- Posts tagged iPhone
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My iPhone4 is Jealous
I think my iPhone4 is jealous of the new iPhone4Steve.
It's been working great ever since I got it. Now that it has a new big brother, it's throwing a tantrum. The Home button has become sluggish. Sometimes I have to hold it down for 2-3 seconds to get the phone to do what I tell it to do.
I've tried reasoning with it and putting it on time-out. I even left it home alone once or twice (though I think that may have punished me more than it). All to no avail.
Maybe if I upgrade to iOS5 and get Siri? Oh, right, that's not going to work because even though the Siri code is in iOS5, it won't run if it finds itself living on a machine that doesn't have a 4 and an S in its name. Seems kind of like a sales gimmick, eh?
Anyone got any advice?
Great Approach to Organizing iPhone and iPad Screens
My colleague Steve Lomas has written a great post that describes clearly how to organize your multiple screens of scattered icons on your iOS device for easy retrieval. It's a great system if you can get yourself to think in terms of folders on those devices which started out with no such concept and then implemented the idea in a sort of obtuse way.
I decided to try his technique on my iPad. In less than 30 minutes I took six screens of icons down to two. It would have all fit on one, but I decided to leave my three-year-old granddaughter's page intact so she wouldn't get confused and then start rummaging around my other icons!
Good idea, Steve.
John Allsopp: "Hybrid Phone Apps Are BS"
SitePointe columnist Louis Simoneau had a good piece on the role of hybrid apps in the skyrocketing world of smartphone and portable device app development the other day. Featured in his article was a link to a fascinating podcast with long-time smartphone guru and conference organizer John Allsopp.
In this podcast -- and lots of other places on the Web -- John faces the issue of hybrid apps head on, opining that they are essentially dead ends that there are "a whole pile of reasons" not to engage in. His view is that Web apps built using HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS are destined to be far more successful and less prone to sudden shifts in the markets caused by disruptive technology and marketing decisions by the owners of the few App Stores out there. I've been saying this for some time, of course, but it isn't only the fact that John and I agree that causes me to recommend this podcast. Listen carefully to what he says; he offers software developers of all stripes a cogent look at the near-term future.
Why Would You WANT to Bypass the Browser?
An intriguing story about a guy who figured out how to create games for Apple iOS without using PhoneGap or Titanium while completely bypassing the built-in browser has me somewhat puzzled.
Dominic Szablewski (blog) has created a game development library called Impact that allows you to write iOS apps completely in JavaScript. Graphics and sound are rendered using OpenGL and OpenAL respectively. So no dependency at all on Apple's OS or infrastructure. That's a cool-sounding idea alright but I'm not sure what it gets you in exchange for what has to be a tremendous amount of additional work to create your apps in the first place. (Reading his blog will reveal at least some of the hoops through which Szablewski had to jump to make his app work.)
The reason this idea caught my eye is that the author is using HTML5 to render the games, which then run on all HTML5-capable browsers, which includes all of the important browsers with more support coming out every day. So doesn't that mean the games will already run on iOS in the Safari browser? Why, then, go to the additional work to make them run naked stand-alone without the browser? I don't get it.
Szablewski says on his blog that, "This means you can take your JavaScript games written for Impact and run them on iOS with perfect sound and touch input and way better drawing performance than with Mobile Safari." I'm not a gamer, so I don't know if that's true. If it is, of course, then I stand corrected and this approach may well have some real value for folks who want to write snappy games for the iOS that also run in all of the major HTML5-supporting browsers.
Whether there is something real here or it's just a mental exercise by someone who doesn't like the way Apple renders game stuff in the Safari browser, the exercise is intriguing. The fact that Apple approved two demo games the author built for deployment in the App Store also suggests that this probe opens another avenue in the anti-scripting bias Apple has clearly shown in screening app submissions to the store.
