Back in the bad old days of the original Browser Wars, Netscape and Internet Explorer duked it out for prominence. One of the primary munitions in this conflict was introducing display features and custom code that the other browser didn’t have. The downside of this was that web developers had two choices — code for one browser or the other (and if you were on the Internet back then, you surely remember the ubiquitous “Best Viewed with XXX Browser” signs), or bend over backwards with multiple forking and buggy browser sniffing trying to get the damned thing to work on what amounted to two incompatible platforms. Then Microsoft came up with their cunning “Drive them out of business by giving ours away for free” strategy, and in one grand gesture, won the war. Internet Explorer, of course, has been dominant ever since.

The Netscape people didn’t rest, however, and to make a long story short: Firefox.

Even as IE dominated the browser market all those years, there were other browsers. The problem was that most web coders didn’t give a rat’s ass — they designed and tested their websites in the (buggy) Internet Explorer, and all those little pissant browsers that “nobody” uses be damned. The fact that the other browsers followed the official HTML and CSS standards better than IE made no difference; coders just coded for the bugs in IE — most likely not even realizing they were doing it.

But these days, Firefox has grown in popularity, and with that, coders are finally realizing that there’s another browser out there — and starting to write “standards compliant” web pages that work on both. Unfortunately, while an improvement, this is really a type of “more of the same”. There are still more than the two browsers.

Apple has had their own browser for a few years now, but it has been Mac OS X-only. This pretty much means that anybody not alrady running on a Mac is not going to be doing any testing for it. They can’t — at least not easily. Up until now, Apple has been happy to quietly improve their browser and give it out as just another advantage of using a Mac instead of one of The Other Guys.

Enter the iPhone.

One of the big touted features of the iPhone is that it has a full-fledged web browser built-in. For the first time, people who don’t necessarily have a Macintosh computer will be using the Safari web browser. Suddenly, Steve Jobs has a lot bigger reason to want web developers to test their sites on Safari — his big new product’s web ability depends on it. As web sites continue to morph into web apps, the increasingly complex code requires more testing to work properly. And Steve wants it to work on the iPhone.

Thus, Safari for Windows. Much as in the past several years he has encouraged Mac developers by giving away the XCode development environment, he is now giving away a Mac testing ground that works on 90% of the world’s computers. With a dash of luck and a bit of that Jobsian voodoo, Safari just might break out past its current 5% market share — and I’m sure that wouldn’t break his heart either — but I think his biggest motivation at this particular point was to make Safari a more universally tested browser, so that the iPhone can more easily attract the development community it deserves.

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Completely separate from rumors of the Apple phone and commentary on the previously announced iTV (now “Apple TV”), There is another major technology expected to come out of Apple that has largely flown under the radar recently. I’m referring to their upcoming Resolution Independent User Interface.

Probably the biggest reason this has remained on the down-low is that it’s a bit difficult to explain — it can’t easily be reduced to a sound bite the way “Apple phone” or “TV media player” can be; but it’s an important technology for the future of computers and computerized gadgetry in general.

The quick and dirty version of what that is is thus:

Remember back when you had an 800×600 resolution monitor? Later you got a newer monitor with a resolution of 1024×768, and while the screen itself was bigger, icons, text and the like displayed smaller on it — that is, there was more stuff packed into the same amount of screen space. The resolution had gone up. Maybe you didn’t like things smaller, so you figured out how to set the resolution back to 800×600. Maybe you just settled for the smaller icons. Eventually, programs such as Microsoft Word (and for that matter, Windows itself) gained the ability to use “large” icons and text in the toolbars and such, to make up for the shrinking caused by expanded resolution. With the rise of Mac OS X, we saw the ability to use large or small icons on virtually every toolbar on every application.

The real geeks among us even figured out that we could go into Terminal in OS X and change the scaling of the GUI — that is, tell the computer to display programs at a certain percentage of “default” — but that has glitches, and really is more of a hack than anything else. Notably, if you scale something bigger, it looks pixel-y. The nice crisp edges and lines are messed up.

So Resolution Independent User Interface (“RIUI”) is a system by which the operating system is designed to be resizable, no matter what resolution your monitor is. Why is this important? Because as computers become more and more varied in size and form, people are more and more running the same programs on systems as varied as 22-inch high-def screens, to 12-inch laptops, to handheld gadgets such as… the iPhone.

Apple has been quietly talking about RIUI as a feature of an upcoming OS release. Reportedly many people thought it was going to be part of OS 10.4, which it wasn’t, and now it is reportedly going to be part of the upcoming OS 10.5. I personally think we’ve already seen it in action. Where? I’m so glad you asked….

In last week’s Keynote presentation at the MacWorld Expo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs got up on stage and presented the soon-to-be-released iPhone, which is basically a mobile phone and handheld computer running a full version of Mac OS X. The way he showed it to the audience was to actually use one, with a special extra board installed that gave it a video out port so what he was doing could be projected onto the big screen on the stage. Let me say that again. He was holding in his hand a computer with a screen size of a couple inches by a couple inches, and that computer was outputting video that was being displayed on a huge projection behind him on the stage.

Now, If you did that with you average Palm handheld, that big projection would look awfully pixelized. That’s just the nature of taking a certain resolution and sizing it up significantly. Have you ever looked at an image on your computer and zoomed in and in and in until it looked like a bunch of colored boxes? Same thing.

That projection on the stage looked pretty clear to me. It looked like a far higher resolution than the 160dpi that the iPhone reportedly has, but according to Steve (and by all indications as he used it and the projection updated instantly) it was the iPhone in his hand that was creating the image we saw on the projection. I think that Jobs was slyly showing us the Resolution Independent GUI all through his presentation. He never mentioned it, but he subtly got us used to the concept of viewing the same interface image at radically different scales and resolutions without any loss of crispness or image fidelity.

Somewhere down the road when they release this feature as part of an OS, people are going to be pointing to this presentation as the first public unveiling of the technology that Apple has already perfected.

Just remember — you heard it here first.

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“Geez. You know what this is? It’s the True Video iPod AND the Mac Tablet AND the iPhone.”

(Oh, and he was talking to Steve Jobs. Not me.)

[cross-posted in Striderweb blog]

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Interesting reading, and it makes me wonder just what the minds in Redmond are thinking. Still trying to control the world I guess. *sigh*

I especially like this bit:

“[O]ne important point that must be kept in mind when reading this document is that in order to work, Vista’s content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that’s unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry wishes it were possible.”

Microsoft got its lock on operating systems because they were there in the beginning (or close enough) that they were able to sink in their hooks from the start. The foolish thing they’re trying (over and over) to do now is to retroactively get a lock on media forms that have existed for years. Consumers do not respond well to draconian measures, and there will most certainly be a backlash if they insist with going forward with this.

The security holes weren’t damaging enough. Now they’re going to deliberately cripple Windows computers… which will just throw more and more angry former Windows users into the waiting arms of Apple.

Watta buncha maroons.

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