iPhone-optimized IHT.com launches

While our American colleagues are enjoying this Fourth of July by gorging on delicious BBQ and tossing each other into swimming pools, here in France it’s just another day. Since we’re stuck in the office — on a wonderful Parisian summer day, no less — we decided to launch our iPhone-optimized version of IHT.com.

Point your iPhone or iPod Touch to: http://iphone.iht.com and take a look.

As you can see, this is an optimized version of the web site, and not an “iPhone application”, which is what they were called before Mr. Jobs decided to open up the iPhone for development. Now, they’re “native apps” which you obtain through iTunes and may or may not have to pay for. We don’t have any plans to develop a native app.

The iPhone site is still very much a work in progress. We wanted to get the core functionality in place first so the user can access nearly all of the content on the regular IHT.com site. You’ll notice that we’ve decided to build the entire site using AJAX (as opposed to published pages), and while this allows the speed to be quite zippy on Edge and blazing fast on Wi-Fi, it also uncovered numerous bugs and usability issues.

The most glaring omissions are the lack of functionality of Safari’s back/forward buttons and bookmarking. The former is a very difficult nut to crack, as we’ve done extensive research and experimented with several JS libraries. While we were able to get browser history working, the JavaScript process required is extremely processor-intensive and caused a 15-25 second delay in the display of every new page requested. It was too detrimental to the experience to retain the functionality. JavaScript is notoriously slow on iPhones, and I hope that Apple addresses this some time in the future, unless of course this has been Apple’s plan all along: to cripple Safari knowing that companies would pay them real money to develop native applications that harness the full power of the phone. In any case, we felt that it’s less of a dealbreaker and more of an annoyance. This one is on the top of our bug list.

Bookmarking is somewhat related, and Google’s Really Simple History claims to address both this and the previously mentioned issues. We couldn’t get it to work properly, but we can think of a few ways to tweak our code so you can “drill” into the AJAX to access specific pages. Once we implement this properly we’ll also add an “E-Mail Article” feature, so keep an eye out for that.

Another minor annoyance is Safari’s address bar, which auto-hides on most sites but stopped working reliably on ours. In earlier builds of the site, it auto-hid as it should when the page finished loading, but somewhere along the line it stopped disappearing. We suspect it has something to do with AJAX processes running when the page thinks it’s finished.

There’s a short list of other issues that we’ll be addressing in the next few weeks, but if you find anything, feel free to report it here.

That’s it for now…we’re off to find an expat barbecue to crash.