The Blog that Noone Reads

Note: I wrote this post almost a year ago, just as the iPhone was coming out. They’d told us in development talks that the iPhone would support most of the features of the desktop Safari, sans Flash. I never published because I discovered that the iPhone did have canvas features, but did not have SVG support. It’s been announced recently that the next version of the iPhone firmware will support SVG.

Most visual effects on web pages are today created in a graphic editor such as Photoshop and implemented on the page as rendered graphics. This is all well and good for users on speedy DSL connections, but the bandwidth eaten up by these graphics can really effect the load times of your content on our favorite new mobile device.

Luckily, the iPhone supports both canvas and SVG for handling your drawing in the browser. Using these formats will allow you to create much more visually appealing content at a fraction of the bandwidth. Both canvas and SVG are specified using plain text. Instead of supplying the artwork, you supply instructions for generating the artwork.

In the example that follows, I’ll compare using a transparent PNG to create a reflection effect with the same effect in SVG. The SVG version uses only a few lines of code to produce what is a near identical effect.

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A while back, i wrote a post about a hacky way to get better support for GMail on your iPhone. Well you can ignore it now because Google is officially rolling out IMAP access for free on all GMail accounts.

See details on their announcement post.

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.

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.

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

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.

Dear Google,

Let me first say that I’ve been a GMail user since nearly the very beginning of the public “beta”. I’ve been extremely happy with the service. So much so, that I’ve abandoned all desktop email clients. Second, let me say that the GMail experience on the iPhone sucks. I’m sure you’re probably working on something, but I still intend to enumerate my issues with the current offering.

My first attempt was to use the built in GMail profile for connecting to my account. The issue is that it’s not nearly customizable enough. It really should only download my inbox. I subscribe to a few mailing lists that get a lot of traffic. This is absolutely fine on the web interface because they’re automatically filtered into a label and out of my inbox. Those emails are absolutely worthless on my phone, but I can’t seem to figure out how to keep them off of it using the POP access method.

It’s so worthless, that I’m willing to give up the convenience of using the built in app and use the GMail web interface. It works for me on the desktop, why not on the mobile? Well, first, I lose the ability to see if i have new messages or have my phone make some noise when I get new emails. Second, the GMail web interface is pretty much unusable on the iPhone. It’s a fantastic desktop experience, but it just plain sucks on the iPhone. I’m referring mostly to the inbox. The layout is so wide that you can’t really zoom in in a meaningful way. There are invalid characters at the beginning of every subject line. Because of the zoom issue, the checkboxes are largely unclickable.

So, I decided to go with the mobile version. It is mostly usable, aside from that there is no button to mark a message as spam. It’s still a very sad way to access my email on such a device. There are a ton of possible solutions to this issue. First, allow me to only download mail in my inbox through POP. That’s an easy one. What I think everyone would prefer would be IMAP access. I know that’s a tall order considering how GMail doesn’t really comply to the folders data model of IMAP, but I’m sure you guys are smart enough to figure something out. Another option would be to just create a special view for the iPhone. There are already half a million of them out there. It’s worth it.

In any case. I’ve been looking for an alternative to GMail for the first time since I signed up. I’ll give you some time to figure it out, but I may have to leave you if there are no solutions in the next few weeks.

-dave