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Posts tagged with "safari"

Terra Is A Powerful, Free Alternative To iPad’s Safari

Currently the #1 free app in the iPad App Store, Terra Web Browser is one of those apps I didn’t know if I should take for a spin at first. There’s no shortage of alternative browsers for iPad: from the excellent iCab Mobile (which I use on a daily basis) to more innovative solutions like Sleipnir, it’s very easy to achieve the perfect browsing experience on the tablet if you think Safari is too limited and you’re willing to spend a few extra bucks. It needs to be mentioned, however, that unofficial browsers don’t get access to the latest Nitro Javascript engine goodness, and there’s no way on iOS to set a default browser other than Safari. Still, many users like me feel like having a (perhaps slower as far as webpage rendering goes) browser companion to Safari is necessary for more complex tasks like saving files locally, or displaying open pages as tabs under the main app’s toolbar. Again, iCab is quite possibly the perfect app if you’re looking for desktop-like interactions on the iPad.

Back to Terra, it comes from the guys behind ReaddleDocs and Calendars, and it’s free. I was a little skeptical at first because I really don’t need another browser on my iPad, but for what it does and for its current price, I have to say Terra is a really good app. All those positive ratings in the App Store can’t be completely wrong, after all. The app’s got a minimal interface with tabs, and you can go fullscreen with the tap of a button. Unlike many, many other apps that try to replicate fullscreen mode with semi-transparent icons on top of a webpage, Terra places a single button in the upper right corner. If you want to focus on something you want to read, hit fullscreen and forget about it. Thanks to the implementation of multitouch gestures, you can switch between open tabs with a three-finger swipe. The top toolbar gives you access to the usual functionalities of an iOS browser, such as address bar, refresh button, Google search, settings, bookmarks and action button. In the settings you can set a passcode for the app, choose to navigate in incognito mode (your cookies and history won’t be saved), change the user agent and modify the selected search engine. You can also import bookmarks from your computers, but you’ll have to use iTunes File Sharing for that. Bookmarks, history and “saved files” are located in a bookmarks popover on the left, but I couldn’t figure out how to export my Chrome’s bookmarks bar to Terra. I guess I’ll have to properly edit my exported .html file to make it work. The action button has got some interesting features as well: you can create a new bookmark, AirPrint a page, save a page locally for offline access, mail a link or forward to Safari.

What most impressed me about Terra, though, is how it handles tabs. Not only the app is stable and can handle dozens of open pages just fine (tested last night, 13 open tabs and none of them reloaded after several minutes of navigation), it’s also got a nice popup menu that will show a webpage’s full title as you tap & hold a tab. If you have a lot of open tabs and you can only see the favicons, that’s quite handy. Switching between tabs is not as fast as iCab, but it’s more than acceptable. The animations are smooth and, overall, the system works well.

Terra for iPad was a surprise. The app is free, but it does a lot of things better than many apps priced at $2.99 and above, without sacrificing its minimal approach to UI and responsiveness. Get it here.

Google Brings “Undo” Bar To Gmail iOS Web App

With a post on the company’s official Mobile blog, Google announced a few minutes ago that they’re bringing the popular “Undo” action to the Gmail web app for iOS and Android devices. You can check out the new feature by opening mail.google.com on your iPhone now.

Sometimes when I’m using Gmail on my phone, I delete a message by mistake or label it incorrectly. Sure I can fish the message out of my Trash or remove the label and apply the correct one, but that takes several steps. Even just a few seconds is usually enough time to catch those annoying mistakes.

The new Undo feature works with labels, archived and deleted messages, as well as moved messages or conversations. Undo appears in the same bottom bar that Google added a few weeks ago to display the status of a mobile connection. It all works fairly well, and the bar stays on screen for a few seconds even if you move to another section of Gmail – like starred items from the Inbox. Google also recently brought Priority Inbox to mobile devices through Safari, although support for Retina Display graphics is still nowhere to be seen.

Apple Releases Safari 5.0.5 and Security Update 2011-002

Together with iOS 4.3.2, Apple also released a security update and a new version of Safari. The updates are available now in Software Update and on Apple’s website. Safari 5.0.5 “includes the latest security updates”, and it’s recommended for all users.

Security Update 2011-002 is recommended for all users and improves the security of Mac OS X. Previous security updates have been incorporated into this security update.

Safari 5.1 Gets “Do Not Track” On OS X Lion

As noted by The Wall Street Journal, Apple has enabled an option in the latest developer build of OS X Lion (Developer Preview 2 was released two weeks ago) to activate “Do Not Track”, an open project by Mozilla to prevent advertisers and other web companies from tracking you online.

Apple Inc. has added a do-not-track privacy tool to a test version of its latest Web browser for keeping peoples’ online activities from being monitored by marketers.

The tool is included within the latest test release of Lion, a new version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system that’s currently available only to developers. The final version of the operating system is scheduled to be released to the public this summer. Mentions of the do-not-track feature in Apple’s Safari browser began to appear recently in online discussion forums and on Twitter.

Already offered by Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4, “Do Not Track” can be enabled or disabled by a user at any time; the service will then tell advertisers, web app or companies to stop tracking your movements online and, in a typical scenario, won’t serve “targeted ads” anymore to the browser. The new option hasn’t been given a standalone preference panel in Safari 5.1 yet, but it’s very likely that there will be one come the final release of Lion this summer. Right now, developers can activate the option from the Develop -> Send Do Not Track HTTP Header.

iBooks Can Now Open EPUB Files Directly→

iBooks Can Now Open EPUB Files Directly

Adam Engst at TidBITS details an important change in how iBooks handles .EPUB files opened directly on iOS:

The practical upshot of this fix is that you can now transfer EPUB files into iBooks far more easily than before, when the only way was to drop them into iTunes and do a USB sync. For individual users, that means you can send yourself an EPUB via email and transfer the attachment to iBooks, and you can also copy EPUB files into Dropbox and use the iOS Dropbox app to send them to iBooks.

Basically, forwarding books bought / downloaded in Mobile Safari to iBooks got a lot easier thanks to the “Open In…” menu. Project Gutenberg books work great with this method.

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Kickstarter Project - Tweet Land: Playing With Reality

I hope you don’t get tired of reading about Kickstarter projects because I enjoy writing posts about very cool ideas. A new project I found today is called Tweet Land. Tweet Land is the idea of six Costa Ricans that believe it’s “possible to reinvent the way video games are created. We believe in opportunity, that’s why we believe in Tweet Land.” Tweet Land is one of the world’s first video game platforms that plays with reality, or “Real Time Gaming.”

What would happen if people’s social networks effected what happens in a video game? If you like the idea of the twittersphere becoming a virtual universe, this is for you.

Video after the break. Read more

Camino’s Future Is Uncertain, Might Switch To WebKit→

Camino’s Future Is Uncertain, Might Switch To WebKit

The developers of Camino, a Mac browser based on Mozilla’s engine, are not sure about what the future holds for their software. Namely, as Mozilla announced the end of Gecko embedding (a technique that allowed Camino’s devs to include Gecko into the Cocoa interface) the team is asking whether for future versions they should switch to (much more supported and widely adopted) WebKit:

As a purely community-based open source project, no one is employed to work on Camino; all Camino developers are volunteers, working on Camino in their spare time, as a labor of love. While maintaining embedding in a fork of Gecko is theoretically possible, we don’t have the manpower for a sustained effort of that kind. A more realistic option would be to port Camino to WebKit, but while this would be much easier to maintain in the future, it would require a large amount of initial work.

For what it’s worth, a very small percentage of MacStories readers use Camino, but we don’t want to see the project be discontinued just yet. I think turning Camino into a WebKit-based lightweight alternative to Safari and Chrome might actually be a great idea.

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Scribd To Switch Millions of Old Embeds Over to HTML5, iOS Devices Rejoice

Social document sharing service Scribd has made a major announcement today: they’re in the process of switching millions of old Flash-based embeds scattered around the web over to the new HTML5 layout they started implementing last year. The conversion process will be automatic, shouldn’t break anything for publishers and website owners and, most of all, will dramatically increase the quality and speed of Scribd embeds.

As Scribd swaps Flash with HTML5 on old document embeds, iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad will benefit from the change: the HTML5 tool developed by Scribd is fully compatible with iOS’ Mobile Safari and now every webpage containing a new or old Scribd document will be perfectly viewable on Apple’s phones and tablets.

When Scribd launched its HTML5 reading platform last summer, they said user engagement with the Scribd experience “surged”. The conversion of 20 million embeds to HTML5 should definitely make things even better for Scribd.

Flickr Improves Slideshows for iPad

With a note on the official company blog posted earlier today, photo sharing Flickr has announced improved compatibility of slideshows for the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser. By taking advantage of the device’s touch interface, you can now tap on a photo to view at a larger size in the lightbox, and browse through photos with a single swipe. The lightbox displays photos on a clean, dark background and you also have options to mark an item as favorite or quickly go back to the standard photostream.

Flickr also offers a native app for the iPhone, available for free in the App Store, which was recently updated with Retina Display support and sharing to Twitter through the flic.kr shortener. [via Daring Fireball]