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Showing posts with label iPhone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iPhone. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

I Would Simply Like To Support iPhone But I Cannot

Update
Before other silly flame/blame will start, I have already twitted that my next laptop will be a netbook. Here the related tweet.


let me summarize the story: at that time I had a girlfriend with an iPhone so I though why on earth shouldn't I buy an Android instead? If I need some test online I'll have both to test it, and I've rarely been that wrong.

Wanna Develop for iPhone? Buy a Mac

As marketing strategy sounds "cool" except I do not want to develop iPhone application, the present and the future is online, why on earth should I learn another programming language from the scratch, Objective-C, to develop something that will be relatively soon replaceable via WebKit and a good host?

Wanna Develop Web for iPhone? Buy a Mac

Again!!! Unbelievable, there is not such a thing: online iPhone tester, everything I found Googling was about a silly image with an iframe just to test the iPhone size ... are you kidding me?
It's like put IE inside an iframe inside an "Android frame" ... where is webkit? Where is the real JS engine? Where is the real render engine?

Wanna Develop for Apple Devices? Buy Apple

OK, I got your point, so now I am stuck with an Android contract and moreover I "love" my Android and it's about a year I am using it writing at light speed thanks to hidden keyboard, and using for whatever Web purpose thanks to its WebKit which is maybe not perfect but it works like a charm, generally speaking.
I do not want to buy a Mac only to test iPhone Web engine via Xcode, I'd love to have better reasons for a Mac, and I don't want to buy an iPhone only to test it online.
That will mean another contract to surf the Net as well ... and why on earth should I do this while I am simply trying to support iPhone?

I Would Simply Like To Support iPhone But I Cannot

Now I am a single developer, but I cannot imagine all other engineers, JavaScript hackers, W3C "slaves", cross-browser maniacs, unable to develop a web application for iPhone. With this strategy Apple is missing the possibility to fix a wider range of problems related to iPhone WebKit dedicated build and moreover it is avoiding iPhone Web support for "silly developers" like me that in this case was only trying to fix a common problem, the css position fixed property, but I am unable to make it works in an iPhone while every other A-Grade browser is supported, Android included, and here is the example!

As Summary

People like Peter-Paul Koch have the privilege to try any kind of mobile device in order to test compatibility. Unfortunately for Mobile Devices Vendors Peter-Paul alone will never be able to cover every kind of test. Even Microsoft releases time bombed images for Virtual Machines in order to test other versions of Internet Explorer. The Android OS is Open Source and it is possible to test it almost via whatever platform, same is for other browsers but not the iPhone. I know you do not mind but you are missing my contribute and support for projects a la sessionStorage, Formaldehyde, the incoming position-fixed, vice-versa or noSWFUpload ... and again, I am only one out of million of web developers.

Please think about it,
Best Regards

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Advertisement revolution? A first try for Android, iPhone, and PCs

Introduction


Nowadays, we read news about new libraries, technologies, etc etc, but there is an area in this Web 2.0 era which seems to be "stuck" since big G introduced AdSense: a new way to deliver advertisement, compatible with new devices such as Google Android and Apple iPhone.
Even if Google proposes AdSense for mobiles as well, we know that those simple text boxes do not cope properly with Android and iPhone innovative web browsers.
This is why I have though about a new way to show ads, unobtrusive, cross-browser, and in a way even funny, with less than 2Kb minified and gzipped code, library independent, with everything inside its own closure ;-)

Ad 2.0 Introduction


The iframe below perfectly represents my idea of mobile advertisement, idea that I will explain better a bit further down. Every 10 seconds, a little banner comes up at the bottom of the screen, and it persists for 2 seconds before it disappears. The number of bunners can be from 1 till unlimited, in this case, just 3.

The page above has been written by me and inspired by x.facebook layout and colors, one of the best mobile implementations I have ever seen so far.
You can surf the content of the above iframe with almost every XHTML 1.0 Compliant browser, included FireFox, Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc etc. but it is ideal for Google Android or Apple iPhone, whatever mode you are using (portrait or landscape) and with a fixed bottom ad that comes up every N seconds and shown for other N seconds, parameters that I could easily customize directly via url, as well as colors and banners (now simply fakes).

A new idea? Only for mobile!


What we miss so far for mobiles are CSS "position:fixed" in iPhone, solved via my ad 2.0 code, and an advertisement system able to appear and disappear with transparency effects and in a Web 2.0 Stylish way. After a couple of hours of neck-breaking, here I am with a football match alike advertisement, something that makes sense in Web 2.0 since the tendency leans towards not refreshing a page in order to rotate displayed banners (concept I introduced ages ago in packed.it project page, a site entirely based on Ajax and where AdSense content is not static).

So basically, since even Facebook with their Ads policy did not introduce a nice way to show some "interesting stuff", I asked myself: what could be the best way to introduce ads without annoying people, without being obtrusive with whatever library, easy to click on touch-screens, and without boring long texts/big spaces since in this mobile era pixels are truly precious?
The fixed bar is entirely a link, it is extremely easy to click with both iPhone and Android, while the advertisement concept is just this: can you sell something with a 32x32 icon plus a summary or a funny sentence able to capture mobile surfers attention? Then in this case, Ad 2.0 does half the work, thanks to its appearing/disappearing effect plus transparency and customizable colors, and the rest is up to your marketing ability ;-)

Here there's a static shot of Ad 2.0 script:


I know a lot of you are thinking: OMG! Advertisement even in my mobile? You are evil! ... well, it is just a simple idea but I am sure we will have ads in our mobile sites soon - so, in my opinion, it is just a matter of time, and the way to show it.

Any comment or suggestion will be more than appreciated, have a nice week.

P.S. Does anybody know how to contact some guy in Facebook?