All Articles in Web Apps

Social networking is all the rage these days. From Facebook to MySpace, everyone has a web presence. Well, now the iPhone crowd has an iPhone only experience, it’s called iRovr. Be prepared to enter the stream…

iRovr is designed to work exclusively on the iPhone. You can log in from a desktop browser, but it is still formatted for our favorite mobile device.

The Setup

The configuration for iRovr is quite clever. You setup and account with your email. Once you do this, iRovr sends you several links to add to your Contacts on the iPhone. You receive a unique address for items such as:

• Photos: Send photos
• Videos: Send YouTube videos
• Blogs: Send a blog post in the form of an email

• Bookmarks: via the send a link to this page in Safari

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iPhone users can now more easily access and update their Twitter feeds thanks to Twitter’s efforts to improve support for mobile browsers, including Safari. Now when you access Twitter.com from your iPhone, you are greeted with a mobile friendly version of the service instead of the standard “pinch me please” desktop version.

Finally I can inform my followers of important moments in day. “I’m eating a ham sandwich, sitting on the john.”

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Steve Jobs might want to look in his rearview mirror, because there’s a hulking eighteen-wheeler barreling down the highway, belching thick black smoke, and crushing every vehicle in its path.

The software giant is working with long time rival Adobe to bring Flash player Lite (yes, THAT Flash player) to Windows Mobile devices, while simultaneously incorporating support for its own SilverLight technology. The move will give Microsoft a leg up over Apple, making its mobile platform more web 2.0 friendly in supporting these ubiquitous web animation and runtime environments.

Apple has valid reasons for eschewing Flash lite, so it claims, like poor performance and a not-so-much like a desktop experience. Even if valid, it’s never a checkmark in your favor when competing products support features yours does not.

Wake up, Apple. You’re in Micrsoft’s crosshairs now.

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Google rolls out a new iPhone friendly revamp to its popular web based RSS reader. Users are now greeted with a cleaner, more logically designed interface that places key navigation icons on top, for greater accessibility. It still doesn’t provide the collapsible tree view that I long for, but it does go a step further towards a better RSS experience. I approve.

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Can’t bear the thought of missing out on the latest score or match results while away from the telly? MOLISC gives you live up to the nano-second results from every game. Simply point your iPhone’s browser to http://www.mobilelivescore.com and get full on updates as they happen.

GOOOOOAAAAALLLLL!

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Dave Merten from MacOSG informs me that he has created a new web app for iPhone that provides instant access to support guides right from your iPhone. It’s called Mac611 (shouldn’t that be 911?). Check it out for yourself, or better still… break your Mac and try to fix it using this service. I’m going to the tool shed now to get my sledgehammer.

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Yellowpages, the Google of the analog age, is jumping on board the iPhone bandwagon. The old offline search directory has rolled out a very slick looking mobile web interface designed for Safari, offering the usual “Find me” search service for businesses, as well as maps - powered by Microsoft MapPoint (bleh).

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While I was gone at CTIA, there’s been a bunch of things that have happened that I didn’t get time to properly write about. So today, we’ll have a bit of an iPhone news smörgåsbord. There’s been a fair amount of news, a fair amount of not-news, and some of the things that I’ve been reading are just plain wrong.

Apple Dealing with Film-Makers Directly for iTunes
Apple has sidestepped some of the major studios for some films, opting instead to deal directly with film-makers. This could be a sign of things to come — it would be great to not have to report every major film-studio or TV channel contract tiff.

Apple iPhone Dev Center
Apple has created a web site devoted to developers that are interested in putting their programs on the iPhone. Apple is calling it the iPhone Dev Center, and it’s a repository of tips, tricks, and guidelines to follow should anyone want to make an iPhone web app. It’s also probably a list of instructions that one would have to follow to get listed as a featured application on Apple’s web app listing.

Molson Reveals iPhone on Rogers in January?
For any Canadian readers, Molson ran a contest that had an iPhone as the prize. They had a disclaimer on the iPhone prize, stating that it couldn’t be activated on the Rogers network until January. So, odds are pretty good that the iPhone will be out in Canada in January. Molson has since pulled the language for the contest, saying they have no idea when anything is coming out ever. And they never had any idea. (images below via Electronista)

Is the iPhone Running Leopard?
There’s an article at Wired that delves deeper into Jobs’ open letter about 3rd party applications on the iPhone and the connection to Leopard. One of the tidbits that Jobs talks about briefly is signing applications, and Wired has a good look into what that would mean for 3rd party iPhone apps. And, there’s some discussion whether the iPhone is based off of Leopard or not: “It’s not known for sure at this point, but all indications are that the iPhone is a Leopard-based device,” as stated by Carl Howe, analyst at Blackfriars. It clearly is. Witness the uname -a of my laptop on 10.4 vs. the uname -a of my iphone:

The important bit there is the kernel version. Apple releases the OSX frameworks to correspond with kernel versions of darwin for every version of OSX. The iPhone has been running Leopard (9.0) since it came out in June. My 10.4 laptop is running darwin 8.10.0, which corresponds to 10.4.10.

iPhone Security Faults
Meanwhile, there’s been a rash of complaints about the iPhone’s security. You may have seen headlines that compare the iPhone to Windows 95, for example. It’s of course, a loaded comparison, made for sensationalism. You could just as well compare the iPhone’s security to Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows XP if you’re logged in as an administrator (which is everybody — you can barely run Office as a limited user). But, Windows 95 gets the headline. Since the iPhone is made of UNIX, user separation is built-in, expect apps to run as something other than administrator/root/super-user when the SDK update comes out. Perhaps earlier; we can’t know as Apple isn’t commenting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that ‘run as root’ is a good security model. It’s so bad, it’s not even a security model.

iPhone de-bricking: re-virginizer tool available
The Elite team posted a re-virginizer tool that people can use to restore the ability to upgrade. This tool locks the iPhone with the proper bits in place on the iPhone radio; some of the free iPhone unlock tools wrote stuff to the iPhone baseband radio that was invalid; this led to bricked phones when it came time to update the firmware to 1.1.1.

AT&T Upgrading Core Network
Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, was interviewed recently and he talked about many things concerning the iPhone and AT&T’s network. Their core should make for faster downloads for anything that uses AT&T’s networks, wired or wireless. That means us: anyone using an iPhone should see a smidgen of a benefit, but the real help comes when we’re using 3G fast internet iPhones.

We are one step closer to editing word documents on our iPhones today. Google is now offering a mobile format of Google docs, viewable on mobile devices. The bad news - it’s Read-only mode, so no editing capabilities are available… yet. But at least you can access important docs while on the go, right from your iPhone, and that’s something to cheer about. Right?

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Apple has created a searchable directory of mary various online web applications. The service is available at http://www.apple.com/webapps/, and offers over 200 (!) online applications. We had considered doing an online application database very early on, but we didn’t. And it now makes me happy that we didn’t, for very real. All of the iPhone application list sites are now competitors with a company with very deep pockets.