Posts tagged iphone

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

When iPhone OS 4 comes out this summer one of the new features that is coming is GameKit, which in short is sort of like Xbox Live for iPhone/iPad games. If you have ever used Xbox Live or Steam on the PC you will realize exactly how huge of a feature this could be. Centralized friends lists, achievements etc. are great.

If Apple allowed games made with the Flash CS5 compiler in the app store, none of them, not one, could use GameKit.

This is exactly what Steve Jobs is talking about in the quote above.

Engaget reports Google is going to attempt to defragment the Android platform by separating their apps from the core OS and distributing OS updates via the Android Marketplace.

This is a good goal for Google (sorry for the alteration). Hopefully, for Android handsets going forward, it solves the problem. But as John Gruber notes:

Google has been iterating quickly, but the problem is that carriers aren’t interested in any updates at all for phones they’ve already sold. The carriers have learned nothing from the iPhone, or, maybe they just don’t care about Android as a platform.

So, in the end, OS version fragmentation may be less of a problem for Android users — two years from now. Current Android users, except for Nexus One owners, are shit out of luck. Hope you like Android 1.6 if that’s what your phone shipped with.

Google has a vested interest in keeping people on the Android platform. The carriers and handset makes have a vested interest in selling phones. Google wants to keep Android attractive and current for all Android users, even those with older phones. Carriers just want to sell new phones. Perhaps they don’t care if the software a phone ships with ever gets upgraded. To the carriers it doesn’t really matter if they sell a Blackberry, a Palm pre, an Android or a Windows Mobile phone.

Apple has interest in the OS and the hardware. They want to keep iPhone OS users on the iPhone OS platform and they want to sell iPhones. For Apple, this is really one goal.

Google has the Android Marketplace, Apple has the App Store, HTC has… to keep selling phones. It’s not that what is good for Google and Android is bad for T-Mobile or HTC, it just isn’t as important to them.

If you are like me, you enjoy the Web comic xkcd and you also like to read it on your iPhone because xkcd is blocked at work or because you are too lazy to get off the couch to get your laptop.

If this sounds like you, you may already know the dilema that reading xkcd on the iPhone creates. How do you read the annotation contained in the title attribute of each comic since you cannot hover your cursor over the image like you would in a traditional browser?

So I wrote a bookmarklet to solve this problem for myself and I am sharing it with you, the Internet.

Installing the Bookmarklet

Step 1: Navigate to this page on your iPhone.

Step 2: Press the + button at bottom of Mobile Safari.

Step 3: Press “Add Bookmark”.

Step 4: Change the title of the new bookmark to something like “Show the xkcd title that you normally have to hover to see” and press “Save”.

OK, probably call it something shorter than that. I actually gave it a generic name because you can use it on any site.

Step 5: Copy this text to your iPhone’s clipboard:

javascript:(function(){imgs%20%3D%20document.getElementsByTagName%28%22img%22%29%3Bfor%20%28var%20i%3D0%3Bi%3Cimgs.length%3Bi++%29%20%7B%20%20%20%20imgs%5Bi%5D.onclick%20%3D%20function%28%29%7B%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20alert%28this.alt%20+%20%22%5Cn%5Cn%22%20+%20this.title%29%3Breturn%20false%3B%20%20%20%20%20%7D%3B%7D})();

Step 6: Pull up the bookmarks menu in Mobile Safari. Press “Edit” and select your newly created bookmark.

Step 7: Clear the value of the address field and paste the contents of the clipboard into the field and press “Done”.

Step 8: Go to http://xkcd.com on your iPhone (now is a good time to read the comic), pull up your bookmarks menu and select your newly created bookmark and then tap the comic to view the tooltip.

More Information Than You Require

For those who are curious, here is the un-encoded version of the JavaScript:

    imgs = document.getElementsByTagName("img");
    for (var i=0;i<imgs.length;i++) {
        imgs[i].onclick = function() {
            alert(this.alt + "\n\n" + this.title);
            return false;
        };
    }

Technically it shows both the alt attribute and the title attribute and it will work on any img on any page. If the image is a link, it will not click through, so if you want to click through you’ll have to reload the page.

Note: If anyone reading this has an Android handset, how does the browser on Android handle tooltips? If it acts similarly to Mobile Safari please give this a try, I would be curious to know if it works.