iPhone

Adapted from Introduction to Mobile Web Design (SitePoint)

By Earle Castledine, Myles Eftos and Max Wheeler

First of all, let us make sure we are on the same page. You may well ask, “What do you mean by mobile?” The answer is: many things. On the surface, building for the mobile web may appear to be not all that different from building for any other web application or site; we’re simply optimizing for viewing on mobile devices. Dig a little deeper, though, and there’s a lot more we need to think about.

Discussions about the mobile web tend to focus on the devices and their capabilities—things like the latest iPhone, the newest Android phone or this week in webOS. It’s a rapidly changing landscape and thus an exciting time for web development, so it’s easy to get caught up in discussions of the technical requirements and solutions for targeting mobile devices. But this misses the great opportunity we have with mobile design, because, ultimately, it’s about people, not devices.

Read further on Graphics.com

Click the image for the full list of rumors.

This is all speculation at this point, so skip it if you're not into such things.

Appleinsider reports that it's highly likely that Apple will soon announce an iPhone mini or nano alongside the iPhone 5. Here are some key points the iPhone mini may have:

• 50% smaller screen than iPhone 4
• 50% lighter
• Thinner
• Offered in colours
• HSPA+ with 14.4Mpbs speed
• Dual core Cortex-A9 ARM CPU
• Free Mobile Me with content streaming
• CDMA or GSM chips
• Price around $200-300

Don't hold me to it!

Ever wanted to be sophisticated while typing your status updates on your iPhone and write café properly with an accent?

If you occasionally need special characters such as é,ü,í,ő,ú, etc. you can get them easily on iOS. Just tap and hold the relevant key until a pop-up menu appears. Then slide your finger to the correct letter and release.

Üdvözlet! (Best regards in Hungarian)
Ivan

If you have a 3G iPhone and you installed the latest iOS4 you may experience sluggish performance, which can be quite annoying. Unfortunately the hardware of these phones can't handle well the features iOS4 provides, but there are a couple of tricks you can do to regain the quick response time you're used to.

Excerpted from Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps (O'Reilly Media)

By Josh Clark

Gowalla is a location-based social network that lets you and your entourage check in when you arrive at a new place, a way to share activities, discover new places, and find out what’s happening nearby. The app gives you a passport to fill with stylish stamps as you roam your city (or anywhere in the world). The app stamps your “passport” with a sleek icon for each new location you visit, and if you’re lucky, you’ll also find a virtual item (guitars, koi fish, cutoff shorts, you name it) hidden at the new spot. Pick up or swap these collect-em-all icons to build a pixel-perfect collection of virtual swag, a goal that turns the app into a global scavenger hunt.

Gowalla built on the demonstrated strengths of Alamofire, the company behind the app (and since renamed Gowalla). The inspiration for the app began with Alamofire’s talent for building playful, collectible icons for Web and software interfaces. In 2005, the company created IconBuffet, a website for designers to collect, trade, and buy sets of icons for use in their own projects. This pixel swap meet led the company in 2008 to create PackRat, a Facebook game for collecting and stealing virtual cards sporting the company’s signature icon stylings.

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Look at these amazing pictures shoot with an iPhone 3GS and edited with Photoshop afterwards. It proves that great picts depend on great lighting, not the camera.

McCann creative Mat Bisher is conducting an "experiment" as he calls it that's a reaction to Apple's lack of Flash support and a message to Steve Jobs all in one. Here's Bisher's explanation:

Fyrian LLC today announced the release of a new iPhone application that will allow freelancers and creative professionals to quickly generate project estimates while on the go. The application, aptly named "PocketProposal," helps anyone who bills by the hour, by the page, by marking up a wholesale price, or any combination of the three, eliminate the guess-work and stop losing money from spur-of-the-moment project estimates.

Apple a little over a week ago Apple essentially banned iPhone apps from the app store that were created with the upcoming Adobe CS Flash to iPhone app converter. Details here.

Amidst a huge uproar in the development community and Adobe's public complaints Apple took stand and didn't change it's policy claiming such applications may not be as fast and stable as native applications written in Apple's development environment.

I guess the CS5 Flash to iPhone converter is still useful if somebody wants to release an app for jailbroken iPhones, but clearly the exclusion from the app store is a huge blow for Adobe.

Flash always performed poorly on OS X and was never supported on the iPhone platform. It was kind of expected that Apple will not allow the converted apps into their stores. I think Adobe took a huge risk putting effort and resources into the development of this converter without any prior assurance from Apple.

Now Adobe's Principal Product Manager for developer relations put an end to the story saying they will still release the feature for CS5 even if the apps created with it will not be allowed into the iTunes Store. However, they will not develop the feature in the future and will focus on Android instead. This was a good move.

If I had a say in Adobe's direction, before anything else I would concentrate on making sure Flash on OS X is fast and stable. Then, implement Flash to run on iPhone within a custom browser and release it for jailbroken iPhones to demonstrate how well it can perform. This would prove without doubt that Flash has a future on the iPhone platform.