Always Leave A Way Out
Jan 30, 06:21 PMI’m beginning to hate browser sniffing again. I mean, seriously — is it 1997?
I don’t know about you, but every time I visit a site on my iPhone that immediately redirects me to wap.domain.tld, I groan and know that I’m in for a crippled mobile web experience with no way out. I groan even louder when I see that it’s been optimized for the iPhone.
(nfl.com, I’m looking at you!)
The best part about getting trapped on a WAP site is that it loads fast. It’s designed to be read on a mobile phone, after all, and anyone who has developed for mobile devices knows that their browsers are a potpourri of varying broken implementations. It is a hard, hard task to make those sites work, and the only way to do it is to sniff the browser and display an optimized site for the particular device.
But now we have Mobile Safari.
So I don’t really have anything against browser sniffing per se. It’s a valid technique of optimizing content for different browsers and devices. To make many precise CSS layouts work, you have to sniff the browser. That’s fine. And providing optimized iPhone interfaces through browser sniffing is also fine.
What I object to is making your main website inaccessible to a mobile device. And most of them are.
Getting stuck in a WAP site is not just about the UI; they nearly always have less content than the main site, which is almost always the content you’re actually looking for. Attempting to find information about the NFL Network’s airing of the Texas Bowl (where my alma mater played this year) on the iPhone was an exercise in futility. The mobile website uses all the iPhone controls, but has a tenth of the content.
In the parlance of the internet kids these days: you’re doing it wrong.
You know it’s an iPhone reading the page. You’ve optimized for it. But if you’re limiting the content on your WAP site, let the user actually use the main site! Yahoo did this a year ago and thankfully realized what a mistake it was. Don’t force iPhone users to a different domain, even though they’re a mobile device. And give iPhone users a choice between your shiny new interface (which is very nice and easy to use) and your clunky old one (with all the juicy content.)
Unsurprisingly, Amazon gets this right.
It boils down to two good rules of thumb:
- Always leave your users a way out.
- When in doubt, copy Amazon.
Seriously.
I continue to be impressed by Amazon.com’s iPhone web interface. Calling it a web app doesn’t do it justice, because it’s more than just a one-trick pony. It’s a faster way to shop when you’re on your iPhone, and it’s accessible to all iPhone users, not just people who have downloaded their web application.
But, much like its web interface has done for years with ecommerce sites, Amazon does the little things right, like letting you go back to the full, non-optimized version if you want to browse comments or multiple entries. This is the right UI behavior — it’s okay to sacrifice some functionality for optimization gains, but not content.
It seems like a simple thing. But simple things are not always easy.
TJ Luoma sidesteps a common problem with the iPhone’s autocorrect:
During an amazingly boring and poorly led meeting today, it occurred to me that I might be able to work around the “ducking iPhone” issue by creating a contact with this name.
The iPhone uses your list of Contacts as possible auto-complete or matching when you type. This makes sense, if you have someone’s name in your address book, you may very well find yourself typing it one day, and occasionally iPhone will even offer to correct my spelling of people’s names.
And that seems to correct the ducking problem.
In case you’re looking for a great way to watch US election returns tonight (but are away from the TV), the New York Times’ election dashboard looks great on an iPhone:
Via Daniel Jalkut.
Wil Shipley: Let the Market Decide
Wil Shipley has an excellent post on what the App Store should be, but isn’t:
Customers win because they can choose whatever software they like, regardless of whether Apple “approves” of their choice or not. Apple wins because developers aren’t alienated and don’t all go develop for Android, and so Apple has the device where all the innovation is happening. And developers win because the obviously cool apps will be featured by Apple and get tons of his, but even if their app isn’t “blessed” by Apple, if it’s a neat enough idea it’ll become popular on its own, through word-of-mouth.
The whole post is well worth your time.
What Happens When You Let a Complete Stranger Hold Your iPhone
Shawn Blanc shares his iPhone. Hilarity ensues:
I very much wanted to say ‘no’, but I like to think of myself as a nice guy; sharing is caring, you know? I slowly pull it out of my pocket and as I’m hesitantly passing it over the empty chair my first thought was, “Is she going to steal it?”
But my second thought was, “If she does try to run I could totally take her.”
iPhone 2.1 Due Friday
Sep 9, 01:54 PMOh, thank goodness. At Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event today, Steve Jobs said:
If you have an iPhone, there’s a 2.1 software update as well. It’s a big update: it fixes lots of bugs: fewer call drops, significantly improved battery life, not as many crashes, backing up to iTunes is “dramatically faster.” And some new performance enhancements as well. Free to all iPhone owners, and it’ll drop on Friday.
(Via Dan Moren at Macworld).
This is really welcome news. The 2.0.x iPhone code release has been terrible. First, the iPhone is unresponsive to input, and then it catches up from all the frantic tapping you did seconds before. Changing from screen to screen within an app, or scrolling within it, now has annoying lag, especially in the core applications: Phone, SMS, Safari, and Mail. 2.0.x was a major step backwards from 1.1.4 for everything but the App Store.
Here’s hoping that Friday brings something to be excited about again.
The Keys To The Kingdom
Sep 6, 07:30 AMTerrible news. This week, Apple rejected an application to turn iPhones into Whoopie Cushions:
We’ve reviewed your application Pull My Finger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published to the App Store.
The thing is, I’m not joking. This really is terrible news for the iPhone.
By rejecting applications based on whim instead of policy, Apple has brought every developer’s fear to pass — that they can invest time working on an application, only to have it arbitrarily never make it to market. This in turn drives developers to other platforms, and encourages those who stay on it to take fewer risks. And that leads to fewer truly great applications on the iPhone.
This is already happening. John Gruber writes:
I’ve already heard from a top-tier developer this morning who, in response to this story, is dropping an idea for a very cool iPhone app out of fear that the work to create it would be for naught as Apple might reject it.
Steven Frank of Panic also writes:
I’m telling you, the App Store continues to give me the heebie-jeebies. I do not like the future it portends.
There are hundreds of bad applications in the App Store. I don’t even know where to start criticizing them. Do I pick on the copies of Apple’s sample applications in the SDK, or the ones that display a single image? Or the electronic books of public domain works available on Project Gutenberg? There’s so much crap in the App Store right now that the great applications are hard to find.
This was only acceptable as long as Apple stuck to their stated guidelines:
- No VoIP over EDGE
- No driving assistants
- No plug-ins
- No background processes
- Sandboxed
- Official APIs only
- Must adhere to Apple’s HIG
- No porn
Pull My Finger adhered to all of those restrictions. Watching the developer’s video, it looks polished, full-featured, and adheres to more of the HIG than many other apps I’ve seen. It may not be in the best taste, but that’s not a stated policy. Apple’s claim that an application must have more than ‘limited utility’ introduces a new, arbitrary standard that seriously harms the platform.
It doesn’t matter how popular the iPhone is. It doesn’t matter how good the iPhone is. If you’re running a software development shop, you are going to hedge your development investment. The risk is too great to do otherwise.
And you know the worst part about all this?
It shows that Apple can’t take a fucking joke.
Tilt Scrolling in Instapaper Pro
Adam Lisagor, on Instapaper‘s implementation of Tilt Scrolling:
It’s such a simple idea: exploit the power of the iPhone’s accelerometer as an alternate means to control scrolling on the vertical axis of a page.
(Via Cameron.)
The whole thing is worth a read, but I found the following especially interesting:
Almost as impressive as the feature itself is its introduction in the brief promotional page included in Instapaper Free. A simple description of the feature is accompanied by a large green button linking to a demonstration video that opens and plays from within in Mobile Safari. Like everything else in this application, it’s well thought out and concise.
The ways in which developers are finding to make money off their applications continues to amaze and impress me. This is a great example of the Free/Pro model, with a useful free application, but a really desirable pro version.
Well done, Marco. Well done!
Instapaper is available at the App Store in both Free and Pro versions. The Pro version is $9.99. The Free version is, uh, free.
Mike Lee’s firing (“invited to resign” means “you’re fired but we’re not going to pay unemployment”) from Tapulous on Monday continues to ripple through the iPhone development community. John Casasanta writes:
The vultures are out and and they taste blood. The iPhone’s one of the hottest things around right now and there’s little sign of its popularity letting up anytime soon. And the venture capitalists want in… badly. The fact that the iFund™ exists is overwhelming evidence of this.
It’s a good cautionary tale about accepting VC funds and the effect on the iPhone development industry, especially since the iPhone is the new hot platform. If you have a good product, don’t sell yourself short.
