Dribbble is a playground for seemingly endless pixel shenanigans, including first looks at new iPhone apps, sneak peeks at soon to launch web services, and beautiful icons that evolve into final products. A website that exemplifies an artist’s best work needs an app that’s as gorgeous and classy as the gems you might come across, in which case you’ll want Courtside for the iPad.
Posts tagged with "browser"
Browse Dribbble in Style with Courtside for iPad
Google Chrome 10 Release Brings Tabbed Settings, Flash Sandboxing
Google Chrome has a new stable release you can download today (which should arrive automatically or manually via the ‘About Google Chrome’ pane), which offers a couple new features for faster & more secure Internet browsing, and a significant update to Google Chrome settings. Google Chrome’s new settings interface has been overhauled, placing your settings in a new open tab while enabling a new search box so you can find settings (like bookmarks) quickly and easily. Settings have also been extended to the Omnibox, where you can share direct URLs to jump to a specific settings page so you can quickly help mom & dad enable or disable browser options. You can preview the new features via a video after the break.
Test Shows iPad 2 with iOS 4.3 Is Incredibly Faster Than iPad 1
Surprise: the iPad 2 running iOS 4.3 is faster than the original iPad running iOS 4.2. According to CNET UK, which had the chance to run a JavaScript SunSpider benchmark test on the iPad 2 during a brief demo at San Francisco, the iPad 2 will outperform the competition and even other Apple’s devices when it comes to web browsing experience and overall snappiness of the browser application. The SunSpider test is usually a good test of how a browser will perform with “heavy” webpages with lots of content and functionalities such as Facebook.
Indeed, Apple itself promotes the new Nitro JavaScript engine that powers Safari on iOS 4.3 as “twice as fast” than its predecessor on iOS 4.2. The original iPad, however, also comes with a slower and non-dual core processor (Apple A4), whilst the iPad 2 will get a dual-core A5 and likely more RAM. These hardware features, together with the iOS 4.3, should make the device a lot faster than iPad 1, iPhone 4 and several Android tablets out in the market or coming soon.
Back to the SunSpider JavaScript test, CNET writes:
Incidentally, when you compare the iPad to the other devices we tested, Android phones and tablets don’t come out particularly well. The Galaxy Tab is more than 3x slower than the iPad 2 in this test, and about 2x slower than the original iPad with the new software. The Google Nexus S smart phone doesn’t fare too well either, at nearly 3x slower than the iPad 2. There’s really good news for iPhone 4 owners out there: when it arrives, iOS 4.3 will deliver a 2.5x speed increase in this test.
The one device we’d like to test, but can’t, is the Motorola Xoom. This tablet has a dual-core processor and runs the latest version of Android, 3.0 Honeycomb.
We will get our iPad 2’s next week and we’ll make sure to run some tests as well to see how the new tablet is really faster than other devices with iOS 4.3 and the iPad 1.
Push Browser: An App That Sends Webpages from iOS to OS X
Two weeks ago I realized I needed a way to send a webpage not only from my Mac browser to an iOS device, but from the iPhone or iPad to my Mac browser as well. The reason is simple: I find an interesting link on my iPhone I don’t want to bookmark or Instapaper, yet I want to simply check out later on the desktop. There’s no easy way to do it. So with the help from a friend and support from my Twitter followers, I created a folder action script for OS X that receives links shared from iOS through Dropbox and opens them in a new tab in the system’s browser. The method still works for me and it’s a really easy (yet powerful) way to save just about any link for later desktop usage, but I saw many had trouble trying to make the script work or integrate it with Dropbox. So here comes an app for that. Read more
Smartr Launches Web App to “Read Twitter” From Your Browser
I am a huge fan of the Smartr Twitter app. Smartr, in case you missed my review, is an elegant Twitter client that, instead of focusing just on your timeline and letting you tweet like other apps do, provides a neat way to strip away tweets that don’t have http:// links, and formats articles coming from Twitter in an uncluttered view. Sort of like Flipboard, but meant for Twitter on the iPhone.
The concept is simple: you log in with your Twitter account, and the app only displays messages that contain links to webpages. These status updates, however, don’t appear in the app’s timeline as the original tweets — rather, they’re formatted to be visualized with the article’s title, a thumbnail preview of the first image and a short excerpt. Just like in Flipboard, Twitter becomes a “news aggregator” of links shared by people you follow, with the app excluding unrelated material like Foursquare check-ins, pictures and tweets that don’t come with links. Smartr is a Twitter client that uses the platform to fetch content available on the web. Because of that, it also makes sure content is formatted for the iPhone’s screen with the possibility to display the original, unformatted webpage.
Smartr is launching a web version of their Twitter utility today, allowing users to log in with their account from the browser and read news aggregated from the service without using the mobile app. The web app doesn’t come with all the features seen in Smartr for iPhone, as it’s a simple, continually updating list of links found in your timeline. These links are given a visual preview with an image thumbnail and an excerpt, together with the original tweet and author displayed inline.
Speaking to The Next Web, Smartr developer Temo Chalasani says:
We built this web application because a lot of our mobile users were demanding a desktop Smartr client. The webapp is still in its infancy, but we hope to bring the Smartr experience to the web through this release.
Indeed the web app is very straightforward right now and doesn’t let you do much besides opening articles in new browser tabs, but I like the fact that there’s a real-time update at the top for news posted while you were reading. Check out the web app here, and go download Smartr from the App Store.
New Chrome Beta Is Faster, Includes Revamped Settings UI
Today Google released a major update to Chrome beta for Mac and Windows, which includes features that have been available in the developer channel for a few weeks. Namely, Chrome beta now comes with encrypted sync for passwords (sync happens through your Google account and can handle passwords, bookmarks, extensions, history and settings on every machine running Chrome), improvements in Javascript speeds and a completely redesigned settings UI.
The new settings sport a much cleaner design organized in three different tabs sitting in a vertical panel on the left. Most of all, the Settings now open as a new Chrome tab and not as a standalone popup window. Buttons have been redesigned as well and now look more in line with other Google products. You can search through settings items with a search field on the left, copy a direct URL to a specific settings page without having to re-navigate manually through menus and tabs.
As for Javascript improvements, the official Google Chrome blog reports:
In our new beta release, JavaScript is as quick as a bunny. With a new speed boost that we previewed in December, Chrome’s JavaScript engine V8 runs compute-intensive JavaScript applications even more quickly than before. In fact, this beta release sports a whopping 66% improvement on the V8 benchmark suite over our current stable release.
The new beta also introduces preliminary support for GPU-accelerated video; Google claims content in full-screen mode should see a decrease of CPU usage “by as much as 80%”. Of course you’d have to be running compatible graphics hardware to see the benefits of GPU acceleration.
You can go download the Chrome beta for Mac here. Check out the demo video of the new settings UI below. Read more
First Screenshots Of Opera for iPad [Update: Video]
At Mobile World Congress 2011 the folks over at Softpedia managed to get their hands on preliminary version of Opera for iPad, and apparently they were impressed by the speed of the browser. Released on the iPhone last year, Opera for iOS raised some doubts over the quality of the app, mainly due to scrolling smoothness and font rendering on pinching and zooming – clearly inferior to Apple’s Mobile Safari. Opera for iPad is set to provide a much better experience on the tablet screen, with an interface that reminds of the desktop version (visual tabs on top) and menus accessible from a huge Opera button in the upper left corner. The developers also confirm the iPad app has been built on the same engine the powers Opera desktop.
The app runs very smooth, and allows for some rapid movement between visual tabs (open pages). Visual tabs allow users to have several web pages open concurrently and quickly switch between them using tabs. Each tab allows users to preview a thumbnail, as well as the page title and icon for each web page they have open.
Where the default touchscreen keyboard provides a less-than-optimal user experience, users can take advantage of Opera’s virtual keyboard to type and edit information without having to leave the page they are viewing.
I’m curious to see this Opera virtual keyboard and see how it compares to the iPad’s default one. No release date was provided by Opera at MWC, but Softpedia speculates we might see the app in the Store as early as next week. It will likely be free, and quickly jump the charts of free software like the iPhone counterpart did.
Check out more screenshots of Opera for iPad below. Read more
How To: Send Any Webpage From iOS To Your Mac Browser
Yesterday, I asked on Twitter if there was an easy way to send a webpage from the iPhone to the Mac. Currently, there are several iPhone apps that allow you to get links from your Mac browser onto the iPhone or iPad: most of them either work with a bookmarklet or browser extensions that, with just one click, let you “push” webpages to iOS. Apps like Handoff (review) and Push The Page even work remotely with the iPhone on a 3G connection. But the other way around, iOS to Mac, is not just as easy to achieve.
In my Twitter poll, many followers recommended AirLink, a web service that, once installed on the Mac and iOS, allows you to send an receive webpages remotely. AirLink, however, requires you to visit a special webpage on your browser to retrieve the link you have shared. What I’m looking for, and what I’m sure others like me have dreaming of for a while, it’s a simple system that allows me to send with a few taps any webpage from the iPhone (on WiFi and 3G) to the Mac, and have a new browser tab open on the desktop. So when I get home, I’ll find the link I shared on iOS ready in my browser. It turns out though, this “simple system” wasn’t so simple to achieve but now, thanks to the help of my friend @MisterJack, I think I’ve got something here that just works and does exactly what I need. Most of all, it requires three taps to be activated. Read more
Portal: A Revolutionary Browser for iPhone
Over the weekends, I usually spend a bit of my free time browsing the App Store and AppShopper, looking for new apps to try on my iPhone and iPad. Sometime I find interesting new things to test; sometimes I find great apps. Other times – but this is a very rare exception – I find really great apps I can’t stop using. This is the case with Portal Browser for iPhone.
I have been trying a lot of alternative browsers for iOS over the past months, as you may have noticed. Thanks to tweaks available in Cydia, I also installed several modifications to make Apple’s Safari a better, faster, more functional browser. Still, testing new browsers from third party developers has become one of my favorite “work hobbies”, as I believe there’s great room for experimentation and innovation in a mobile app to browse the Internet. I do believe we have only scratched the surface with mobile browsers on iOS and Android which, if you think about it, haven’t done much besides porting the desktop experience to a smaller screen. Portal for iPhone is the first step towards a much better approach to mobile browsing, entirely based on touch interactions, features and menus developed with the iPhone in mind. Don’t get me wrong: Safari is an excellent browser. But Portal, which is sold at $1.99 in the App Store, is more than the usual alternative: it’s a completely different take on mobile browsing. Read more