We’ve been exploring the iPhone browser, which I think is called MobileSafari, and found it to be rather good. Typing code and hitting refresh on the iPhone over a WiFi network though is a pain (same with any external device e.g. Nokia N95 which has horrible WiFi connection robustness.) iPhoney is a useful little application which uses Safari, the normal Mac OS X kind, to mimic the iPhone interface on your desktop. It matches the dimensions of the iPhone and provides some of the touch-screen interactivity.
However it is using Safari for Mac OS X and not MobileSafari and you are running it on a Intel Core 2 Duo machine with 2gig of RAM and not the less capable iPhone hardware which means you don’t get the same experience. Complex JavaScript animations for instance are slick on a MacBook Pro but jittery on the iPhone (understandble really.) Plus there are rendering differences between the browsers.
What would be better is if Apple released a proper SDK which included a version of MobileSafari that worked on Mac OS X. The underlying system on Mac OS X and OS X on the iPhone is pretty similar. It wouldn’t be perfect I realise but it would be pretty close. Even better if we could throttle CPU, network (to emulate EDGE and WiFi speeds) and memory resources to the app.
What would be ideal is to be allowed to install the iPhone software as a virtual machine in Parallels. And then Apple need to release mult-touch screens for their Mac line.
We can dream.
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