Martin Gordon's Blog

I was planning on writing about the Apple TV that I'm planning on buying soon, but instead I got caught up on iPhone Web Clips. Right after I installed the new iPhone update, I went to add my three favorite mobile sites, Twitter, Google Reader, and Facebook to my home screen. Suffice it to say that I was pretty disappointed when the three icons looked like white squares with some specks of dirt, thanks to their mobile-optimized design. I tried for about 10 minutes to come up with a way to write a page that will prepend the icon link to the mobile sites and give me custom icons, but nothing came out of that exercise.

Today, I came across a post by Paul Robinson linking to a solution to this by Matt McInerney. The solution is rather simple, and involves a few lines of Javascript to redirect visitors to the intended site after 2 seconds, enough time to hit the "+" button in MobileSafari and bookmark the page. I created pages for the three sites noted above, bookmarked them and then changed the redirect timeout to 0 seconds and voila, custom icons!

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, Web Clips, Mobile Safari, JavaScript, redirect

When I first saw the headline that the Opera Browser is headed to the iPhone (later confirmed as false), I joking thought that Opera would be releasing a JavaScript web browser that ran in Safari. On second thought, I realized that a JavaScript browser could be used to bypass proxies by requesting pages from the server and passing them to the client via AJAX.

A quick Google search reveals one JavaScript browser called Accent JavaScript Browser, but it was released in 2001 and says it only runs in IE. A quick test of the browser in Firefox on the Mac shows that it doesn't work too well and that the buttons are only a proxy for the client-side JS functions. I also found another "browser", but I couldn't get this one to work in Safari or Firefox.

So far I'm 0/2 on working AJAX browsers. If a working one did exist, would it even be possible to use it for bypassing proxies? I have no need for this functionality, I just thought that it could be a pretty neat loophole.

Technorati Tags: JavaScript, AJAX, proxies, Opera, security, web browser

Scott Gilbertson of Wired writes on how the iPhone is breeding the next generation of IE4-only web sites in the context of iPhone-optimized sites:

In suggesting that developers use the web to build iPhone applications, what Apple has done (perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not) is force the creation of a subset of the mobile web that only works with the iPhone’s unique features — namely the touch-screen interface.

While Apple is pushing HTML and JavaScript for iPhone app development, they aren't (inadvertently or not) forcing the creation of sites that only work with the touch screen. In fact, I recall reading (correct me if I'm wrong) that the iPhone browser doesn't even support draggin or hovers/mouseovers. There's very little in the way of iPhone-only features (only a few CSS attributes and the tel:/map: protocol for dialing and Google Mapping, as I recall) and so the only way sites are being iPhone-optimized are that they're being dumbed down for the device, thanks to a lack of support for Flash and some JavaScript events (and possibly more). Furthermore, most iPhone-optimized sites are extensions of existing sites. There's no killer app for the internet out there that we're all missing out on because it only runs on the iPhone; hell, there isn't even a web-based killer app out for the iPhone (and I saw this as a launch day iPhone owner).

To be honest, I find all these iPhone-optimized web sites to be completely garbage. This stems largely from one thing: the sites are attempting to mimic Apple's native UI. Of course, the web apps have two huge disadvantage when compared to Apple's apps: they're loading data over a (potentially) slow data connection and JavaScript performance is atrocious on the iPhone.

For something I truly wanted to use heavily, I would go out of my to find a mobile, but not iPhone-optimized, site to use over its iPhone-optimized brethren. The two big winners in the mobile but not iPhone-optimized category are Google Reader and Twitter. I use both daily primarily because they're lightweight (prettier, slower competitors to both are out there). The most recent loser: Facebook – and I'm sure there are many others, but I stopped using them so long ago I can't even remember any of them.

The shoddy state of the mobile web being what it is, I went and jailbroke my iPhone last week, allowing for third-party apps to be installed. It was fairly straightforward, though I had to piece together instructions from a handful of websites to actually get it done. Tonight's release of the Mobile Twitterrific proof-of-concept also spurred me to get the iPhone development toolchain installed. Also, fairly straightforward except for finding out what the hell a "heavenly dmg" was (it's an unencrypted version of the iPhone restore image). There's nothing absolutely must-have out there yet, but it's only a matter of time. You don't really get a sense of how powerful and extensible the iPhone really is (or could be) until you've run a terminal on it or ssh'ed and sftp'ed in.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, SDK, Microsoft, Internet Explorer, standards, Wired, web apps, Web 2.0, Cocoa, hacking, JavaScript

Robert asked for it, and I was bored, so here's my first attempt at a Greasemonkey script. It basically adds "[Add]" next to your followers list so you can easily add followers as friends. You can find the script here. Let me know of any suggestions/improvements in the comments:

Known issues:

• Doesn't check to see if a follower is already a friend (could be fixed by checking /statuses/friends.xml). Nothing seems to break by adding people multiple times, however.
• Doesn't create the link for users with default icons (because user IDs aren't exposed from followers page, but can get them from /statuses/followers.xml). I really hope that the xml returns users in the same order as the page lists them.

I discovered that after putting together this script that those two xml files linked above have the information needed to fix the two issues. I'll get this out there in case people want it ASAP, but I'll work on doing it via the API.

Also, check me out on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Greasemonkey, Firefox, Javascript