Day 12 - What format should video be in for the iPhone

This week I spent a good deal of time reading the Cocoa Fundamental guide and Objective-C. The opening lines says "readers should be proficient C programmers and should be familiar with the capabilities and technologies of each platform." This is a problem because I don't know any programming language thoroughly and I have only scratched the surface of Objective-C.

I do understand the tiered diagrams that explain the differences between Mac OS X and iPhone OS. It is obvious that some support code is not necessary for the iPhone such as printing capabilities, multitasking etc.

What I found curious was that Quicktime is not a component of the iPhone as a core service, but it is for the Mac. Also, Flash can’t played in iPhone, but .mov files (Quicktime) can be, so I’m confused. Perhaps, it comes down to compression. It's an area I feel less familiar with and I have some design questions about.

I was surprised to see a utility called Shark, which is used for memory allocation or memory mapping. I didn't know about this application, but it appears similar to the task manager in Windows.

At this point, I am still reading the Cocoa Fundamentals Guide, I am in the section dealing with Foundation Classes. I did pick up the Human Interface Guidelines, or what is lovingly called the HIG. Most of it was actually intuitive. Lots of the content reinforced things such as simplicity, and attractiveness.

What I found very interesting was the description of "Web-only content, including web applications, which are websites that behave like built-in iPhone applications and Web pages that provide a focused solution to a task and conform to certain display guidelines are known as web applications, because they behave similarly to the built-in iPhone OS applications. A web application, like all web-only content, runs in Safari on iPhone; users do not install it on their devices, instead they go to the web application’s URL."

I haven’t determined that a website has to be structured or designed specifically to fit within the iPhone. This doesn’t make sense, since the web browser in iPhone will allow users to go to any website in their search and access that website. The website may work, but the video may not because of the format it is in on the website. This issue is of some concern and I’m researching it as I write this.