BLOG - NEWS - SPRUIKING
Original post from April 18, updated for the 1 year anniversary of apple web-apps going dark!
Being a developer of several web-apps for both pc and mobile phones, I read with interest way back in March the brouhaha regarding whether Apple had intentionally hamstrung web-apps performance on the iPhone by preventing their use of its brand shiny new Nitro javascript engine.
The question that remains is whether this is an oversight on the part of Apple, or whether it is quietly intentional. With the company’s stand against Flash, an open standard of HTML5 should be its next logical thing to support. But if it doesn’t fix the problem in future versions of iOS, that leads a hefty credence to the rumor mill.
The debate primarily centred around whether with their update to Safari in iOS 4.3 Apple had purposely excluded web-apps for security reasons (JIT’s ability to mark memory pages in RAM as executable) or something more nefarious, such as perhaps feeling threatened by the rise of web-apps and a potential hit on the native app-store revenue….that debate rages on.
As I mentioned, I develop a number of websites with web-app versions customised to run on mobile phones. One of these apps is SwipeStudy (a flashcard study tool) which I submitted to the Apple web-app library, which is (or perhaps was) a very useful and thoughtful site provided by Apple for developers to showcase their (typically freeware) web-apps. However on my last update I mistakenly entered the web address without the http:// prefix (my mistake I admit) which causes the link to wander off to some internal Apple error page…doh!
I have been trying to contact apple to rectify this link, but started to suspect and now after the passing months am pretty sure that they are no longer maintaining this site. In fact the last update to was 3rd Dec 2010, over 4 months ago a year ago!
So I conclude with the question that if Apple are playing with a fair hand with respect to web-apps on iOS, why would they stop updating this site. I guess they may just be too busy dealing with their undoubted many successes, or could they see the writing on the wall with a business model based on app-store revenue when the whole app-ecosphere is converging on html5?
So I was off to Darling Harbour for the annual Geek-fest that is #gdd11, and was pretty impressed with the quality of the lunch boxes…the talks weren’t bad either. Actually the highlights were Timothy Jordan & Julia Ferraioli’s presentation on Using the Google+ APIs and also Eric Bidelman’s Bleeding Edge HTML5. I even managed to incorporate some new HTML5 features into SwipeStudy during the presentations!
Later in the evening Presented SwipeStudy at Google Creative Sandbox 2011, Carriageworks Sydney.
, a great night despite the stormy weather, I was almost electrocuted on the monorail trying to get there…
This Hong Kong street-scene snapped while rolling along up the soho escalator looks like a crazy UX drop down menu design
But I think there’s actually a very good reason why we should, in fact, embrace the term “HTML5” as an overarching buzzword for this latest round of web standards and specifications. Our industry has proven on several occasions that we don’t get excited about new, interesting, and useful technologies and concepts until such a buzzword is in place.
According to a dispatch in the Cablegate Wikileaks treasure trove, American Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Tatiana Gfoeller attended a two-hour brunch to brief HRH Prince Andrew Duke of York ahead of his meetings with the Kyrgyz Prime Minister. Much of the banter is actually quite amusing and a rare peek into the attitudes of the British royal family.
"The crowd practically clapped. He then capped this off with a zinger: castigating “our stupid (sic) British and American governments which plan at best for ten years whereas people in this part of the world plan for centuries.” There were calls of “hear, hear” in the private brunch hall. Unfortunately for the assembled British subjects, their cherished Prince was now late to the Prime Minister’s. He regretfully tore himself away from them and they from him."
Two social media videos...one inspiring, one impressive yet slightly scary
Just put the finishing touches on CurrencyConvert.biz – A quick and easy Web 2.0 currency converter.
Please leave any comments, bugs or feedback as a comment here.
thx
David
Last week I realised the internet wants to kill me. I was trying to write a script in a small room with nothing but a laptop for company. Perfect conditions for quiet contemplation – but thanks to the accompanying net connection, I may as well have been sharing the space with a 200-piece marching band.
I’m starting to feel like an unwitting test subject in a global experiment conducted by Google, in which it attempts to discover how much raw information it can inject directly into my hippocampus before I crumple to the floor and start fitting uncontrollably.
I agree with the posit that excessive hyperlinking can be very distracting, I'd love to see some scientific data on the effect of hyperlinks on comprehension
While slogging my way to Bondi beach yesterday in the annual city to surf amongst the world-record 80,000 strong throng I was reminded of this article on how the ability to run long-distance had a big influence on the development of the human form and brain. At least it helped keep my mind off the pain…
Endurance running, unique to humans among primates and uncommon in all mammals other than dogs, horses and hyenas, apparently evolved at least two million years ago and probably let human ancestors hunt and scavenge over great distances. That was probably decisive in the pursuit of high-protein food for development of large brains.
For the home page of my site I wanted to cause certain divs to fadeIn using jQuery after varying amounts of time. In javascript we can use setTimeout() to schedule an arbitrary function call for some point in future. However the function works differently between Firefox and Internet Explorer (MSIE).
In FireFox, you would do this:
setTimeout(myFadeIn(), 1200, "id1"); setTimeout(myFadeIn(), 2700, "id2"); setTimeout(myFadeIn(), 3500, "id3");
Except, MSIE doesn’t like this. And in fact the additional parameter is not even part of the official javascript spec.
So how can we work around this ?
Closures. In the below example I use closures to pass an anonymous function to setTimeout() that contains in its “frozen in time local scope” the id of the div to fadeIn.
// Return delayed fadeIn closure function function delayFadeIn(id){ return (function(){ $('#'+id+'_img').fadeIn(1000); }); } //Setup three delayed fadeIns by passing closures to setTimeout function setupFadeIns(){ setTimeout(delayFadeIn("id1"), 1200); setTimeout(delayFadeIn("id2"), 2700); setTimeout(delayFadeIn("id3"), 3500); }
And this will work in both MSIE and FireFox 
I'm glad I don't work in a phone shop...
Scenario planning derives from the observation that, given the impossibility of knowing precisely how the future will play out, a good decision or strategy to adopt is one that plays out well across several possible futures. To find that “robust” strategy, scenarios are created in plural, such that each scenario diverges markedly from the others. These sets of scenarios are, essentially, specially constructed stories about the future, each one modeling a distinct, plausible world in which we might someday have to live and work.
Interesting thoughts on hierarchies vs networks in this influential paper by Anne-Marie Slaughter, America’s Edge: Power in the Networked Century.
In this world, the measure of power is connectedness. Almost 30 years ago, the psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote about differences between the genders in their modes of thinking. She observed that men tend to see the world as made up of hierarchies of power and seek to get to the top, whereas women tend to see the world as containing webs of relationships and seek to move to the center. Gilligan’s observations capture the differences between the twentieth-century and the twenty-first-century worlds.
Interesting application of Darwinian theory to social networks from Justin Milne until recently head of broadband at Telstra.
The net in all its forms, wired or wireless, fixed or mobile has become the greatest contributor to the spread of memes the world has ever seen. Never have so many people been able to share so many ideas or concentrate their intelligence so rapidly.
Looks like the u.s. state department is 'getting IT'
The underpinning philosophy of 21st-century statecraft is that the networked world 'exists above the state, below the state and through the state'
A Short Footnote on the Grape and the Grain
Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea.
HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey” the machine is being dismantled, its wires unplugged: “My mind is going,” HAL says. “I can feel it.”
For Carr, the analogy is obvious: The modern mind is like the fictional computer. “I can feel it too,” he writes. “Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.”
Don't forget to add the additional bull$%^* factor...
Their new three social plugins, Open Graph, and Open Graph API, make Facebook’s intentions very clear: they want to be the fabric of the web.
Eric Schmidt: Mobile Is The Future, And There’s No Such Thing As Communication Overload
Eric Schmidt Is the Nicest Guy in Tech...does that mean Google is doomed to lose to Apple?
Am enjoying the Multi-tasking and folders but my beloved nytimes app is crashing boohoo
It's hard to grasp the breathtaking scale of the epic war between Microsoft, Google and Apple. Billions upon billions of dollars. Entire industries at stake. This is the board. These are the pieces.
As if on cue, Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in the same week as the release of a long-awaited report from the investigation into the country's financial collapse.
Perhaps maybe we should put more thought into our tweets now that they'll be history
Amazing winter storm sunset along Martin Place Sydney
Could this be the end of 'freemium'?
