OpenID47 items tagged “iphone”
Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? John Gruber makes the case for the fading significance of Flash, brought about by Apple’s point-blank refusal to support it on the iPhone or iPad. “Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”.” 
31st January 2010, 12:05 pm
owlsnearyou.com. Nat and I built this over the weekend. It asks for your location, then tells you where your nearest Owl is (using sightings data people have entered on WildlifeNearYou.com). If you’re using Firefox 3.6 or an iPhone it grabs your location using the W3C geolocation API so you don’t have to type anything at all. 19th January 2010, 2:45 pm
Notes on designing the Guardian iPhone app. By John-Henry Barac, the principal designer of he iPhone application who also previously worked on the Guardian’s print transition to the Berliner format. 
20th December 2009, 12:55 pm
Guardian iPhone app. Released today, ad-free, £2.39 for the application, has an excellent offline mode. I helped build the backend web service, which is a Django app running on EC2. 
14th December 2009, 1:29 pm
Programmers don’t use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would.
— Paul Graham 19th November 2009, 10:13 pm
We’re at a critical juncture in the evolution of software. The web is still here and it is still strong. Anyone can still put any information or applications on a web server without asking for permission, and anyone in the world can still access it just by typing a URL. I don’t think I appreciated how important that is until recently. Nobody designs new systems like that anymore, or at least few of them succeed. What an incredible stroke of luck the web was, and what a shame it would be to let that freedom slip away.
— Joe Hewitt 15th November 2009, 8:50 am
This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.
— John Gruber 6th October 2009, 7:33 am
Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash. A brilliant feat of engineering: Adobe worked around Apple’s “no runtime allowed” rules by writing a compiler front end for LLVM that compiles ActionScript 3 to ARM assembly code, and apparently ported the regular Flash drawing APIs as well. 
5th October 2009, 9:15 pm
Gmail for Mobile: Reducing Startup Latency. Cheeky iPhone optimisation trick—parsing 200 KB of JavaScript takes an iPhone 2.2 device 2.6 seconds, so Gmail embeds code components in /* comments */ in a script tag and evals them on demand later on when the features are needed. 23rd September 2009, 10:29 pm
Developing for the iPhone at the moment is like picking up dimes in front of a bulldozer.
— Tim Bray 21st September 2009, 5:30 pm
iPlayer usage, for streaming, peaks about 10pm—just a little later from TV. But interestingly, iPlayer on the iPhone peaks at about midnight. So people are clearly going to bed with their iPhone and watching in bed. And we also see on the weekends, there’s a peak of Saturday and Sunday morning usage at about 8 to 10am in the morning on iPhone.
— Anthony Rose 23rd May 2009, 12:42 am
Fake Reviews. Now now kids, play nice... Not at all surprised to hear this—nefarious iPhone app developers (in this case the team behind “London Tube”, an inferior version of Malcolm Barclay’s marvellous “Tube Deluxe”) have been caught leaving fake negative reviews on rival applications in the App Store. This is an excellent argument for adding friends/followers or importing an existing social graph—I’d much rather see reviews from people in my social network than strangers who may turn out to be sock puppets. 22nd May 2009, 12:49 am
Perhaps it’s just frustration speaking here, but when Apple ties my hands behind my back and lets users punch me publicly in the face without allowing me to at least respond back, it’s hard to get excited about building an app.
— Garrett Murray 
22nd April 2009, 12:17 pm
The App Store has an inscrutable, time-consuming, whim-dependent approval process. The App Store newsgroup postings are full of angry claims that this is a bug, but I bet it’s a feature. If you can’t get an app approved until it’s working perfectly, and you have to wait a week or two -- or more -- between approval rounds, you’re much more likely to put a lot more effort in up front to get it right.
— Marc Hedlund 12th April 2009, 1:49 pm
Switching from scripting languages to Objective C and iPhone: useful libraries. Matt Biddulph collects together some very useful libraries for developers just getting started with Objective-C (though I’m not too keen on the title). 27th January 2009, 5:50 pm
Apple shows us DRM’s true colors. The EFF reviews the various places that Apple still applies DRM (including locking iPhones to carriers, licensing authentication chips for iPod accessory vendors, preventing OS X from loading on generic PCs) and concludes that “the majority of these DRM efforts do not have even an arguable relation to ’piracy.’” 18th January 2009, 10:16 am
How could the major players have left a gap in the market so wide that a complete novice in mobile telephony could so instantly shame them?
— Stephen Fry 10th December 2008, 6:21 pm
BBC Programmes iPhone webapp experiment. More clever BBC hackery from Duncan Robertson, a really classy iPhone web app for viewing the BBC’s TV schedules, built against the BBC Programmes API with source code available. 8th December 2008, 6:21 pm
iPhone Backup Extractor possibilities (via) Nick Ludlam points out that iTunes backs up your iPhone call records by copying across a sqlite database—which means it wouldn’t be at all hard to extract the logs in to a larger database. Could make for a really cool addition to a private lifestreaming application. 10th November 2008, 10:41 pm
I’ll put forth one central, overriding guideline for iPhone UI design: Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.
— John Gruber 4th November 2008, 12:02 am
Where I’m actually living in augmented reality, Jefferson Airplane and what does this mean for photos. Rev Dan Catt takes us to the future. 27th October 2008, 11:53 pm
Best Practices for OAuth with Fire Eagle. “We insist that you must NOT use embedded rendering controls to present the OAuth process with Yahoo! and Fire Eagle”—that’s a clear nod towards the iPhone development community. 
16th October 2008, 11:23 pm
Obama ’08 for iPhone (via) Slick app, impressive for a three week turnaround. I’m guessing it uses the phone number area codes in your address book to arrange your friends by state for the “call your friends” feature, which is an ingeniously simple hack. 2nd October 2008, 6:13 pm
[REDACTED]. Now that the iPhone NDA has been lifted be prepared for a flood of useful tips about the platform. Here’s Craig Hockenberry explaining how iPhone URL schemes work (used to great effect in the Pownce app for returning to the right place post-OAuth authentication in Safari). 1st October 2008, 10:34 pm
OAuth on the iPhone. Mike from Pownce explains their superbly implemented OAuth flow for the Pownce iPhone app, and how much push-back they got on it from regular users. One interesting point is that an iPhone application could “fake” a transition to mobile safari using core animation as part of a sophisticated phishing attack. This is a flaw in the iPhone OS itself—it does not offer a phishing-proof chrome as part of the OS. 12th September 2008, 9:47 pm
I can’t question that [the App Store] is probably the best mobile application distribution method yet created, but every time I use it, a little piece of my soul dies.
— Steven Frank 17th August 2008, 11:15 pm
Carphone crackdown on phone insurance scam. Story from 2005 but relevant today: I’ve been pestered by scam calls about phone insurance since buying my iPhone from Carphone Warehouse yesterday—the scammers apparently wardial against Carphone Warehouse’s assigned blocks of numbers. Caused a bit of a scene on Twitter until I figured out Carphone Warehouse weren’t actually at fault. 12th August 2008, 11:45 am
Reviews of the Pownce app on the iPhone app store on Flickr. I had to stitch together a screenshot because you can’t actually link to content in the App Store (unless you don’t care that people without iTunes won’t be able to follow your link). Three out of the four reviews complain about the OAuth browser authentication step, which is frustrating because Pownce have implemented it so well. 12th August 2008, 11:05 am
Exposure (iPhone app) behaves suspiciously. Exposure on the iPhone does OAuth-style authentication incorrectly—it asks the user to authenticate in an embedded, chromeless browser which provides no way of confirming that the site being interacted with is not a phishing attack. Ben Ward explains how the Pownce iPhone app gets it right in the comments. Exposure author Fraser Spiers also responds. 12th August 2008, 7:47 am
Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple’s standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that’s kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos.
— Ben Charny 6th June 2008, 9:08 pm
Administrative Debris. Ryan Tomayko explains his exceptionally clean redesign, inspired by Edward Tufte’s critique of the iPhone. 21st March 2008, 3:29 am
OpenStreetMap on the iPhone! Via an ingenious hack. The Google Maps iPhone client caches downloaded tiles using SQLite—to display your own custom tiles, you just need to dump them straight in to the “cache”. 22nd October 2007, 3:30 pm
Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.
— Steve Jobs 17th October 2007, 6:04 pm
Apple—Web apps. Interesting (and slightly confusing) to see Apple choose “Web apps” as the term for applications targeted at the iPhone and iPod touch. 11th October 2007, 8:40 pm
All the big guns want an iPhone killer. Even I, mad for all things Apple as I am, want an iPhone killer. I want smart digital devices to be as good as mankind’s ingenuity can make them. I want us eternally to strive to improve and surprise. Bring on the iPhone killers. Bring them on.
— Stephen Fry 19th September 2007, 7:15 pm
For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.
— John Gruber 14th September 2007, 8:15 am
The other interesting thing about the 1.0.2 update is that Apple didn’t try to prevent the hacks that are out there [...] one would have assumed that Apple would have done *something* in this release as a sort of “shot across the bow” but they didn’t, which bodes well for a future, more open platform.
— Russell Beattie 22nd August 2007, 10:08 pm
Django and the iPhone tutorial. How to install SSH, Python and Django on your iPhone and get Django running against the call database. Less complicated than I expected. 21st August 2007, 11:34 am
H.264 support coming to the Flash player. It looks like this is a response to the higher video quality offered by Silverlight. I wonder if YouTube knew about this when they started transcoding their videos to H.264 for the Apple TV and iPhone. 21st August 2007, 8:28 am
Django on the iPhone. Jacob got it working. The next image in his photostream shows the Django admin application querying his phone’s local database of calls. 19th August 2007, 7:58 am
mobileterminal (via) The iPhone now has a GUI terminal application, which can run a comand-line SSH client. Now I really want one. 16th August 2007, 2:54 pm
Die, Marker Felt, Die! How to replace Marker Felt in the iPhone notes application with Helvetica, via some hackery with jailbreak, MacFUSE and iphonedisk. By the time they arrive in the UK it looks like they’ll have been hacked wide open. 16th July 2007, 10:50 pm
I heard that Foxconn—the place that makes the iPods and iPhones—consumes 3,000 pigs a day.
— Bunnie Huang 14th July 2007, 12:59 pm
Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone (via) Apple’s iPhone developer documentation. 4th July 2007, 1:58 am
Once people see that a pretty good phone can be a pretty good mobile computer, they won’t settle for less anymore; and mobile networks will be pried open.
— Ed Felten 29th June 2007, 4:58 pm
Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to “Mac OS X” as “OS X” are now over.
— John Gruber 12th January 2007, 10:29 am
Apple doesn’t give a damn. Steve Jobs doesn’t build platforms, except by accident. He doesn’t care about your thriving metropolis. All you independent Mac developers: you’re all sharecroppers, and your rent just went up. Way up.
— Mark Pilgrim 12th January 2007, 9:51 am
