Posts tagged with "browser"

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

Google Rolling Out “Instant Previews” for iOS Devices

In the past months, Google has been very busy improving the experience of iOS users on products like Gmail, Google Docs and the Google homepage: Google Docs editing came to Mobile Safari, then Google launched Instant for Mobile, which similarly to the desktop lets you see search results as you type. Most recently, Google has enabled Cloud Print support for Gmail in iOS Safari and improved the mobile weather widget on its homepage.

As noted by 9to5mac, Google has also begun testing a new feature for iOS browsers (and Android as well, we guess) which hasn’t been officially announced yet but was spotted by some users. Google “Instant Previews” will let you have a quick preview of a website by tapping on the magnifying glass icon – again, just like on desktop browsers you get a preview inside a popup menu on google.com. On iOS though, it looks like the feature will really be redesigned to sport a much better touch interaction: previews will open in a dedicated window that reminds of Safari’s tabs and you can flick through them to quickly preview search results.

It is unclear at this moment whether the feature is being tested among some users in the United States or worldwide, and when Google plans to launch it or at least announce it.

Tapu: iPad Browser That Looks Like Chrome, Plugs Into Facebook

Looking for great alternatives to Mobile Safari, I have stumbled upon a lot browsers for the iPad. Some of them are really nice, like Grazing and Browser+; some them are the result of strange experiments gone terribly wrong, like Super Prober. Overall, the trend amongst developers seem to be that of trying to reinvent Safari by adding features over features that, without good software engineering and quality control, may end up cluttering an app, making everything barely usable. It happened with many browsers I have tested so far. Read more

Gmail Notifications Come To The Desktop with Chrome

A few minutes ago Google rolled out a new feature for Gmail and Chrome users: native Gmail notifications. These notifications are only available to Google Chrome users for now, and they’re very similar to Growl in the way they appear on your computer on top of any window you’re currently on. Unlike Growl, though, it all runs natively within Chrome and Gmail.

These notifications, however, seem to be in need of some serious tweaking. Testing them briefly, I’ve noticed that they stick on the desktop, there’s no timeout option (Growl offers this functionality in its preferences) and they’re definitely slower then Growl associated to, say, Mailplane. Also, they don’t work in Safari and Firefox – just Chrome. They work both with new email messages, new “important” messages (in Priority Inbox) and IMs.

To activate Gmail notifications, head over your inbox, then Settings and enable as you can see in the screenshot below.

Google Improves Weather Results on Mobile Safari

There is no shortage of weather apps on the iPhone, from the most professional ones to beautiful user-friendly software like Outside, but Google thinks you should just head over google.com and check out their new, mobile-optimized weather forecast view. The feature, which should work both on iOS and Android phones, will be activated once you open google.com on your browser and search for “weather”. The browser will ask you to give location permissions to Google, and you’ll be presented this neat search result page with fancy graphics for your location’s weather on top of everything. Fortunately, you can also enter a location manually inside a dropdown menu (Google got my location wrong, and I don’t know why).

The information displayed on screen are pretty useful and well designed. Google even bothered to add a slider that flicks through hourly updates and changes the background gradient from darker (night) to lighter blue (day). You can visualize temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit degrees, check on humidity and wind strength.

Well done, Google. We look forward to better Twitter integration in your search results now.

Skyfire Makes Another Million With iPad App

Remember Skyfire? The alternative browser for the iPhone that comes with a lot of extra functionalities, including the possibility to play Flash videos through remote proxy servers that transcode Flash content to iOS-optimized video. The iPhone app was insanely successful as it managed to pull in a million dollars in just three days in the App Store. The app has also been sitting on top of the iPhone charts for weeks now.

In case you didn’t notice, right ahead of Christmas the Skyfire team released an iPad version of the app, priced at $4.99. It was good timing and a clever move as the App Store was about to shut down for developers and apps that climbed the charts in those days gained thousands of downloads. Skyfire for iPad is no exception: three weeks into the App Store, another $1 million in the developers’ hands – although 30% will go to Apple. That’s around $700,000 in revenue so far, as MobileCrunch reports.

Skyfire for iPad is available here. It’s a cool browser, but I’m still not sure what’s the real need of Flash compatibility for videos on iOS devices. Apparently though, people bought it. And that should be enough for the developers. Read more

iTunes To Become Part Of Safari? We Don’t Believe It

According to website Three Guys and a Podcast, Apple has been working on a major redesign of its iTunes software that will see the music manager / app organizer / media hub become part of Safari. The new system is rumored to be announced at Apple’s music event that should take place (as every year) in September and will be the evolution of Apple’s original plans during the lala acquisition.

Apple may be preparing a massive move that will propel Safari from niche browser to market leader. The move to merge Safari and iTunes into one software solution appears long in the works, which may arrive this fall at Apple’s usual iPod special event.

It is believed that Safari will be the only browser able to access iTunes, as iTunes is built into the browser itself. “Moving iTunes organizational side-bar into Safari isn’t a monumental task” claimed a source, adding “Safari would skyrocket in use as a result of integrating the software titles together.

Read more

Browser+ for iPad Aims To Reinvent Safari

I have been trying a lot of alternative browsers for the iPad over the past months. Since my good friend @kenyarmosh suggested me to give a spin to iCab Mobile (for iPhone and iPad), my interest for well-crafted, feature rich and innovative third-party browsers reached a new level. And while I’m still digging into all the features offered by iCab (which is, without a doubt, the most powerful alternative to Apple’s default browser), I have also been testing other simpler, minimal browsers that aim at offering a different take on browsing the Internet on the tablet.

Browser+ HD for iPad, in spite of its not-so-appealing name, is the freshest and simplest browser I have found in the App Store so far. What Browser+ does is simple: it takes standard elements of web browsing such as tabs, address bar and history and completely re-imagines them as if they were built from scratch for the iPad. Pretty much like Flipboard did for web content that has to be consumed on a tablet’s screen. Browser+, sold at $0.99 in the App Store, doesn’t come with all the functionalities found in Apple’s Safari or iCab Mobile, but what’s there has been recreated to fit better on the iPad. Read more