A compliment and a complaint for Safari

Adapting Safari to work for the iPhone’s interface is no small feat, and by and large, the Apple engineers have done a pretty good job of taking a point-and-click interface to a tap-and-scroll interface. Drop-down menus (HTML <select> elements), are a great example. Choosing the right option would be difficult to do precisely, since they’re so close together, so on the iPhone, you get a totally different “roller” interface (like when you choose a date or time in the calendar or alarm clock). Now you can flick through the options in a very iPhone-like style instead of having to navigate a cramped menu of options.

Not every implementation is perfect though. Consider this: when entering text into a web form, it’s often better to switch into landscape orientation, since the onscreen keyboard is then larger and easier to type on. However, it also takes up more space on the screen, leaving you with a much smaller view of the page. And, should you need to edit text, you’ll find that the magnifying loupe often goes off the screen. Sometimes you can coax it back on the screen by scrolling the page, but sometimes it’s more effective to switch back to portrait, edit, and then flip back to landscape. However, if you’re doing a lot of editing—like, say, writing a blog post—that can get pretty irritating pretty fast.

Overall, it just makes me miss text selection that much more.

Category: Musings, Software

Posted by Dan Moren on Jul 9 2007, 11:05 AM ET

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