be more corporate friendly with push email, push contacts, auto-discovery, global address lookup, two-factor authentication and remote wipe. Apple has also worked with Cisco to build in a secure VPN into the new iPhone. This new iPhone will rely heavily on the Internet and the framework of a website. A more Mobile friend experience is coming.

In fact Google recently changed their favicon to scale better on new platforms. They know a changing in mobile web standards is coming and being lead by the iPhone.

Marissa Mayer explains on the Google Blog:

"The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices."

Now the importance of this is that the iPhone will become a very powerful instrument for corporate America and for everyday people as well. With their new "Snow Leopard" Operating system being able to control a computer and easily connecting to your computer through iPhone, it is going to become more seamless. The iPhone will now become the standard in the mobile web experience.

As a web developer, this is very important because it means that now we will have the ability to generate more traffic from the mobile world. A website has to be ready to adapt to this new way of viewing a website.

Websites and developers have to create a web experience which allows them to succeed on mobile devices since they are quickly becoming the way of the future.

Currently a lot of websites don't adapt to a different users’ browser. For example, if you view a site in Safari versus Firefox, the experience could be the same, have a slight difference in appearance or vastly different.

A lazy web designer probably does not check the design layout in other web browser such as like Opera, Camino, Firefox, Flock, etc. Until all web browsers achieve the Acid 3 test standard, each user experience will differ.

Now that there is a growing mobile traffic, testing of a site must be done not only on different browsers and operating systems, but also on major mobile devices.

Good web designers use scripts which can detect browsers and adjust the appearance of the web design so that it looks exactly the same on the each browser. Now, the next level will have to be detecting mobile devices and making sure their site looks perfect on this new emerging traffic.

When the web can be viewed like it is supposed to be viewed on any device, the user experience can only be positive which then creates brand loyalty and return traffic. So don't forget, when designing or redesigning a site, remember the new mobile traffic that is coming and scale your website accordingly.