The Blog that Noone Reads

Update: IMAP is now available on GMail. These instructions are no longer relevant.

Here’s what you do:

• Go signup for a Yahoo mail account.
• Setup filters in your GMail account to forward mail to your Yahoo account
• Create a new IMAP email account on your iPhone with the following settings:
  • EMail address: your gmail email address
  • Incoming server: imap.apple.mail.yahoo.com
  • Incoming user/pass: your yahoo username and password
  • Outgoing server: smtp.gmail.com
  • Outgoing user/pass: your gmail username and password

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One complaint I’ve heard a few times is that there is no way, on Safari on the iPhone, to see the path of a link before following it. I haven’t seen the solution to this anywhere. Well, there is a quite simple way to see this. If you put your finger on the link and hold it there for a second or two, a nice little popup will show up right over your finger with the title of the link and the url. Simple.

On the way home from work today, I was thinking about one deficiency that DHTML seems to have that Flash doesn’t. That is the ability to play sound. Now, I’m not a fan of sounds on web pages, and usually not even web apps, but there are some instances where could be useful if used appropriately. I’m thinking of things like an online chat app that make a little ping noise when someone sends an message and your focus is elsewhere. Those kinds of things are really helpful and should be easier to include.

I’ve started working on such a tool. It’s basically a little flash applet that you embed in your page. It’s designed to not be visible and actually not do anything but play sounds. Now here’s the cool thing about it. Once it’s loaded, it actually creates some javascript functions on the page so you don’t have to even think about it being a flash application and not native functionality.

Here it is: Sound Board v0.2

Usage

The api couldn’t be simpler. There are two methods, loadSound(name, url) and playSound(name). You need to load a sound clip before you can use it. You have the option of either giving the sound a nickname for referring to it later or not. If you choose not to, you pass the url only to both the load and play functions.

loadSound('mySound', '/sounds/mySound.mp3');
playSound('mySound');

or

loadSound('/sounds/mySound.mp3');
playSound('/sounds/mySound.mp3');

That’s about all there is to it. In the zip file there is a bit of js that you can include to make sure things fail gracefully if flash is not available. There’s also the full ActionScript source of the flash component.

Note

This should be easy enough to use at this point, but it’s still pretty unpolished. You’re welcome to do with it as you wish, just try to use it wisely. Sound on websites is generally a bad idea.

I’m sure few of you have noticed yet, but if you access this very website on your shiny new iPhone, you will be greeted with a very iPhone friendly new interface. Sorry, the content is the same.

I’s long been my opinion that most men only know about 8 colors by name: red, blue, green, yellow, brown, purple, orange, and… ummm… black and white only count as one. There are, of course, modifiers allowed, such as light green or dark red. We can also blend colors together with the suffix -ish, such as greenish blue. Lastly, you can use color descriptors, but only within the range of a guy’s understanding: Giants orange, sky blue, beef red, etc.

For the ladies: follow the simple rules above to avoid frustration when describing what mauve is for the umpteenth time.

For the dudes: check out this link to add another 32 color names to your noggin.

One thing that’s great about the beautiful display on the iPhone is that it makes it rather easy to offload reading tasks to a time when you’re away from you desk, such as taking public transportation or the Google Shuttle. Or, you may just want to a quick way to move a confirmation number to your mobile for later reference.

I’ve come up with a simple way to send anything you can print straight over to your iPhone. By harnessing Automator and OS X’s build in support for print workflows, we can automate the process of creating a PDF, compressing it, and emailing directly to our mobile devices.

The Workflow: Read on iPhone workflow

To install:

• Download and unzip the package linked above
• Double click the Read on iPhone.workflow file to open it in Automator
• Enter an email address you can access from your iPhone
• Choose File > Save as Plug-in…
• Choose a name for your workflow and choose Print Workflow from the pulldown
• Click save

That’s it. Now, to send something to your phone:

• Choose File > Print… from whatever app your document is in
• From the PDF pulldown at the bottom of the print dialog, choose your new print workflow

Notice how North America is on the right side of the map. Just a small reminder that the internet, while generally US centric, is in fact global.

From PHP.net:

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

It’s about damn time.

The iPhone is an amazing new platform that developers the world over are chomping at the bit to get their apps on. What we know is that the only way to get your app on an iPhone day one is to create it as a web page. Users will access your content through Safari on the device. iPhone apps are already starting to pop up all over the web, and Apple has graciously provided both Windows and Mac platforms with the “iPhone development kit” (Safari 3).

There are a lot of reasons to complain about their choice to not let us put “real” apps on the phone. But let’s try to get beyond that. Even if Apple will give us no more than lemons, let’s at least try to make the best lemonade possible.

I’ve been playing with some of the more unique aspects of Safari 3 for the last few days. It is a very capable browser. The JavaScript support is much improved over the last version. It can handle the canvas element, as well as SVG. It’s fully ACID2 compliant, and it’s really, really fast. I have no double that, even though we’re restricted to the browser, the community will be coming up with some really brilliant apps.

The biggest limitation, even more than the lack of Flash, seems to be the notoriously slow EDGE network Apple chose for it’s first generation of handsets. The biggest challenge when programming for this device, in my opinion, is going to be to make our apps as responsive as possible when the user is reaching them over the EDGE network.

I grabbed my iPhone from the dock on my way out the door this morning. On my way down the elevator, I looked to see if I had any new podcasts. I chose the new episode of MacBreak Weekly that was released some time yesterday. On the show, they were talking about musicthing.org which was supposed to be launching on the fourth. On the train, I surfed over to check it out. I tried to stream a song, but they have the wrapped in zip files. So i sent an email to the creators describing my use case and how they could better serve iPhone visitors (don’t wrap already compressed files in MP3).

On top of all that, I got through all my work email before I reached my office. I walked in, aware of what’s gone on this morning and ready to start working. My morning is much smoother, and I’m a very happy iPhone user.