Google has optimized Google Talk, its web-based instant messaging program, according to the company’s Mobile Blog website.
To send or receive instant messages an open instance of the phone’s Safari browser must be running. Switching to another browser window or application will change your IM status to “unavailable,” but you can select from a quicklist of the people you contact most, search your contacts, and manage multiple conversations. The company said it designed the iPhone optimization to closely resemble its desktop application.
Written by Lonnie Lazar on July 3rd, 2008 with no comments.
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Winning awards for the product design is old hat for Jonathan Ive and his team in the Apple Design Group. The company’s Senior Vice President, Industrial Design has won every honor that a product designer can claim, and then some. But today, he won an award unlike any other. He was recognized for a design that drove the adoption of an obscure technology.
Ive was honored with the Personal Achievement Award by the Mobile Data Association, a UK group that recognizes “those UK companies and individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the uptake and success of mobile data over the last 12 months.”
The iPhone can be credited for many things — upsetting the existing mobile phone market, increasing demand for cool touchscreen interfaces, creating a new icon to be used as short-hand for innovation — but, as the MDA notes, its biggest accomplishment probably is in driving demand and adoption of mobile data plans. Data plans have been available for a very long time, but the appeal of the mobile web wasn’t obvious to most of us until we first got to try the stupendous Mobile Safari. By itself, the iPhone has made HTML browsers a near-standard feature for a modern smart phone.
And the industrial design is a big part of the success of Mobile Safari. Wiithout the finger-flicking scrolls and double-tapping zooms, the iPhone wouldn’t be what it is and mobile data wouldn’t be so hot. It’s nice that an organization that has been promoting mobile data for years recognizes that design’s contribution to the iPhone goes far beyond aesthetics and software. It was designed to make the mobile web accessible and appealing. And it succeeded wildly.
Via Ars Technica.
Written by Pete Mortensen on July 3rd, 2008 with no comments.
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Graphic by mitchener83 via flickr
The newer, faster iPhone 3G, set for release on July 11, promises to chart new frontiers in mobile pornography, according to Time magazine.
The $13 billion adult entertainment industry sees the new Apple phone as a key in the shift from physical distribution (IE. DVDs) to a business model based on downloaded and streaming smut.
The iPhone is “by far the porn-friendliest phone” on the market, says Devan Cypher, spokesman for San Francisco-based porn producer Sin City Entertainment.
The porn industry may have problems with Apple, however. An Apple spokeswoman told Time it does not condone porn on the iPhone and promises to ban adult content from applications being built by third party developers for distribution by the company’s AppStore. (more…)
Written by Lonnie Lazar on June 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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For a Steve Jobs Keynote, the kick-off to last week’s Worldwide Developer Conference was surprisingly, well, surprise-free. Apple rumor-mongers nailed the specs on the iPhone 3G, the pricing, the slipping ship date, and even the launch of Mobile Me, a major redesign of Apple’s .Mac service that focuses on Push technology for the rest of us. For subscribers of Mobile Me, all you have to do is make a change to your calendar on one platform, whether Mac, PC or iPhone, and the change instantly occurs on your other machines. Apple was going to become the Push company.
Phil Schiller demoed the applications involved, from photos to e-mail to address book for almost a half-hour, repeating the phrase “desktop-quality applications” roughly 900 times. As promised, the apps instantly updated across platforms. The Push technology really works, as well as, or, Apple hopes, even better than Microsoft Exchange for corporations. In every respect, it looked like a winning platform. For $99, anyone can have world-leading syncing of their entire digital lives. There’s just one problem: you have to use Apple’s Web applications to do that. No GMail, no Flickr, no GCal, no Facebook. Rather than delivering on the promise of automating the process of keeping every aspect of your life up to date, Apple requires you to leave behind your existing digital life to build a new one. Unless you’re an existing .Mac user, you need a new e-mail address, a new online photo gallery, a new calendar, a new form of online storage. And I, like a lot of people, am not going to make that change. I love Google Apps, Flickr, and Facebook. They’re where I keep my stuff. And that isn’t going to change any time soon. Rather than Mobile Me, Apple seems to have created Mobile Steve. To see the implications of this decision, click through.
(more…)
Written by Pete Mortensen on June 16th, 2008 with no comments.
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Increasingly, people work online, using web-based applications for day-to-day tasks. Unfortunately, web browsers aren’t the most robust of applications—a single unruly website or advert is enough to lock up Firefox or bring down Safari unexpectedly. At best, you’ll waste time reopening a browser and signing back in; at worst, you’ll lose work and a precious little nugget of sanity.
Inspired by Prism by Mozilla Labs, Fluid offers an approach referred to as Site-Specific Browsers (SSBs). As the method’s name suggests, this enables you to create browsers for specific sites, making them akin to desktop applications. This is great from a stability standpoint—there aren’t other windows with content that can cause problems—but it’s also handy in making you focus on the tasks at hand, rather than getting tempted to check out other websites.
Creating SSBs using Fluid is child’s play—you bung a URL, name, location and icon (if you don’t have one to hand, an application icon is created based on the site’s favicon) into Fluid’s sole dialog, hit ‘Create’ and wait a few seconds. Fluid then invites you to launch your new SSB, which is basically a honed-down Safari with your site preloaded, restricted to site-specific content (click on an ‘external’ link and it launches in your default browser). Usefully, some SSBs (such as those based on online email) provide Dock badge updates, just like Mail, and each SSB can be restyled (UI, opacity, fonts) and set to various window levels. Not so usefully, Fluid doesn’t work particularly well with some sites (during our tests, Flickr was a notable culprit) until you tinker with the SSB’s advanced preferences and add some extra URLs that it’s allowed to peruse.
Interestingly, Fluid’s creator appears keen to take his application further. Recent builds have seen Fluid become a reasonable browser for general use, and while the ability to browse via Cover Flow won’t win it many friends, forthcoming tabbed browsing improvements and menu-extra SSBs mean Fluid has the potential to gain a strong foothold in the Mac browser market, rather than remaining a purely niche concern.
Cover Flow in a web browser! (Don’t worry, Cover Flow objectors—you can turn it off.)
Further information
Manufacturer: Todd Ditchendorf
Price: Free
URL: fluidapp.com
Written by Craig Grannell on May 21st, 2008 with no comments.
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