Insightful commentaries, articles, professional projects by Thomas Yung
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Go get your Mobile Web Best Practices Flipcards now. These summarize the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 document. The flipcards are a useful reminder of the sixty guidelines explained in detail in the specification. A PDF version of the cards is available.
Pastebud — Looks like this new iPhone web app called Pastebud is out that does exactly what I had envisioned for the iCopyuPaste web service of mine. Unfortunately for me and the rest of you out there, I’ve been swamped with too many other commitments to get mine out there first. Therefore, I’ve decided to simply offer my help to the developers of Pastebud, and see if they’ll let me help out with this project. The only thing that iCopyuPaste would have an advantage over on Pastebud is the fact that I didn’t plan on charging anyone for this service. Pastebud costs $5 to use once it officially releases. Also, I plan on giving iCopyuPaste an open-source license so that anyone that wants to see how it works can. I’ve got a lot of work to do to get my code published. Stay tuned.
News about Pastebud:
This is wonderful news. According to the Apple Developer Connection website,
We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.
We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.
However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.
What does this mean to you? This means that developers can now share to the world any technical articles or tutorials related to developing iPhone apps or web apps. Now, I can finally proceed with publishing my iCopyUPaste technical article.
According to the Netbiscuits blog…
The main advantages of client based mobile Web applications are that they provide very good possibilities for graphic design of user interfaces and keep content available even offline. Furthermore, they often show faster reaction times and are sometimes easier to link to other telephone functions such as directories, camera, etc. The main disadvantage of every client-based solution is that they initially need to be downloaded by the user and installed on the mobile – a practice that will need to be repeated for every new release. Many users are prevented from taking this step due to technical problems, security issues and a lack of clarity concerning costs involved. Furthermore clients are always dependent on the mobile phone operating system and must often undergo costly adjustments for each individual terminal.
Mobile sites, on the other hand, do not require any installation. They are immediately available over the browser and the sites’ content and software are continuously updated unobtrusively to the mobile user. Mobile sites also provide a greater scope of outreach than clients do, as nowadays practically all mobile phones have a browser. Adjusting mobile sites and rich media content to various mobile terminals can be made 100 percent automatic. This means a massive reduction in development and testing expenses. User interface design is also no longer an obstacle. Modern mobile phone browsers enable use of AJAX and Flash, thus creating a user experience similar to that of PC Web. If a company is looking for a larger audience reach with as little hassle as possible, the mobile site is the clear winner.
I totally agree. The one thing that I advocate is to have some kind of markup language that allows the browser to have access to native device functions such as the PIM, camera, etc.
Head on over to CityBlogz Labs section of the website, to check out the latest code iteration of a user interaction model demo that I’m prototyping. It is a little bit rough around the edges, but it showcases a little bit of how I envision the Copy and Paste to work on the iPhone Safari client. I will be describing some of the code in detail over the next couple weeks, so stay tuned.
Still no copy and paste for iPhone 2.0. Apple has admittedly said that copy and paste is in the works, but it is not a big priority. Time to take matters into my own hands by creating a “iCopy uPaste” web service for the iPhone. I figure it would be a nice side project for me to learn more about iPhone web development and get some exposure in creating a REST-based web service.
The premise is simple. I want a way for anyone using an iPhone to open a bookmarklet on any Safari web page that activates a hidden dialog menu. They can select any text from the web page and copy the text to a “Copy and Paste” web service up in the “cloud”. The user can paste the text on another page’s form input field or somewhere else on the same page. I can already think of several hurdles such as cross-domain JavaScript, server-related security issues, and iPhone limitations on JavaScript events. I plan on sharing every morsel of information that I find on my journey and I invite anyone to help. I will start putting up the code in some form of source control (more on that later). By the time I’m done, perhaps Apple will already have implemented a nice solution to this problem.
The wonderful part of this idea is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to iPhones. Creating it as a web service and opening up an API allows any platform that can consume web services to have access to a “cloud-based” Copy and Paste. Therefore, I can envision native iPhone apps to simply create the following options: “Copy to iCopyuPaste” and “Paste from iCopyuPaste“. They can hook those events to consume the “iCopyuPaste” web service. Of course, the down side is that it won’t work if you aren’t immediately connected to the 3G or Edge or Wi-Fi network, but that’s the trade off for copy and paste. Another use case scenario could be for someone who needs to copy some text from one computer’s browser over to another computer’s browser. If they needed that text to be pasted into a native app via the system’s clipboard, someone could conceivable use Adobe AIR to create a widget that consumes the “iCopyuPaste” web service and store that text onto the system clipboard, ready to be pasted on any application on the desktop. Thoughts?
