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Testers wanted for new iPhone Armory application
Elad Shahar, a student at University of Massachusetts Lowell, has developed a web interface that will allow you to search the Armory on your iPhone or iPod touch's MobileSafari. He's released a new version today, polished to the point where he's looking for people to help him test the application and to offer ideas and suggestions. iArmory lets you do the searches you'd expect -- by player or guild -- and serves up results in a clean, Apple-like format that's designed especially for the iPhone's screen. The one catch is that the Armory has been stripped of its images, including items, tooltips, and fancy borders. What you get is a simple text display of the information you searched for. You can see images of the interface on Elad's website, Omen of Clarity. So, if you are, you know, hip enough to own an iPhone or an iPod touch (which I'm, uh, not), and you are reading this post (which means you probably play WoW), then get your Armory-lovin' self over to Omen of Clarity's contact page and volunteer your services as a tester. Git, I said!
Samsung L870 S60 slider features Webkit-based browser
Yup, you read that right. We're not talking about just any Webkit-based browser, Samsung's long-rumored L870 slider features a full "Safari" browser (which we'll take to mean Webkit). The 13.5-mm thin phone pumps Symbian v9.3 and S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 at its core with a 3 megapixel camera, 2.4-inch QVGA display, FM radio, Stereo Bluetooth, and microSD expansion. Unfortunately, this pup is tri-band GSM with single-band UMTS/HSDPA 3.6Mbps support so it'll be heading to Europe around the August time frame.Update: As per the full press release (posted after the break), Samsung claimed that they'd brought mobile Safari to this device. Technically feasible, we suppose, but far more unlikely than some clueless PR flack screwing up the release. We'll let you know if Samsung HQ has anything differently to say about the matter, but until then we're calling this Webkit, not Safari.Update 2: Yup, it's Webkit all right.
iPhone on the Road: a substitute for paper boarding passes
Some things sound really cool -- until you actually have to step up and do them in real time. TUAW reader Gerald Buckley's story about traveling with his iPhone strikes me as belonging to this class. When he approached the American Airlines counter to use his iPhone as a boarding pass, the coolness quotient for his entire trip got bumped up several notches. It seems that he navigated over to AA.com using Mobile Safari, signed in and displayed a PDF of his boarding pass on-screen. The American Airlines counter agent in San Antonio "humored" him and scanned the barcode as displayed on his iPhone. The scan worked, and Buckley proceeded with his travels (much to the envy and amazement of his fellow passengers, no doubt). Here's the thing though. If it were me, this would have totally gone another way. First, while waiting on line, I would have had bad WiFi. It would have taken me about 20 minutes to type in my information and the people behind me on line would have been coughing *significantly* to get me to keep moving along with the line as I tried to type, move all my luggage and possibly keep three extremely rambunctious children in order. Finally, I would get to the gate agent and I would have gotten the snarky impatient version -- somehow I always do. Assuming that I could even get all the typing and navigation done, I know in my heart that the response would have been "you need a printed boarding pass, ma'am." Of course, this is entirely academic because I have not been granted a boarding pass for the last 5 or 6 years due entirely, I'm sure, to my last name. It's always "You must check in at the counter" -- which is way easier than even a boarding pass because I just swipe my credit card. All that having been said, TUAW congratulates Mr. Buckley's ingenuity and offers the example of his experience to speed you your travels in a uniquely geek fashion. If you've got the travel bug (with or without your iPhone), be sure to visit our sister site Gadling for all things flight-related.
iPhone 101: Clearing cookies from Mobile Safari
This morning, I Farked my way over to this story about British Tea Cakes. The tea cakes, which appear to be nothing more than British mallomars, have been re-categorized from biscuits to cake. Far be it from me to dispute the accumulated wisdom of the EU high courts, but from this American vantage point if it looks like a cookie and tastes like a cookie, perhaps the tea cake actually is a cookie -- and not a cake. I consulted TUAW's in-residence Britishness expert Nik, who threw up his hands and asked (justifiably) whether this was actually related to Apple or its products. Being in a cookie-minded mode, I decided to respond to a reader who asked about issues on the iPhone in visiting mobile versions of sites that were less than accommodating upon revisits. Some mobile sites hide "log out and log in as another user" details in their mobile formats. (I would point the finger at FireEagle/Yahoo--but lately they've cleaned up those problems rather nicely.) If this situation happens to you and you really need to access a site as if it were your first visit, let me recommend clearing your cookies. And yes, I can hear you groaning: "You want us to do...what?". Unfortunately, with Mobile Safari, cookie clearing is an all or nothing proposition. You can't just clear cookies associated with a single site. It's a clean sweep or nothing at all. To do this, open Settings > Safari. Scroll down and select Clear Cookies. The iPhone throws up a pop-up confirmation. Tap Clear Cookies and quit from Settings. Your problem sites should now act as if it's your first visit. And, as for that whole tea cake thing? If you serve cookies for supper, are they tea cakes rather than biscuits? British people feel free to expound in the comments.
Mobile Safari getting support for psychedelic effects
A close examination of the descriptions of Apple's 2008 WWDC sessions revealed at least one iPhone gem, buried in the appropriately-named "Enhancing Your iPhone Web Application with CSS Transforms and Animations" overview: Safari's getting a little bit of an update. With firmware 2.0 baking to a delightfully golden brown right now in preparation for a June release, of course, it only stands to reason that the iPhone's Safari implementation would get retooled a bit to pull in a more recent Webkit build and stay somewhat in sync with the headway Apple's browser has made on the desktop, and we now know that CSS transforms and animations will be supported as a part of that. What does that mean, exactly? In short, the feature allows web page elements to be twirled, zoomed, and skewed, making for some pretty eye-popping (or watering) effects. It's all going to be accelerated by the iPhone's hardware, too, meaning that the next ultra-annoying ad for some sketchy product that you view on your iPhone should really fly.
iPhone-optimized versions of LinkedIn, TalkShoe now up
We don't post about every website that comes up with an iPhone/iPod touch-optimized version -- if we did, we wouldn't have time for eating or sleeping -- but every now and then a couple of sites newly built for Mobile Safari rise above the pack. Today's launches for everyone's favorite "internet in your pants" browser include pro-social business networking site LinkedIn and collaborative calling tool TalkShoe.LinkedIn's new iPhone beta version (at m.linkedin.com) allows you to view a list of your recent network updates, see your own profile (lest you forget your vital details) and search through your contact list. No editing options and no click-to-call or click-to-send buttons in this early version, but having the streamlined view is quite nice.Meanwhile, over at TalkShoe (host site for the weekly TUAW live podcast) the team has released an iPhone version of the Talkshoe site at iphone.talkshoe.com. It does a nice job integrating the telephony component of the service with call selection and management. Using the new iPhone UI, you can quickly search for ongoing or upcoming calls, then single-click to call in and chat about your topic of choice. Naturally we have some suggestions. There'll be a TalkShoe call tonight at 8 pm ET featuring our friends Victor Cajiao of the Typical Mac User podcast and Adam Christianson of the Maccast to discuss the new iPhone-optimized site. Should be fun.via Macworld & iPhone Matters
Xbox Live Friends list on your iPhone
There are quite a few ways online to see what your friends are up to in Xbox Live -- the most fun way is probably the 360 Voice site (that lets your Xbox blog about what you've been playing lately), but there are also Facebook applications, Dashboard widgets, and all kinds of other ways to keep tabs on gamertags. And now, 1337pwn.com has released a browser widget for MobileSafari on the iPhone and iPod touch, so you can track any gamertags you like on the go.It doesn't actually nab tags from your friends list, so you have to type them all in separately (of course, that also means you can ninja-monitor folks), but once you get it set up, you get a URL that you can bookmark (or Webclip -- there is a default Webclip icon as well) with each person's GT, Gamerscore, last game played, and their icon and motto. So there aren't too many stats there to deal with, but if you want to quickly see what your friends are up to on your favorite portable device, it works pretty well.[Thanks, Det!]
Tabulate adds Safari "tabs" to iPhone and iPod touch
Now here's a clever trick. Inventive Labs Gadgets has designed a Safari bookmarklet that adds "tabs" to your iPhone browsing experience. Just drag their bookmarklet into your Safari bookmarks bar, then sync your iPhone or iPod touch. (Make sure you've selected Info > Web browser > Sync Safari bookmarks in iTunes.) Once synced, open a web page and then choose Tabulate from your iPhone bookmarks list. A small orange icon appears at the top-left of the screen. Next, tap on any link. The three-button control window shown here appears. Tap on blue to open the link in the current tab, green to open the link in a new tab (i.e. a new Safari page, in iPhone terms), and orange to add the link to the list of flagged links to open later. The flagged items appear in orange at the top-left of the screen. So how does it work? Not too badly. It's a little annoying opening the bookmarklet for each page and sometimes the javascript "took" better on some pages than others. That being said, I found it very useful to have around and it's staying in my permanent collection of iPhone javascript bookmarklets. Good job, Inventive Labs guys! Thanks, Virginia. There really is a javascript clause.
Rumor: Apple to launch WebApp consolidation portal
Today the UK Register reports that Apple is preparing a WebApp catalog. WebApps are apparently already showing up in the recent downloads feed although the page they supposedly link to has not yet gone live. I downloaded the latest feeds page and did not personally find any reference to http://www.apple.com/webapps but maybe I just checked at the wrong time. If you find otherwise, let us know in the comments. An official Web 2.0 apps feed would be very nice indeed. Thanks to Erwin Harte.
iPhone browser dialing found to be security threat
SPI Labs is claiming to have discovered a fairly significant threat to iPhone security due to MobileSafari's ability to dial phone numbers found on web pages. The feature can apparently be exploited in various ways, such as redirecting the actual call to a number other than what is viewed on the webpage, tracking calls placed by a site visitor, bypassing the confirmation dialog and forcing the call to continue and even preventing the phone from dialing calls altogether. Imagine clicking on a local number for a restaurant on a malicious website, only to discover you're actually calling an international number and, perhaps more importantly, paying international calling rates.While SPI Labs has rightly chosen not to disclose the actual nature of the exploit and how to perform it, they do state that they have alerted Apple and are cooperating to plug these holes. If these security threats worry you, SPI Labs recommends that users simply don't use this feature for now. Ultimately, it is probably a safe bet that Apple is working quickly to plug security issues like this and other bugs for a future software update that will be delivered (hopefully) soon.Thanks Eliot!
