Google Blogs (via Gizmodo) has announced that the long-rumored Geo-Location based services in Mobile Safari are indeed included in iPhone 3.0 and being put to use in “My Location” searches by Google.com on the iPhone.
As of today, when you visit www.google.com from Safari on your iPhone 3.0, you can choose to turn on My Location by tapping on the link on the homepage. When you tap on the “update” link, your location will be updated and displayed right there on the homepage. Whenever you want to refresh your location, just tap the “update” link. Testing this in New York, my search for “jazz clubs” returned a handful of places within walking distance. I picked one, tapped the phone number, made a reservation, and we were set for the night.
As to privacy concerns, Google stresses the service is opt-in and can be turned off via the Preferences link at the bottom of the page. Also, it currently only works in English in the US and UK, though other languages and regions are said to be coming soon.
Good news for those looking for a local burger joint, bad news for those hoping Latitude wouldn’t be stuck in the browser…
According to our sources, the 3.0 beta still has some stability and speed issues, so that makes these results that much more impressive. While the overall average gives the iPhone 3.0 beta a 300 percent speed advantage, some of the individual tests show 6x, 8x, or even 11x improvements—the bitwise “AND” function even runs 16x faster than in the current version of Mobile Safari.
Should make the release version of the new, Nitro-powered Mobile Safari 3.0 fairly impressive, come summer! Bring on them multi-app Facebook pages, the iPhone will be ready! (Joking… a bit.)
Tap and hold is a multi-touch gesture that Apple introduced into Mobile Safari in iPhone OS 2.0. It triggered a popup a menu that allowed users to Save Image to the camera roll.
In iPhone OS 3.0 it’s been given a bit more power. Now, in addition to selecting blocks of text for Copy and Paste, when you tap and hold on a link, you trigger the same type of popup as the Save Image function, but instead you get the URL path for the link and options to Open (in the same page/tab), Open in New Page (tab), or Copy (the URL path).
If the link is also an image, you get all of the above options, with Save Image combined into the mix.
May not seem as sexy as MMS or Stereo Bluetooth but we heart this new functionality. It will make our lives easier, which is what OS updates should do.
Apple has gotten some much-deserved heat in the past for not adapting anti-phishing measures into their Safari browser. Phishing is when “bad guys” make look-alike websites and try to trick users into entering personal data like passwords or credit cards numbers, so they can be used to break into user accounts or make fraudulent purchases. We’ve had some warnings about MobileMe phishing attacks in the past for example.
Safari 4 Beta on the desktop finally took steps to address this, and it looks like Apple is rolling the anti-phishing alerts out to Mobile Safari as well! As more and more people start using mobile browsers for banking, email, and other security-sensitive tasks, Apple can’t be too careful.
Also of note in the screen shot above is auto-fill. We’re guessing this works like the desktop, automatically entering common data in text fields like name, email address, etc. (Of course, the convenience comes at the expense of the very security mentioned above — balance your usage accordingly!)
Ars Technica has a great article up on the future of web design, involving 2D and 3D graphics and transformations, and what’s most interesting is that it’s the iPhone’s Mobile Safari browser that right now seems to be leading the way in surfacing this next-gen (Flash killing?) goodness for general users:
The WebKit team added CSS Transforms to nightly builds of WebKit back in October 2007, transforms that included scaling, rotation, skewing, and translation in 2D space. As the specification matured, 3D and animation capabilities were added. Eventually, the 3D transforms were broken out into a specification of their own. Though WebKit has had these 3D transform capabilities for some time, only Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch has them enabled.
Check out some of the other demos, and get the full scoop, over on Ars.
Heh. Internet Explorer, for reasons unfathomable to any modern web designer, still rules the desktop with a massive, if waning browser share. In the mobile space, however, things they are a different.
Net Applications (via CNet) is reporting that the iPhone owns 66.61% share, which compare to Java2ME (RIM’s OS) 9.06% and WinPho’s 6.91%, Android and Symbian’s 6.15% each, and Palm’s 2.37% and the assorted others’ at 2.75%.
No doubt rivals will gain share as the overall market increases, and new products like the Palm Pre hit. What’s interesting, however, is that the WebKit engine beneath Safari is also powering Android’s Chome Lite and will also be powering the Palm Pre, making WebKit’s share of the market extra impressive…
It should also be noted that, when looking at these numbers, even with 16+ million iPhones on the market, the sheer usability of Mobile Safari has to be factored in. Simply put, on many platforms the browsers are still crippled from a rendering standpoint, and frustrating from a interaction standpoint. Make it usable and people will use it, who’d a thunk it?
No doubt other platforms will be addressing this in future updates… but will it be enough to catch Apple’s lead?
(Thanks to Phil from sibling site WMExperts for sharing!)
Using webOS, which is a localized, almost widget-ized development environment (using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and enhanced local access), the Palm Pre can run many WebApps at the same time. The way it’s visualized is with the “card” metaphor, where a touch of the Home-like button shrinks the current screen down to a thumbnail that’s kept live and updated in real time. The interface also lets users shuffle the apps like cards in a fanned-out deck. You re-arrange the cards and can even terminate an app by “throwing it away”.
While the iPhone doesn’t keep them live or let you re-arrange them, and has an X to close rather than the throw-away gesture, going as far back as two years ago when Steve Jobs introduced it at Macworld 2007, it let you zoom out of the Mobile Safari web browser with an eerily similar thumbnail representation. (Though there doesn’t seem to be any patent contention over that just yet…)
Actually, given Apple’s recent obsession with Cover Flow in iTunes, OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Finder and now Safari 4 Beta, we’re surprised they didn’t just default to that for Mobile Safari tabs from the get go as well…
Apple has just released the first public beta of their new Safari 4 web browser for both the Mac and Windows (the Windows version now looking like an actual XP or Vista app). New features include an iTunes/Finder-like CoverFlow visualization for exploring browser history, and Apple TV commercial-esque visual wall of Top Sites (which should cause the same potential pr0nbarassment for some as Chrome and Opera’s “favorite” visualizers in the past), the ability to search, spotlight-like through past sites, Chrome-style top-mounted tabs, robust developer tools… and most important for the iPhone and iPod touch’s future — the new Nitro Engine for screaming fast JavaScript rendering.
Yes, JavaScript engines are the new speeds and feeds. Bottom line, the more script, the slower and heavier the site. Hey, BlackBerry still turns JavaScript off by default on the Bold and Storm to get anything approaching decent rendering speeds. But with Google’s V8 and Firefox’s TraceMonkey helping push the technology — not to mention every Web 2.0 site ladling on the AJAX — we’re going to need all the power we can get, especially on the iPhone.
As for the rest: CoverFlow already works well on the iPhone, though I’m not sure we need it in Mobile Safari, and the smaller screen might make Top Sites a little too tiny to be useful. And the search? Heh. We still need Spotlight on the entire iPhone, so how about we get that rolled up together?
Anything else you want to see in Mobile Safari 3.0?
According to Admob (via TUAW), Apple’s share of the mobile Web is big and might just be getting bigger:
Worldwide requests from Apple devices grew 28% month over month to 1.2 billion in January. Building on its strong December, iPod Touch growth outpaced iPhone growth in top markets. The iPod Touch now represents 40% of Apple requests, up from 20% in September.
People like great mobile browsers that can handle HTML, CSS, and AJAX, who’d have thunk it?
Of course, competing devices from Nokia, Palm, and Google, are beginning to use Apple’s WebKit in browsers of their own, Firefox keeps threatening to push their mobile Fennec client to release status, and RIM is inching the Bold towards usability, so can Apple and the iPhone/Safari team maintain their leading edge?
TiPb loves answering your emails, but we also love sharing our answers with the community in hopes that more people will benefit, and even better answers will present themselves (hey, that’s why we have them forums!). Today’s question comes from Joephoto5:
My Bookmarks are listed in the order that I created them… Is there a way to resort them??? Is there a way to “group” them … (ala: sites dedicated to “news”, or sites dedicated to the “iPhone”, or sites dedicated to “aviation” etc.) ???
