iPad By Davis: “Google refreshes its mobile web user interface to look more like its Gmail iPhone app” plus 17 more |
- Google refreshes its mobile web user interface to look more like its Gmail iPhone app
- Applauze for iPhone helps you discover the best events around you
- Apple airs new, iPad-like Discover and Brilliant ads for iPhone 5
- The "iPhone 5S" problem
- Givit Video Editor for iPhone goes social with Video Stream
- Apple turns on HTTPS for the App Store, closes numerous security vulnerabilities
- Fingerprint scanning, NFC rumored for iPhone 5S
- Projectbook for iPad review: create and organize your notes and to-do's
- Contest: Win a Moko Slim Fit Case for the iPad mini
- Comparing Apple news site apps for iPhone at a glance
- Behold! Photos of early iPhone development prototypes!
- How to customize navigation tabs in the iMore app for iPhone
- The BeatBlaster for iPad Updated: Adds Radio Recording, New Skins & More
- iPhone 5 vs HTC One
- Deal of the Day: 60% off Amzer ShellCase w/ Holster for iPhone 5
- iMore show 340: Nerd Talking
- Monday Brief: New CrackBerry launches, 2InstaWithLove, and more!
- No Firefox web browser for iPhone or iPad unless Apple relaxes its rules
| Google refreshes its mobile web user interface to look more like its Gmail iPhone app Posted: 12 Mar 2013 01:42 AM PDT
The refresh is certainly a very nice improvement when you are accessing the site from your iPhone's browser. The question is, does anyone actually access Gmail in this way? Surely it is much more convenient to either use the built in Mail app or use the Gmail app from the App Store. Source: Google+ 
       | ||||||
| Applauze for iPhone helps you discover the best events around you Posted: 11 Mar 2013 09:38 PM PDT Applauze is an iPhone app that helps you discover, plan, and attend the best events around you. Whether it's a little crafts program at your local library or a huge concert featuring a popular band, Applauze will make sure you know about it. The interface of Applauze features a vertically scrolling list of events. Each event is represented by a gorgeous photo with a little blue ticket in the corner that displays the price. You can sort events in Applauze by what's hot, what's nearby, what's happening soon, theatre, music, sports, community, or all categories. If you find an event you want to attend, you can purchases tickets directly with Applauze. One of the great things about Applauze is the the price you see is the amount you pay. There are no hidden fees.
I've already discovered a few events that I may be interested in attending thanks to Applauze. If you're ever looking for something fun to do, check this one out!
    | ||||||
| Apple airs new, iPad-like Discover and Brilliant ads for iPhone 5 Posted: 11 Mar 2013 08:55 PM PDT Apple has brought their recent, gleeful, iPad ads to the iPhone 5S with two new spots called Discover and Brilliant. Just like the iPad ads, the new iPhone ads feature a series of rapid-fire words, culminating on a focus word, which then triggers a series of app demos relating to different meanings of that word. Discover starts with rock, and shows off rock music being played on GarageBand, minerals being explored, rocking chairs being shopped for, and Alcatraz -- the Rock -- being looked at on Apple Maps. Sharp shows a sword slice in Infinity Blade, a sharp-looking tuxedo in a catalog, a sharply detailed photo being zoomed in on, and C# being tuned on a guitar. Discover shows the universe, a dinosaur, augmented reality on Yelp, and Shazam identifying a song. Brilliant starts off with sweet, and shows a fruity dessert, a heartfelt sentiment in card-form, a touching moment from Pixar's Up, and a sweet skateboard trick. Rise shows a sunrise, a Starbucks payment via Passbook, energy efficiency in the face of rising costs, and a remote-controlled helicopter rising up from behind the iPhone. Brilliant shows Albert Einstein in an iBook, solving a virtual Rubik's Cube, solving math with MyScript Calculator, and changing the color and intensity of a Hue lightbulb. While some people have been critical of this series of commercials, I still think they both retain Apple's traditional app-centric iOS marketing theme, while adding some of the lighter, faster fun that's traditionally been reserved for iPod advertising. They may not be pitch perfect, but they strike me as more Apple than the previous spate of celebrity Siri spots. How are you liking them in general, and more specifically, how do you like them for the iPhone? 
    | ||||||
| Posted: 11 Mar 2013 08:35 PM PDT Apple may or may not release a product called the "iPhone 5S" this year. The presumption, however, fueled by Apple having previously released the 2009 iPhone 3GS-as-in-speed, and the 2011 iPhone 4S-as-in-Siri, is that 2013 will see another S-style update. And that, the perception of the yearly update cycle and its tick-tock nature more so than any specific reality, is problematic. Between 2007 and 2010, Apple released new iPhones in late June or early July, one after the other, like clockwork. In 2011 and 2012, Apple released new iPhones in October and September respectively. While that was an offset from summer to fall, it still kept the iPhone release window to roughly a 3 month period. It made it predictable. Consumers, even the kind that don't read sites like iMore every day, and don't track every rumor they come across, began to realize when new iPhones would be released. That led to a slowdown in sales for existing iPhone models just prior to the presumed next release. Apple taught people when to buy, and by extension, when not to buy. Apple also taught competitors how to counter-program the iPhone. It's probably not a coincidence that HTC is releasing their next-generation Android phone, the HTC one, this spring, or that Samsung is holding their Galaxy S4 event this March. While I assume BlackBerry might have preferred their relaunch to have been sooner rather than later, they're also introducing the BlackBerry Z10 in the U.S. this month, far from the long, fall shadow of the iPhone. Rather than competing for attention with Apple, who continues to dominate the media cycles and best-sellers list during their launch quarter, competitors are waiting until halfway in, when the iPhone is no longer new, and yet still not due for a refresh. Thanks to Apple's tick-tock product cycle, where a new design is introduced one year, and that design is iteratively updated with new internals the next year, both of those elements -- consumer presumption and competitive counter-programming -- become amplified. When the impression is that Apple will "only" release an S-class phone in any given year, consumers might be more interested in seeing what else is out there. They might be interested in seeing something different. While the iPhone 5 was almost entirely new from a manufacturing standpoint, because it has the same general, flat, rounded rectangle design as its predecessor, it was criticized by some consumers, and more than its fair share of tech pundits, for being boring. New unibody construction, a camera that was a feat of optical engineering, a taller, 4-inch display, and LTE -- boring. If marketing the iPhone 5 as re-revolutionary was tough, marketing an almost identical-looking iPhone 5S to the same crowd would inevitably be tougher. Keeping the same design for two years allows Apple tremendous economies of scale, and instead of funding an entirely new phone every year, they can spend their resources on making the same phone better for the same price. That's theoretically good for everyone. However, holding to the same design also limits what Apple can do to make the iterative iPhone "better". Making the screen bigger again would require a new casing. Adding extra radios like NFC or wireless charging could require changes to the entire package. Fingerprint scanners could complicate the current mechanisms or require other changes. Anything other than a better camera, more advanced processor, and more encompassing LTE chipset could simply be beyond the constraints of an S-style update. They could have to wait for an iPhone 6, or another, new device. In the past, to mitigate against hardware similarity, Apple has turned to software differentiation. Even if it felt arbitrary, the iPhone 3GS had video recording and the iPhone 4S had Siri. An iPhone 5S could have some other, exclusive software feature. Competitors, however, are free to take their biggest shots at Apple during the S-years, throwing even more against the wall in an effort to see what sticks and what clicks. Whether it's digitizer-based styluses and incredibly large, ridiculously dense displays, and software that listens for you and watches your every move, anything perceived and sold as different has a better chance of standing out against anything perceived as the same, no matter how it's sold. 2013 could be especially brutal in that regard. In previous years Apple enjoyed tremendous market and media support. Even in the face of major PR stumbles like the iPhone 4 antenna, overall Apple enjoyed mostly positive coverage. iOS 6 maps wasn't recovered from as easily or fully, and now Apple is doomed rhetoric fills Wall Street and its journals of record. Whatever iPhone Apple fields this year, no matter how good it might be, in the current climate Apple may have to work harder than ever before to get even a percentage of the positive coverage afforded them in the past. That shift in reality distortion is benefiting competitors. Google is getting a lot of buzz for Project Glass and the Pixel, and Samsung is enjoying unprecedented mindshare for a mobile company without a fruit in its logo. They're also far, far, far exceeding Apple and everyone else in the market when it comes to ad-spend, and it's working for them. They're shaping perception. A few years ago Apple convinced the world that technology alone wasn't enough, and that it wasn't about specs but experience. Now specs and feature lists are being hurled at Apple, and they're being accused of losing their sense of innovation, and failing to push the envelop. The original iPhone didn't have 3G or GPS. The iPhone 3GS didn't have the larger, higher resolution screens of then cutting-edge Android phones. The iPhone 4S lacked LTE. The iPhone 5 skipped NFC. That used to cause some complaints among power users. Now even the idea that an un-announced iPhone 5S might not have a 1080p, 400+ ppi display and biometrics is pointed at by an increasingly mainstream audience as proof positive Apple has lost their way, and that other manufacturers are now leading that way. In tick years Apple has leapt ahead with technology like Retina display. But in tock years like this one? Markets are fickle and sentiment can gain momentum. And the fear facing some iPhone users is that, in the face of all this, an "iPhone 5S" simply won't be enough. Apple's a smart company, though. They understand the problems that come from predictability and the reality-distorting power of perception. Last year, when explaining why the iPad 3 was called the new iPad, Apple's senior vice-president of global marketing, Phil Schiller, said it was because Apple "didn't want to be predictable". Apple releasing the iPad 4 only seven months after the iPad 3, and the "pedal to the metal" language that came with it, was an even more dramatic showing of that. If Apple can release two iPads (three if you count the iPad mini) in one year, what else could they do? Rumors abound of less expensive iPhones, and of large screen iPhones. Apple has already bifurcated their tablet lineup into the 9.7-inch iPad and the 7.9-inch iPad mini. There's a rumor that next full-size iPad, at least, could arrive this spring. If Apple chooses to, they could conceivably release one iPad now and one in fall, to better spread out the schedule. Apple could also do the same thing with the iPhone, have two sizes, 4-inch and 5-inch, and eventually have spring and fall releases for those as well. And there's that watch thing, which could directly or indirectly increase the perception of overall platform value. Some of these rumors, like all rumors, are no doubt misinterpretations or completely baseless, and believing all of them, especially for this year, would be a mistake. But to dismiss all of them all, for all time, just because they don't fit a previous pattern, or because they sound like something Apple would never do, could be just as big a mistake. The "iPhone 5S" problem is the idea that Apple has become predictable coupled with the perception that the next big thing might just come from somewhere else. Breaking patterns and challenging expectations is just one way to solve that problem. 
    | ||||||
| Givit Video Editor for iPhone goes social with Video Stream Posted: 11 Mar 2013 06:30 PM PDT The videography iPhone app Givit Video Editor has been significantly updated with a Video Stream, making it a very social video sharing app. You can discover new videos from the popular feed, browse by category, and follow your friends. Just like other social services, you can also like and comment on videos. Other features of Givit includes an extremely easy and streamlined editing process. You simply highlight sections of video while it plays making it easy to include multiple clips. Givit also allows you to add motion effects, music, transitions, titles and photos. You can also upload your videos to Givit cloud for permanent storage. Givit offers 5 GB of storage for free and premium packages for avid users. Givit is like Instagram for videos. Check it out.
    | ||||||
| Apple turns on HTTPS for the App Store, closes numerous security vulnerabilities Posted: 11 Mar 2013 03:04 PM PDT Some great work by Google researcher Dr. Elie Bursztein has led to Apple increasing security on its iOS App Store. Last July, Elie reported a number of vulnerabilities in the App Store to Apple. As of January, they have been fixed. It appears that certain areas of the App Store were not using HTTPS, and as a result, it was possible for attackers to execute a number of different exploits on users. HTTPS is a protocol widely used to secure web traffic. By using HTTPS, companies employ an added layer of security to their users' web traffic. When properly implemented, HTTPS helps ensure that when a user communicates with a server, that the server is indeed who they say they are (and not a malicious third party) and that the contents of their conversation stays private and unmodified. Without HTTPS, not only is it possible for a third party to view your traffic, but it is also possible for a third party to modify the traffic that you are sending and receiving without your knowledge. In the case of Elie's exploits, it was shown that due to the lack of HTTPS in certain areas of the App Store, it was possible for a third party to perform a number of attacks: stealing App Store passwords, installing an app other than the one the user was requesting, installing fake upgrades, preventing users from installing certain apps, and even obtaining a list of all apps a user has installed on their device. This was accomplished with scripts that Elie wrote to intercept the HTTP request and alter the responses sent back to his device. While an iPhone might request an app like Angry Birds, the response could be modified to instead serve up Real Racing to the device. This isn't the first time we've seen a company forget to secure all of their sensitive URLs with SSL and it certainly won't be the last. Fortunately there don't seem to be any reports of these vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild (though that's not to say no attacks occurred and simply went unnoticed) prior to Apple's fix. It's also important to note that such attacks would have required a user to be on an unencrypted network with an attacker; this isn't something that would be done while connected to an encrypted wifi network at your home, or while using your data plan with your cell provider. Another reminder for users to remain vigilant in good security practices, and not connect their devices to unknown or unsecured networks. 
    | ||||||
| Fingerprint scanning, NFC rumored for iPhone 5S Posted: 11 Mar 2013 01:38 PM PDT The iPhone 5S -- or whatever Apple ends up calling it -- is rumored be sporting both NFC and a fingerprint scanner. Chipbond, a Taiwanese company, has apparently been tapped to provide some components of the next iPhone, including touch display drivers, NFC chips, and chips that support a fingerprint sensor. China Times reports:
There have been rumors of fingerprint scanners in iPhones since Apple's aquisitions of Authentec last year. There have been NFC rumors going back beyond that, and Apple may have even experimented with NFC prototypes at one point, before abandoning it in the final design and production models. If NFC and fingerprint scanning both make their way into the next iPhone, then it seems probably that Apple would find a way to use them both together. An NFC mobile wallet could have fingerprint scanning for added security. Any mobile wallet would also probably tie in to Passbook as well. Given that NFC payments have yet to take off in the United States however, there is some doubt that this would be the route Apple takes. While it's true that Apple could spur the adotion of the technology, they would need the infrastructure in place to begin with. It's likely that Apple would use NFC for mobile payments in addtion to another feature. Anyone holding out hope for either fingerprint scans or NFC this time around? Source: China Times), via Macotakara 
    | ||||||
| Projectbook for iPad review: create and organize your notes and to-do's Posted: 11 Mar 2013 12:34 PM PDT Projectbook for iPad is a note taker and to-do app that aims to streamline how you organize your data. Instead of using a note taking app and a to-do app separately, Projectbook allows you to keep them all in one place, minimizing the need for multiple apps to stay on task. You also have the ability to take handwritten notes or even draw which makes Projectbook ideal for almost any class or presentation setting. When you first load up Projectbook, you will notice that only landscape orientation is supported. It's somewhat of a bummer that portrait isn't even an option but if you use a keyboard case or plan on taking extensive notes, landscape is probably the orientation you're going to prefer anyways. The left hand column of Projectbook is where you'll find your navigation. Along the bottom you can toggle between notes, folders, tags, and to-do's. The rest of the screen off to the right is used for you to take notes, draw, or map out your to-do lists. To create a new note or to-do, tap on the plus sign in the upper right hand column and pick which one you want to create. Notes allow you to create text based notes or written notes. You can also search for context within a note for other notes matching that item which makes searching for items a lot quicker. This makes Projectbook great for anyone who has drawing classes or have a need to create items with symbols or mathematical equations that are difficult to enter on a traditional keyboard. To switch to drawing mode, just tap the pencil in the top navigation and you'll be given different brush stroke sizes, pen tools, erasers, colors, and more. Projectbook also has a feature when in drawing mode that's makes handwritten notes much more legible and manageable and that's the zoom box. Instead of writing or drawing text in the main space, you can use the zoom box. This will auto-scale your handwriting down so it fits much more content on one page. Whether you're using your finger or a stylus, it's hard to write small on an iPad while maintaining legibility. The zoom box is an awesome solution and works extremely well. Tasks in Projectbook are easy to create and manage. You can set due dates, create multiple lists with nested lists inside of it and more. When setting up a new to-do, the first checkbox will be the name of the list. Everything underneath it will then become nested. Checking off the main to-do item will mark the entire project as complete. As you do things, you can mark them off individually as well. When creating text notes or to-do's, you'll get a keyboard that has a specialized top row of keys that allow you to easily insert bullets, checklists, text formatting, and more. You can also choose to insert photos, audio recordings, things from an email, and more. Projectbook also supports Dropbox and iCloud integration which makes for an easy way to share and save your notes. You can also pull in from sources like Pocket and Instapaper as well. The good
The bad
The bottom lineThe App Store has an abundance of to-do and note taking apps readily available. To be considered one of the best, your product really has to stand out. While Projectbook has a super nice interface and the drawing tools are beyond stellar, there is no iPhone or Mac counterpart which makes it hard to suggest. It's not very often I only need to interact with my notes or to-do's on my iPad. I want to see them on my iPad or Mac when I'm working and on my iPhone while on the go. If you're only interested in taking notes on your iPad, Projectbook is a viable option but until there's more cross-platform support, it's hard to recommend it over other apps like Byword for note taking and Things for task management.
    | ||||||
| Contest: Win a Moko Slim Fit Case for the iPad mini Posted: 11 Mar 2013 11:42 AM PDT One Free Moko Slim Fit Case for iPad mini To Be Win Contest Deadline: Wednesday March 13, 2:00PM US Central Time for another iPad case giveaway contest. Today you've got a chance to win the very nice Moko Slim Fit folio style case for the iPad mini. I did a review of the Moko Slim Fit for iPad mini last week, and it's quite a good all rounder sort of case for the iPad mini. It's my own lightly used case that will go to our lucky winner. Hit the break to see how easy it is to enter for a chance to win …
How To Win – Leave a comment on this post and you're in with a chance. – To gain a bonus entry and increase your odds, check out my recent review linked above and tell us what your favorite feature of this case is. That's it. We'll pick our winner on Wednesday and I'll ship the case out later this week. Shipping: I really don't want to limit this to just US...         Comments
Related Stories
 This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | ||||||
| Comparing Apple news site apps for iPhone at a glance Posted: 11 Mar 2013 11:01 AM PDT Since I've compared iPhone Twitter apps, weather apps, podcast apps, and calendar apps, it's time to put my app where my scrutiny is and compare Apple news site apps, including iMore's, at a glance. There's an interesting debate when it comes to websites-as-apps, and perhaps most poetically, Apple news sites as apps. Some think Safari on iOS is good enough that a website should just be a website, and packaging it up as an app is artificial at best, bloated at worst. Others believes that apps provide functionality beyond Safari and the web, including native performance, and the potential for native features like push notifications, pod catching, and more. Still others think the iPhone, due to its smaller size and more mobile use-case better suits websites-as-apps than the larger, yet still portable iPad. The internal discussion at iMore and Mobile Nations over making the iMore app touched on a lot of those points, and more. Ultimately, we've made on for the iPhone -- just now updated to version 2.0 -- but we haven't yet made one for the iPad. The discussion continues. Other sites no doubt have gone through similar discussions, and each has made their own decision, determined their own value, and if they made it app, made their own choices about why and how to present themselves in a native, compelling way. Default UIKit vs. custom interface, pulling the page via UIWebView vs. pulling the data and reformatting it, ads vs. no ads, and much, much more goes into planning and implementing a website-as-app. Not including international versions/site, forums apps (I'll do those separately at some point), general news/RSS or other aggregator apps (likewise), here's a glance at the content list screen of some of the most popular Apple (or generic tech that also includes Apple) news site apps.
And as a bonus, since some of you complained one screen shot per app wasn't enough, here are the single article views. The comparison is, of course, limited and incomplete. Some popular Apple news sites don't have apps, like Daring Fireball, MacRumors, 9to5Mac and The Loop. Some of the sites pictures above also include extra features, like iPad versions, podcast players, push notifications, forums integration, app recommendation engines, and more. However, it does show some of the different opinions that went into making the basic functionality and design of an Apple news site-as-app. Checking them out, what's you feeling? Should websites stay websites, or do you like what going native has to offer? 
    | ||||||
| Behold! Photos of early iPhone development prototypes! Posted: 11 Mar 2013 10:41 AM PDT An early iPhone prototype has surfaced, different from others that we've seen before, and much closer akin to the aspect ratio we're now used to in the iPad. It's also caught on camera. While we have previously seen design concepts and renders, it's rare that we see a development prototype. From early 2005, the prototype has a 5"×7" screen and is two inches thick. It also has a number of ports that would never make it to the final iPhone design. According to Ars Technica:
The engineering team was impressed that they were essentially running Mac OS X on a machine of that size. In only two years, this device would be refined and become the iPhone we all know and love, making its first appearence at Macworld 2007. It's funny to think that from this device, and others like it, no doubt, has come most if not all of Apple's current success. Years from now, we'll undoubtedly see more such prototypes for devices that we haven't even seen yet. Source: Ars Technica. Image: Ars Technica 
    | ||||||
| How to customize navigation tabs in the iMore app for iPhone Posted: 11 Mar 2013 10:27 AM PDT If you haven't picked up the new version of our iMore app from the App Store, we highly recommend you do as it's a great way to get all your favorite iMore content in one place right on your iPhone. Aside from being able to leave comments inside the app, you can also customize the iMore app to give you the content you care about most. If you read more how to's and app reviews more than anything else, you can edit your navigation tabs for quick access to those kinds of articles. How to customize navigation tabs in the iMore app for iPhone
That's it. You can now browse the sections you're interested in most with a single tap. 
    | ||||||
| The BeatBlaster for iPad Updated: Adds Radio Recording, New Skins & More Posted: 11 Mar 2013 09:52 AM PDT The BeatBlaster iPad app has been updated recently, to Version 2.0. As the version number would suggest, it's a fairly major update – with some notable subtractions as well as new features and improvements. Might as well get the bad news out of the way first. The app no longer supports iOS 5 – so original iPad users get a tough break here. Lyrics have also been removed from the app, for unspecified reasons. On the good news front, there are a handful of very nice new features, including the ability to record radio, new skins to style your BeatBlaster, and iTunes Match support. Here's the full list of new features and improvements:
 Related Stories
 This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | ||||||
| Posted: 11 Mar 2013 07:59 AM PDT Phil Nickinson from Android Central is busy looking at the HTC One, one of the first, big Android phones of 2013. Of course, that means he's putting it side-by-side with, and head-to-head against, Apple's 2012 iPhone 5. They're both phones, and what's more, metal phones. I love that. One you've held a metal phone, it's really hard to go back to plastic-as-inpolycarbonate. That's about where the similarities end, though, as the HTC One has a huge, incredibly dense 4.7-inch 1080p screen, front facing stereo speakers, and, you know, runs Android Jelly Bean instead of iOS 6. I've already explained why, for me, the frustrations associated with iOS are less annoying than the frustrations associated with Android, and why I won't be switching any time soon. But since I haven't been exactly thrilled with my Nexus 4, who knows, maybe I'll pick one up. I had the G1, and I liked the Nexus One quite a bit. HTC has, thus far, been my favorite Android hardware manufacturer. Sense might be a deal-breaker, but I'll give it a try before making up my mind. In the meantime, check out the video above and the pictures below, and if you're interested in the HTC One, keep your browsers locked on Android Central as they have complete coverage coming your way. Source: Android Central 
    | ||||||
| Deal of the Day: 60% off Amzer ShellCase w/ Holster for iPhone 5 Posted: 11 Mar 2013 07:07 AM PDT | ||||||
Google has announced that it has refreshed the user experience for its mobile web access to Gmail, Calendar, Google+, Web and more. The refresh has come about because of the positive feedback it has received since launching a revamped 
 |  |
Posted: 11 Mar 2013 06:42 AM PDT
Brian Klug of AnandTech joins Rene to talk Apple TV chipsets, the limitations of battery life, camera optics and microns, high density displays and arc minutes, iOS vs. Android limitations, and much more. It's serious nerd talk, and our longest show ever! You've been warned!
- Subscribe via iTunes: Audio | Video
- Subscribe via RSS: Audio | Video
- Download directly: Audio | Video
Show notes
- Updated Apple TV taken apart, reveals tiny A5 system-on-a-chip
- Slightly Smaller Apple TV 3,2 (A1469) Contains A5X SoC, BCM4334 Combo
- iPhone 5S planned for August, next iPads may debut as soon as April
- AnandTech iPhone 5 review
Guests
- Brian Klug (@nerdtalker) of AnandTech
Hosts
- Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie)
Credits
You can reach all of us on Twitter @iMore, or you can email us at podcast@imore.com or just leave us a comment below.
For all our podcasts -- audio and video -- including the iMore show, ZEN and TECH, Iterate, Debug, Ad hoc, and more, see MobileNations.com/shows
| |
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now
Monday Brief: New CrackBerry launches, 2InstaWithLove, and more!
Posted: 11 Mar 2013 05:09 AM PDT
No Firefox web browser for iPhone or iPad unless Apple relaxes its rules
Posted: 11 Mar 2013 05:51 AM PDT
Mozilla has no plans to bring its Firefox browser to the iPhone or iPad in the future and it is putting the blame firmly at Apple's door. Mozilla vice president Jay Sullivan was speaking at the mobile browser wars panel at SXSW Interactive. According to CNET:
The sticking point for Mozilla is not being able to carry over its sophisticated rendering and javascript engines to iOS. Essentially, the organization doesn't feel like it can build the browser it wants to for Apple's platform, Sullivan told CNET.
Of course this should come as no great surprise to iOS users; the browser debate has been rumbling on for a long time. The App Store already offers a lot of different web browsers which include the likes of Google Chrome, Dolphin Browser and more.
The fact that none of these alternative browsers can be set as the default browser is hindering enough. When you also factor in the lack of access to the Safari exclusive Nitro JavaScript engine; which considerably speeds up the browsing experience, you can see why it is not an attractive platform for third party browsers.
Nitro gets its speed by using a just-in-time compiler that can execute code faster, but at the expense of security. Given the amount of security exploits that target web content, Apple only uses it in aspects of iOS it can be completely responsible for securing, namely Safari and in web.app (web apps clipped to the Home screen). Third party apps are restricted to UIWebView, which uses the older, more secure yet slower JavaScript engine. That means all alternate browsers can really offer are different interfaces and add-on services, like Chrome does with tabs and sync.
Now that Mozilla is making their own mobile operating system, however, perhaps they can lead by example and show how alternate browsers can run with their own HTML and JavaScript engines, unrestricted, and in a completely secure manner.
Source: CNET
| |
| You are subscribed to email updates from iPad By Davis To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario