Categories
iOS development iPhone Mobile News

On the eve of the Apple event…

It’s the night before the Big Announcement, or for many no doubt the Big Disappointment when it turns out not to meet everyone’s fanciful expectations.   I fully expect that the hype has gotten so big that whatever is announced will cause a drop in Apple’s stock price.   It is the way of things.

I’m pretty sure the device won’t:

  1. Be made of gold
  2. Have an OLED screen
  3. Run Windows 7  (though I wouldn’t bet against it entirely)
  4. Run on AT&T exclusively.  Apple has made it clear they aren’t completely pleased with them as a partner.
  5. Be called iSlate.   I’m expecting iPad, myself, but it could just be called iPod Tablet or something like that.

Other than those things, all bets are off.

I’m hoping the device has:

  1. Front-facing camera, and a mobile implementation of iChat.
  2. Some form of iPhone OS — tablet PCs have been around for years, but a touch device has to work differently from a mouse device.  Gestures and touch, not mouseover and click and drag.    I’d hope there are a few new UI constructs that use the real estate better, but the current iPhone OS really has a lot of elements that will absolutely *sing* on the new device.
  3. No carrier tie-in.  I’ll gladly forgo a carrier subsidy for a device that can be used with any carrier or even just wi-fi for now.  The ideal would be for the device to accept some sort of wireless card in an SD card form factor, using the case as an antenna.   Then, let the carriers compete to offer deals on the cards and plans.
  4. Really good reading software.
  5. Don’t make me sign up for a new developer program,  sandwich this device into the current iPhone program.
  6. Inexpensive.
  7. Color calibration — don’t make a device that screams to be used by artists and photographers, then fail to put color management in it.  I still don’t know if there is any color management on the iPhone.
  8. An implementation of Apple TV on it.
  9. Support for Bluetooth peripherals, like a portable keyboard.

No matter what the device is, however, if it indeed is meant to be a game-changer for magazines, newspapers, and textbooks,  this release has got to be accompanied by a major retooling of iTunes.  iTunes has had so many types of content and commerce grafted onto it, it needs to be overhauled with a classification scheme that lets the individual consumer browse content efficiently,  do well-targeted searches,  bookmark or compare products, and support additional business models like subscriptions, gifting,  etc.    Don’t staple e-books and magazines onto the current thing, it’s gotten downright Byzantine.

Let’s see what it does, and hope that people judge it by what it does rather than what it doesn’t.  This type of device is still the product of a lot of engineering compromises.  People don’t seem to understand the hurdles that were overcome to bring the iPhone to market — the iPhone is a far more powerful computing device under the hood than its accessible exterior would suggest.   I expect the new device to be no less.   I do have to say that I still haven’t used cut-and-paste on my iPhone, even after Apple did put a very nice implementation in place.  They generally have some sound thinking behind their feature priorities, based on what will serve the majority of users best.  This sometimes leaves out your pet feature, but more often then not these features are worked around in an elegant way.

Categories
iOS development iPhone Web Design Web development

WPtouch is an awesome way to get your blog on the iPhone

Since I’ve been studying how to optimize web pages for the iPhone, I decided to quit procrastinating and finally install WPTouch, a WordPress plug-in that generates a very iPhone-friendly version of your WordPress Site.IMG_0108

WPTouch provides some very elegant UI attributes, including a search panel that slides in, Google Adwords for Mobile support, and the whole presentation is very configurable. Also, you have a switch that will let you go to and from the standard browser layout, so you aren’t stuck with the theme. WP Touch is considered a theme, but is installed as a WordPress plug-in, since it has to inject some code into your pages in order to do the theme-swapping.

Mike-icon-snapshot
Obey the foot. See how happy it will make him?

So, you may be asking, “how do you get one of those neat-o icons that you can put on your iPhone home screen to jump directly to the web site?”
This blog post has a great tutorial of how to set up your icon app if you are using the plug-in. Normally in a static web site, you just create a 57×57 pixel PNG file and name it icon.png, and link to it in your HTML header:


Oddly enough, the apple-touch-icon link is not part of standard wordpress themes in general. I guess that’s not so weird considering the themes are designed for desktop rather than mobile, but it is annoying that the iPhone plug-in can do this but the standard view of the site can’t be saved with your custom icon to the iPhone home page.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this mobile page looks on other devices, apparently the user agent sniffing done by the plug-in can also supply the page for Blackberry, Android, and others.

Categories
iOS development iPhone Mobile News

iPad, iTablet, iSlate: whichever it is, expect videoconferencing.

Fresh new rumor about the upcoming Apple tablet,   this one from one of Apple’s telecom partners in France.

Basically, they are saying that the tablet will have a camera on the screen side, so that it can be used for videoconferencing, and that Apple will include a videoconferencing app for live streaming.

This is definitely credible — Apple has supported videoconferencing out of the box for years in Mac OS. Their video chat feature in iChat maintains a relatively high frame rate over AIM, much better frame rates and video quality than the video chat on Yahoo IM, for example. This feature runs very nicely on even the older Power PC laptops, it ran great on my old 1.33 GHz Powerbook G4 over a WiFi connection. The only question is how well it would run on the slower mobile networks, though the current version of iChat does have the ability of adjusting the video for lower bandwidth. A more refined version of this would detect the bandwidth available and throttle back image quality and frame rate as needed.

This does suggest that the tablet will definitely have WiFi connectivity and that it should have a beefier graphics system than the iPhone 3GS, though it wouldn’t need something as powerful as the graphics on current Macbooks.

Categories
iOS development iPhone Mobile News Web Design Web development

iPhone Web Apps versus Native Apps

Elisabeth Ronson from O’Reilly just started a new webinar class today through creativetechs.com, called “Learn to Build iPhone Web Apps.”

It’s not too late to sign up, it’s a 2 hour webinar every Tuesday at 11am PST. Viewing the webinar is free, and the course videos can be purchased at a nice price if you are enrolled now. Find more info here. The first class was today, but that was more an overview, so you could easily jump in on the next session.

One thing that Elisabeth touched on that I think needs more amplification is the question “When should I consider a Web App, and when must I build my App natively?” It turns out that for many types of informational apps, a Web App makes a whole lot of sense, and few people realize just how powerful the iPhone browser is.   So many people who want iPhone apps for their businesses or services could actually get by very nicely with a well-written Web App, it’s just that there isn’t much awareness of that option, and there aren’t a lot of designers who are savvy about Safari’s Webkit/HTML5 features.

You *can* build a web app that:

  • Has a tab bar interface to separate sections of the app.
  • Can play video.
  • Can use the accelerometer.
  • Can accept simple gestures, like a swipe.
  • Can animate UI display and interaction (acceleration, crossfades, etc.)

You *must* build a native app if your app:

  • Needs to be able to run standalone without a data connection.
  • Uses the iPhone camera for stills or video.
  • Is intended to be sold on the App Store, and/or has additional content you want to offer through the App Store.
  • Requires more sophisticated animation than WebKit provides, or uses OpenGL.
  • Has complex gesture interactions.

If your app can be done as a web app instead of a native app, you get some immediate benefits:

  • You don’t need an Apple developer’s account to develop your app.
  • You don’t have to go through the app store approval process to publish your app.
  • You don’t have to go through the app store approval process to update your app.
  • Apple is not going to stop offering your app.
  • You have a very wide range of CSS/HTML tools to choose from to do your development, and a large base of people who know CSS.
  • You can push changes to your content, pages, etc. in real time.
  • May also run on other WebKit mobile devices.  Note that Palm, Android, certain Nokia phones, and certain Blackberries all have Webkit browsers.

More on this subject as the class goes on.

Categories
Web Design Web development

Theming WordPress plug-in content

I have to say that I really like the delicious plugin (del.icio.us for WordPress, by Ricardo Gonzalez), but it didn’t quite look right in the Constructor theme that I am using. The heading didn’t match the rest of the theme headings, and there was text following the link names specifying when the link was posted, but it was indistinguishable, i.e. same style.

(Delicious.com, or del.icio.us,  is a social bookmark site, you can save bookmarks to the cloud and share them with your friends.  You tag the links, they’re searchable, your list of links is browsable, and the ability to access that cloud on your blog is a great little feature.)

Turns out when you look at the source code generated by the widget, it does have custom classes for these elements:

Delicious_title_link   -- the actual title used in the sidebar
Delicious-item    	--  the specific link list item
Delicious-link     -- the link itself
Delicious-timestamp  -- the time for the item (e.g. “36 mins ago”)

Fortunately, Constructor lets you add your own CSS rules to the theme in a separate CSS file that won’t be overwritten when you update the theme files. This is a great place for adding the rules you need.

So, I added the following to the css file, just to differentiate that time stamp with smaller italic text in a contrasting color, and to make the title link look like the other sidebar headings:

.delicious-timestamp {
font-size: smaller;
font-style: italic;
color: #2F608A
}

.delicious_title_link {
color: #2F608A;
}

Voila, now things match, and if I should build my own custom theme from scratch later, I can just lift these rules to accommodate that widget, or any other widgets with their own CSS classes.

Categories
Blog Web Design Web development

Theming WordPress – work in progress

Still working on theming the site and installing the plug-ins I want.

I ended up selecting the theme Constructor for now, which looks relatively nice out of the box.  The theme supports several different layouts, and lets you customize a lot of things.

StockConstructorSkin StockConstructorSkin2

Here’s the same theme with a few minor adjustments, mostly different background images and font tweaks:

MyConstructorSkin1 MyConstructorSkin2

I’d spent a bunch of time scratching my head over how I might do something similar to the legos/crane motif. Finally, I found something I could isolate and put into the theme, and just went with a simple photocollage for the header file. I played with a few backgrounds, and decided to go with a bright, fairly neutral glass texture. With a couple hours of Photoshop, now the page looks more like my old one.

And, just for giggles, here’s what my test version of the site looks like with the default WordPress theme.  It’s quite boring, and requires you to shove everything off to the left side.

Boring. The only thing you can change visually is the color of that blue bar at top, you can't even just drop in your own header graphic.
Boring. The only thing you can change visually is the color of that blue bar at top, you can't even just drop in your own header graphic.

I will say that I am struggling a bit with the flow of the content inside these posts, things really fall apart if you have more than one small graphic, it seems. Perhaps I’m not doing this the easy way, I did see that wordpress has a built-in gallery function for putting a bunch of graphics in a post, but they didn’t look so good to me. Suppose my next step is to RTFM before I blame the theme or WordPress. I also think that my articles are already proving to be too long for the front page, I should use excerpts, but not sure if the theme supports that. At the very least, I may need to override some more things in the style sheet.