Four Shapes web design

Apple released it’s SDK yesterday, including a full development implementation of the iPhone platform, with mobile safari using exactly the same rendering engine (not a webkit wrapper of a local safari install).

We tested it on the iPlayer development site, but as Aspen uses a different user agent to the iPhone (Mozilla/5.0 (Aspen Simulator; U; Aspen 1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Mobile/5A147p Safari/5525.7) we had to alter a few browser checks server-side to accommodate the simulator;

Checkout the movie preview of the iPhone and BBC iPlayer in action; http://codepress.co.uk/screencasts/iphone-simulator.mov

NB: There is currently a problem with quicktime implementation (no visuals, only sound).

UPDATE: The Aspen Simulator is bundled in the iPhone SDK; http://developer.apple.com/iphone/

Although still perplexing why apple chose to deactivate this feature in Leopard by default, it’s very easy to re-enable.

Goto the finder preferences. In the ‘General’ tab there’s a ‘Connected servers ‘ selection box. Tick it and the previous OS X functionality will be back. Happy mounting…

When ordering my MacBook Pro last month, I unintentionally stumbled upon way of a getting a free leather case.

At the start of the month I went to the Apple store on Regent Street, London, to buy a MacBook Pro. After about 20 minutes of deliberation, the store clerk informed me that the model I wanted wasn’t in stock. So I dropped straight onto the Mac store to order it online.

After I’d chosen the specification, I inputted my information; name, address, and all other important details needed for ordering. Finally I reached the credit card payment area. I entered my card details in but the site wouldn’t accept my order - my card had been refused. It asked me if I’d like to save my order for a later time. As I was on a public computer, I clicked no and left the store.

A lot of debit cards have a ‘fraud protection’ feature whereby it automatically stops payments that seem a little odd. As our account was relatively new, we’d hardly spent anything on the cards and the bank blocked the transfer.

I arrived home and carried on with some other work. Suddenly I received a phone call from Apple. They were enquiring to what had caused me to cancel the order and offered a free leather case, worth £60, as an incentive to buy now.

That’s when it struck me; Apple obviously have an order retentions department to follow up on any uncompleted orders. This means that for anyone ordering an expensive computer, I’d bet that if you go the majority of the way to ordering a product and cancel at the card ordering, you should receive a phone call within a couple of hours, offering some free stuff with your purchase.

Anyone with similar experiences? Post below!

Safari has been released for windows today. Surprising in itself, but what comes as more of a shock, is its speed.

Safari has existed for over 4 years. It has enjoyed a small, increasing, market share nearing 5% of all browsers, and up until now, has been available only for the Mac.

So when Steve Jobs announced Safari was fast, faster than any windows-based browser, you can’t help but wonder if he’s being a little biased. Surely a browser that hasn’t seen the light of windows, would not be any match for ones that have been developed on the platform for years? We thought it was time to test - specifically the JavaScript.

For the test we’re using Quirksmode’s JavaScript benchmark. It creates a 50×50 table in html whose cells are filled with a single character. The PC specification used for this test is an Athlon 2500XP+ with 2 Gigabytes of RAM. To ensure a level of accuracy, results are repeated numerous times to discount anomalies. The final samples reflect the most consistent of these; (lower is better)

With a total time of 322ms, over 12 seconds faster than internet explorer, Safari is clearly the winner. Would similar results be found in HTML? Or even AJAX/XMLhttpRequests? We don’t know and we’re sure they’ll be plenty of bugs to iron out yet.

However, Apple have provided another powerful browser for windows, aggressively etching themselves further in to the core of the operating system. Microsoft have got themselves some major competition.

You can check out Safari here; http://www.apple.com/safari/

After so much speculation Apple finally delivered news of its “revolutionary” iPhone during Steve Job’s keynote address at MacWorld 2007. In familiar style Jobs woowed the audience with an abundance of features
whilst mocking the current crop of ’smart phones’.

Whilst the innovative features of the iPhone are applauded already blogs,
podcasts and forums are taking bites out of the Apple with concerns ranging from battery life and scratch resistance (alleged to be better than the iPod) to the lack of 3G (Jobs has hinted this might be included in later models). The price and contract has also come in for criticism however these haven’t as yet been finalised outside US. Restrictions on developers is one bone of contention, however there’s expected developments in widgets plus Google, Yahoo and EA have been provided licences. Read the rest of this entry »