Scrolling on the iPhone
Showtime looked good when I first saw it a few weeks ago, and it looks even better today. It looks like a great native iPhone app. It just doesn’t feel like one, and scrolling is the main reason. I also believe that iPhone web app developers need to be careful about creating controls that look like native iPhone controls, but act different. Showtime uses On/Off toggle buttons that look just like the native ones, but the fake web ones can only be activated by tapping them. The real ones can be both tapped and slid. And my observations suggest most iPhone users slide them (including Phil Schiller in an on stage demo). If you have to tap them, better to use checkboxes, I say.
I agree, the scrolling is an issue. I’m going to investigate PastryKit to see how viable this hacked acceleration/fixed positioning is. The toggle is mostly laziness, however—this is certainly possible and I hope to implement in the next week or so. And yes, for those who are curious, this PastryKit research is taking precedence over the Tweetie throwdown, which I’ve been remiss through the moving chaos.
