Recent Posts

In my last post I wrote about mobile application design and how form should disappear in the face of function.  The implementation of MobileSafari on the iPhone comes so very close to giving developers a toolkit to accomplish this with pizazz, but there are a couple issues holding it back from its full potential:

The "dev kit" that Apple offers doesn't allow access to the phone's features. This was covered in my last post. Lack of access to the camera, microphone, speaker, alerts etc. hinder iPhone apps from being fully effective. MobileSafari's support for Web standards is subpar.  The implementation of the Web standards that Apple touted as an application development platform are disappointing.  Javascript behavior is slow and unreliable, and even some CSS properties do not behave according to the Web standards that Apple touted as the future of the iPhone.

This may have come as a surprise to Apple.As far as I know they have never said outright that the Safari browser and its Mobile counterpart can behave like two different animals, but as someone who spends a lot of time with both, I know it to be true. This is something that I had considered worth...

When I imagine a "digital lifestyle", it is long on "lifestyle" and short on "digital". I picture a level of integration between tech (iPhone, home computer, web applications and services), life (home, family, travel, friends) and the digital tracings of my life (photos, video, music, design, blog/microblog/ tumblelog) that allows me to enjoy what I'm doing without thinking about transferring from real life to digital.  It just happens, at least it does in my mind's eye. The advent of the iPhone had made it seem like the "digital lifestyle" was ready to integrate in this way.  Unfortunately, the actual product and process has fallen short of this mark. Apple's announcement that they are releasing a "real" iPhone SDK for native third-party applications is good news for the iPhone.  Applications so far, whether they were Safari Web apps or hacked native apps, have been restricted to a fairly primitive set of features. The main reason for this: no integration with the features that should make the iPhone a mobile wonder: camera, microphone, speaker, accelerometer on the hardware side, and Address Book, Calculator and Clock on the software side.

A good mobile app should be as transparent as...

Enough people have expressed interest in a desktop browser version of iTweet (examples: one, two, three) that I started putting one together tonight. Twitter's recent dropping of the hyperlinks in @replies is fixed by just a few lines of code in iTweet... so if you like using @replies, here you go. A lot of iTweet's functions are built around convenience for the iPhone, so expect this version to change a lot as I modify it for the desktop browser. Eliminating the constraints of bandwidth and Mobile Safari's funkiness, lots more is possible. On the other hand, without Safari's wonderful CSS3 support, this version doesn't have all the lovely rounded corners of the iPhone version. Anyways, it's a work in progress, but seeing how everyone misses the linked @replies I thought I'd just publish this early so people can use it. Enjoy. Click here to give it a try.So far I have only clicked around this version a bit in Firefox and Safari on the Mac before I blew through the API limit on both my accounts. I will test and debug it for other browsers soon. I welcome your opinions and feature requests for the desktop...

I made my first Facebook product page today, for my project iTweet.net. The process was quite simple, and I can see some useful possibilities already in using the Discussion Boards as a place to handle feature requests and bug reports. I'll be making another FB product page for The Illusion Factory soon as well, and perhaps I'll dig into the paid-push types of advertising they have available. Stay tuned...and meanwhile, please add my iTweet Facebook page to your Products list!

---