Faster iPhone searching over EDGE
After an idea I had a couple of weeks ago, I cobbled together a little web app for the iPhone that lets you search Google’s cached search results with images stripped out. Gfaster gives you a standard Google search, but adds ‘text-only’ links, allowing you to view a result quickly over EDGE. This can be useful if you’re stranded miles from a Wifi hotspot and wanting to some more serious reading or research over the 2G network. The page will load in a second or two and, although it won’t be very pretty, you get all the text in articles, reviews, forum posts, etc.
Posted 62 days ago Comment
iPhone browsing over EDGE with images turned off
Generally, browsing the web on the iPhone over EDGE is slow, especially if you are loading pages with lots of graphics. What a shame, then, that there is no option available on the mobile version of Safari to turn off images. This would be especially useful for those times when you need to do some proper research when out and about.
So I started to wonder about a solution to this problem, using Google’s Search API...
Posted 75 days ago Comment
Unlocking the iPhone
When I bought my iPhone in the US in October, I knew I would eventually have to unlock it to use with a UK network. There are 2 parts to the process. The first is to ‘jailbreak’ the phone, to gain access to the inner workings of the device directly, without going through iTunes. This allows you to install extra, non-Apple applications. The second part is to break the SIM lock that prevents the use of SIM cards from networks other than AT&T…
Posted 125 days ago Comment [1]
Joyent: Joy at Last
Back in the days of Textdrive I took a small gamble and bought one of their ‘limited offer’ Mixed Grill lifetime hosting accounts for $500. At the time in the Blogosphere opinion was divided about the wisdom of these products. And certainly, while the included online Strongspace backup storage was truly useful, the web hosting accounts were slow and unreliable, despite (because of) all the cool software options.
Posted 204 days ago Comment
iPhone Review
So I decided to go ahead and buy and iPhone, and take my chances with the unlocking software when I get back to the UK.
It’s an amazing gadget and actually really useful. As someone who’s never had any kind of Smartphone before, it’s a huge step up. After a couple of weeks of use, here’s what I like and dislike about the iPhone:
Posted 204 days ago Comment
A Foreigner's Guide to iPhone on AT&T
Being out in the US without a Social Security number means I have no credit rating, which makes me in-elegible for AT&T’s iPhone contract. It also means I can’t get a US credit card, although opening a bank account is easy enough. I phoned AT&T to see if I would be able to use their ‘GoPhone’ plan which uses an automated pre-pay arrangement and doesn’t involve a contract. After a lot of holding, I was told that I could do this. Although I couldn’t use my UK credit card, I could use something called a ‘phone check’ which allows them to take money from a bank account without a card.
Posted 217 days ago Comment [2]
The iPhone really is that good
Being in Santa Monica today meant I was able to walk down to the Apple Store on 3rd Street Promenade in the evening and try out one of the new iPhones.
And after playing around with it for nearly an hour I can say that it although it is phone-sized, the experience is a lot more like using a real computer. The screen is bright and clear and so responsive as you flick your finger to scroll through lists. The UI is almost flawless and I was able to adapt to using the virtual keyboard in a matter of seconds. This thing makes every other phone I’ve seen look completely primitive. It feels like using something from a science fiction movie, it really is that good.
Posted 317 days ago Comment [1]
Forcing vCard downloads on the web
A vCard is like an electronic business card. VCards are often attached to emails, or placed on the contact page of a website (see my contact page, for example). VCards can be easily imported into Outlook, and clicking a vCard link in OSX will automatically add the contact details to your Apple Address Book.
Putting a vCard on your website ought to be very straightforward: just place the file, with its .vcf extension, onto your web server and put a link to it on your contact page. But, like me, you may run into a problem here. When you click on the link in the web page, you may find that the browser opens the vCard file into the browser window, instead of starting a download…
Posted 333 days ago Comment [3]
How to save £750 on Adobe CS3
CS3 has arrived and you might be groaning at the price-tag: Design Premium CS3 weighs in at a hefty £1655.58 from the Adobe Store. However, A little-known policy at Adobe called post announce upgrade means that if you buy the old version of creative suite within a certain timeframe, you get a free upgrade to the new one. The interesting thing about this is that you can pick up a full retail version of CS2.3 Premium from Amazon for £904.98. Which saves you over £750! Should also work with most ‘upgrade versions’, but you’ll probably want to call Adobe to check. But don’t hang around too long as it looks like the offer runs out in late June. Also interesting that you’ll find no publicity about this offer on the Adobe website.
Posted 379 days ago Comment
FOWD Conference 2007
I spent today at the Future of Web Design conference in Kensington, listening to 13 different presentations. Andy Clarke gave an interesting talk about being creative with the creative process itself, and suggested that producing large sets of design visuals for a site in Photoshop – which are then signed off by the client and passed on to a developer – is an inefficient and wasteful way of working. Instead he told us how for a recent project he had switched to designing with XHTML pages directly, and pointed out that this made it far easier to demostrate interactive aspects of the design that cannot be easily shown on a static image.
Posted 390 days ago Comment