While most web sites display with no issues on the iPhone, web sites should still be redesigned to fit appropriately on the screen. The UI webkit provides various features that can be utilized to make your web page look more like a native iPhone application. A cool feature that we explored this week, is the viewport metatag.

This simple meta tag helps Mobile Safari determine how best to scale your site for the smaller screen of the iPhone.

To set the viewport width to the width of the device add the following meta tag

<meta name = “viewport” content = “width = device-width”>

» Read more: Formatting Web Pages for the iPhone

Online video has become one of the most used features of the internet, but there is a still a shortage of effective tools that make publishing video content an easy task. Distributing video content over the internet presents various challenges, ranging from creating and editing video content to storage and distribution.

Planning
When starting an online video project it always helps to have a preproduction plan where all these issues are considered. Before you get into how to distribute your video, you first have to plan how to create the content you will use for the video.

Equipment
These days almost every phone has a video camera built in. Some of these cameras are better than others, but cell phone video cameras and portable video devices like the Flip do a decent job of capturing video in digital format. To increase the quality of your video you may want to consider or camcorder or if your budget allows, a higher end movie studio quality camera. Factors to consider when deciding what kind of camera to use are issues such as display aspect ratio, type of storage and capacity, image stabilization features, picture and color quality just to name a few. Sound is also an important consideration. Most cameras have a built in microphone but this may not always be ideal depending on the background sounds. A stand-alone boom mike may be needed to isolate sounds effectively. Extra lighting may also be needed if light is a problem in the shooting location.

» Read more: Making and distributing video content on the web

Midterm 7500

I remember my first introduction to the internet and how slow it used to be. Downloading photos used to take so long and forget watching videos you would have to leave and come back later to watch them. Now the internet displays data in all sorts of interesting beautiful ways as the bandwidth has increased and download times are no longer a hinderance. The term rich media was coined to describe a broad range of digital interactive media. Rich media can be downloadable or may be embedded in a webpage.  » Read more: Rich Media on the Web