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Posts tagged with "iPad"

Grazing: My New Favorite iPad Browser

I feel bad writing this. No, let me rephrase: I love when facts prove me wrong. I especially love when third party developers of iPad applications prove me wrong. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece called “Your Alternative iPad Browser Sucks” in which I basically stated that every alternative browser I had tried on the iPad couldn’t keep up with the elegance and powerful engine of Safari. I still stand by that statement: 3rd party developers are not Apple and I’m pretty sure Safari has got some exclusive features buried deep down in the code engine (such as memory management) which 3rd party devs have not access to.

What’s great now is that I found an alternative that doesn’t suck. Actually, it’s a beautiful, powerful and feature-rich app for iPad called Grazing that has been sitting on my homescreen for a week now. Grazing is now my favorite alternative browser for iPad. Read more

Your Alternative iPad Browser Sucks

I tried many alternative browsers on my iPad. So many, in fact, that I can’t even remember the last time I deleted one. Maybe it was Super Prober, or Atomic Browser. I really can’t remember. My problem with you, developers of alternative browsers, is that you’re not Apple. You’re not even close to being able to implement features and think - just think - that they could work better than Safari’s.

I’ve seen many bloggers and people I follow on Twitter claim that they found a browser better than Safari. In the past months I read dozens of articles about “I ditched Safari for Atomic Browser” or “I needed tabs so I installed this on my iPad”. Early and quick excitement is bad for the internet:  your words will stay there for the months to come as a living sign of your past ramblings. You said you ditched Safari, and now your homescreen.me profile lacks any alternative.

Step your game up, people. You don’t need to write about alternatives, because they all suck.

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Super Prober: Sort Of Like Chrome for iPad, Gone Wrong

Two years of App Store and I still haven’t found a decent alternative to Mobile Safari. Something I could keep on my homescreen for more than 2 days. The reason is obvious: you are not Apple. Developing a browser is not like building a Twitter client: we’re talking about the primary tool to access the web here. And if Apple ships an almost state-of-the-art mobile browser by default, well then - sorry if I don’t trust you.

Mobile Safari is a simple application that lets you navigate the web, we call it “browser”. Developing a browser for a cellphone is a difficult task: you don’t have windows, you don’t have tabs, favicons don’t make sense on a small screen. Also, the elegant interface of the iPhone makes it really hard to implement features seen in desktop browser without looking awkward.  Have you seen Opera Mini? Exactly.

But the iPad is magical, right? It’s got a larger display, it’s a tablet, you can put your hands on it! Let’s develop a full-featured browser for the iPad! Not so fast, cowboy. For as much as the iPad is indeed bigger and more suitable to richer applications, take a second look at what Apple offers: Safari for the iPad is, again, simple. Sure, it has those beautiful thumbnail previews for open tabs. Sure, there’s a bookmark bar. Still, it doesn’t overwhelm you with dozens of features that would probably look cool in the App Store description page, but kill usability. Mercury Browser, I’m looking at you.

It turns out, though, someone decided to develop some kind of Chrome-like browser for the iPad and call it Super Prober. I went into the App Store and bought it. Here’s what happened.

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How Safari on iPad Should Have Been [Concept]

I browse a lot of websites with my iPad. At the end of each day, I sit down, relax and open my favorite websites using Safari. Could Safari on the tablet be better though? Yes. If you look closer, Safari on iPad is pretty similar to the desktop version: you have buttons, a chrome, a standard way of interacting with webpages.

So the Arc90 guys thought about this and came up with a genius concept of how Safari on the iPad should have been like.

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iFiles: File Manager With A Cloud Workflow for iPad

The iPad has no file browser. There’s no way to aggregate online services like Dropbox and MobileMe in one place by default. The iPad has no visible file structure to let users create folders, move files around, create new files in specific locations.

Still, is it enough to not come up with an app that overrides Apple’s limitations and allows you to build your own file browser? An app that is capable of collecting online services in a single interface, enabling you to download files from the internet and achieve a pretty good cloud-based workflow?

Actually, there are some apps with these features in the App Store, and I’ve tried many of them. Air Sharing HD is probably one of the best around, at least I used to believe until I stumbled upon the first release of iFiles for iPad.

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Life Web Browser: Yet Another Alternative to Safari?

So many developers have tried to build alternative browsers for the iPhone on top of Webkit. See, Apple gives you the tools to create your own customized browser, and I’m not blaming them for the attempt. I’m blaming them for the experience they failed to achieve, developing alternatives just for the sake of it. And people, the average App Store users, seem to appreciate this trend, perhaps because they’re willing to accept every single alternative some devs give them. Look at the success of Opera Mini for iPhone, and look at how bad it is when you compare it to Apple’s MobileSafari.

What I’m trying to say is, you don’t mess with MobileSafari. Sure you can try to add thousands of features, and you can also promote your app by saying that it does whatever MobileSafari doesn’t. Seriously, it’s fine. But you can’t really think someone won’t notice and eventually talk about your crap. That’s why we usually avoid to talk about these “alternative browsers” on MacStories.

Developers are now realizing that, with 2 million iPads out there, the tablet might indeed be a profitable market for “alternatives”. I won’t go into all the details, but just so you know - this thing has been the top paid iPad app for days. Is it possible to develop a decent alternative to Safari for iPad?

Let’s look for the answer in Life.

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