MobileSafari
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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
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.
Hahlo updates to version 2
iPhone (although I guess we should really say MobileSafari, since the iPod touch can do it too) Twitter client Hahlo got a nice little update over the weekend. Quite a few things have changed, so I'll just point you to Dean's blog to see all the new features. Basically, as he says, everything that you can do in Twitter can now be done right through Hahlo, including timelines, friends, direct messages, following, and so on. Links have been added inline, and now an @ reply is just a touch away. There are also a bunch of pretty links, including hahlo.com/username, which takes you to the username of the account you're looking for.Very, very nice. Right now, I do most of my twittering through Twitterific, but with an app this nice on the iPhone (errr, MobileSafari), I might not need anything else.[via DF]
What's not on the iPod touch
Bill Palmer sent along this list he put together of all the iPhone features you won't find on the iPod touch. When a lot of people, including myself, first saw the iPod touch, we called it the "iPhone without the phone," because it seemed to pretty much have everything the iPhone had without actually being able to call anyone-- MobileSafari was in there, as was YouTube, Gmail and Yahoo Mail (via the browser). But as Palmer notes, it's not as complete as we first thought.The EDGE network is probably the most obvious and biggest omission-- the iPhone will let you do what you want from anywhere, while an iPod touch only works where your laptop does (unless you have an EDGE hookup, obviously). The Mail application is missing, as is the Notes application (that one has raised a lot of hackles, too), and Bluetooth is gone as well. There's no camera, volume buttons, or dock. The screen isn't quite as good. And strangely enough, Google Maps, Weather, and Stocks are all missing, too. Those seem so easy to implement, and such big selling points, that you wonder what the story is there.Palmer doesn't mean to knock the iPod touch-- he says it's still the best iPod ever, and it really is. If someone did a list of features on the video iPod (or even the Classic) vs. the iPod touch, there'd be no contest. But if anyone was really worried that Apple might cannibalize their own iPhone sales by releasing the iPod touch, a feature list like this shows there's a lot less chance of that.
comiXology releases MobileSafari interface for comic browsing
Macenstein has posted about a cool feature from comiXology for us comic book geeks out there. They're created an iPhone MobileSafari (have to remember that the Touch is out there now) interface for their database of the latest comic book releases. It looks great, allows users to browse both the current and following week's releases in a touchscreen-specific interface. It also displays summaries and cover art for every book on the list. It's like browsing a comic store without actually being there (unless you are actually in a comic store while you use it-- in which case, whoa, I'd have to sit down for a while, that's heavy).While we're at it, I'm currently poking around for comic book collection software for the Mac (the folks are selling their house, and they asked me to clear the old collection out of their closet). So far, it seems like Comics 2 is the pick of the litter. Does anyone want to share a good tip on an app that will help me organize the few boxes of books I've got? I would love if Delicious Library did it, but while I'm sure it could handle my graphic novels, I doubt it would be able to do individual issues. Anyone have a recommendation?
POP Takeout lays out social news in MobileSafari
Sometimes you want a list of what's hot on the social news sites at a quick glance-- an easy-to-access look at the Zeitgeist, if you will. And for those times, there's POP Takeout, a site Wade M put together and sent to us that offers up a quick list of social news headlines from Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Tailrank, and Newsvine, all listed in a site that's easy to browse and right on your iPhone (or iPod Touch-- I guess we should just start saying "in MobileSafari").The only complaint I'd have is that each link goes to the social news site's page for the story, and not the actual link for the story itself. I'd use something like POP Takeout because I don't want to visit Digg or Tailrank, and hitting the link and making me click through causes me to do that anyway.On the other hand, if I worked for Digg, I'd have a serious problem with someone listing my articles and not providing a link through to the site-- it's content theft, more or less. But if Wade could work out a way to keep Digg happy and send me to the news stories with just one click, it'd be a better solution all around.
Saving iPhone applications inside data URLs
This is really basically the same theory as the iPhone bookmarklets Mat posted earlier (squeezing content into a URL), but it's a little less about function and a little more about storage. Currently, the iPhone doesn't allow you to save actual files locally, but it does allow you save URLs, so the idea here is to save entire applications (or other HTML content) in the form of a data URL.It's a pretty wonky hack, but it works-- you can convert whole HTML pages, or even applications, depending on the URL length the iPhone's bookmarks allow, into data URLs (with the Perl script on that page if you don't want to do it manually), and then those data URLs can be loaded into MobileSafari on the iPhone, even in Airplane mode. The suggestion is made that this could allow persistent storage for web applications on the iPhone, but wouldn't that require allowing the HTML page to write to and read from the iPhone's bookmarks? Is that possible?At any rate, maybe it's a good thing, for a little while at least, that Apple didn't release a "real" SDK for the iPhone. Web programmers are making their code do all kinds of flips and tricks to get every bit of access they can on the iPhone. People have been talking about browser-based, OS independent applications for years-- maybe Apple's insistence that iPhone developers go through the browser will bring about that world sooner than we thought.[via DF]
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!
