Obvious Ideas » Web Apps http://www.arikfr.com/blog From the desk of a Software Developer Mon, 05 Sep 2011 08:05:33 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 How To Try Gmail For iPad From Your Mac or PC http://www.arikfr.com/blog/how-to-try-gmail-for-ipad-from-your-mac-or-pc.html http://www.arikfr.com/blog/how-to-try-gmail-for-ipad-from-your-mac-or-pc.html#comments Sun, 04 Apr 2010 05:29:13 +0000 Arik http://www.arikfr.com/blog/?p=117 Continue reading →]]> Read about Gmail’s version for the iPad? Curious to try it yourself? Don’t have an iPad? No worries.

All you need to do is to change the user-agent string of your browser to be the same as the iPad Safari:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10

I’ve done it with Safari on my Mac with the developers tools enabled (after enabling the developers tools, go to Develop->User Agent menu and pick other). If you have other browser/OS, just google “[your browser] change user agent string”, pick the best result and follow the instructions.

Once you done with changing the user agent string, surf to gmail.com and enjoy. The iPad UI is less useful on a non touch screen, but it’s interesting to play with and see Gmail in two columns.

Obviously, this trick will work with most (all?) other iPad web apps.

]]> http://www.arikfr.com/blog/how-to-try-gmail-for-ipad-from-your-mac-or-pc.html/feed 0 Launching Lite Apps – the fastest way to tweet or email from the iPhone http://www.arikfr.com/blog/liteapps-released.html http://www.arikfr.com/blog/liteapps-released.html#comments Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:50:27 +0000 Arik http://www.arikfr.com/blog/launching-lite-apps-%e2%80%93-the-fastest-way-to-tweet-or-email-from-the-iphone.html Continue reading →]]> Ever since I got my iPhone, there was this thing that was really frustrating for me – the time it takes to write a single tweet or compose a single email. While the Mail.app on the iPhone is quite fast, it sometimes annoys me that if I just want to send a quick email I have to go through the inbox and it checks for new mail in the process.

I guess part of the problem is the fact that I’m still using the first generation iPhone, which is slow. But considering the fact that I’m not alone with an old iPhone, I thought that a solution should be available or made. For the tweeting part of the problem I found Twii – a simple app whose all purpose is to compose tweets. It’s an OK solution, but I don’t like that it doesn’t use OAuth and my tweets appear as they were tweeted from “API” (usually a sign for spammers).

So I decided that if there’s no reasonable solution for the problem, I should create one. As I already wanted to try the iPhone SDK, so this two small apps seemed to be good candidates for a first project. I started poking around with XCode and Objective-C, but never had the time to really build this apps. Besides the lack of time issue, the fact that I needed to wait for the whole AppStore approval process was a big turn off.

And then it hit me – why should I waste my time on ObjectiveC and the AppStore, when what I want to create is so simple? I did a few experiments and realized that it is possible to create a good user experience with web apps on the iPhone (HTML 5 FTW!). So instead of poking around with XCode and Objective-C, I started poking around with jQTouch.

Today I finally had the time to wrap everything up in a reasonable package. Now after few hours of coding and mainly designing (and without waiting for the AppStore gods to approve my apps), I invite you to try out my first LiteApps – LiteTweet and LiteMail.

This is a very preliminary release of the apps, and I really look forward for your feedback and ideas on this. There’s a lot to improve – mainly I want to improve the startup time for this apps, as this is the most important feature.

Please be tolerant to bugs, security issues and other bizzare stuff. Also, please report them to me :) I’m available on Twitter or email.

]]> http://www.arikfr.com/blog/liteapps-released.html/feed 0 Maybe It’s OK That WordPress Kill Your CPU http://www.arikfr.com/blog/maybe-its-ok-that-wordpress-kill-your-cpu.html http://www.arikfr.com/blog/maybe-its-ok-that-wordpress-kill-your-cpu.html#comments Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:38:24 +0000 Arik http://www.arikfr.com/blog/maybe-its-ok-that-wordpress-kill-your-cpu.html Continue reading →]]> Jeff Atwood writes about WordPress performance. Quite astonishing – it appears to be that if your blog is medium sized (or bigger) you must install WP-Cache in order it will survive traffic peaks and doesn’t kill your server.

When I read it, my first though was: “too bad they though that fancy control panel is more important the performance.”, but then I though of something else – maybe avoiding performance issues and dealing with other stuff before that, that’s more user targeted thinking of features: most WordPress users are small bloggers (like me (-:) and therefore they need better UI experience than caching, while the big fish can handle the extra hassle of installing WP-Cache or paying for a dedicated server.

Think of that next time you decide which feature to implement first. Remmeber – listen to your users, not your engineers :-)

Arik

]]> http://www.arikfr.com/blog/maybe-its-ok-that-wordpress-kill-your-cpu.html/feed 1 Zooomr? Wait for Mark III! http://www.arikfr.com/blog/zooomr-i-think-i-will-stick-with-flickr.html http://www.arikfr.com/blog/zooomr-i-think-i-will-stick-with-flickr.html#comments Fri, 29 Dec 2006 19:44:40 +0000 Arik http://www.arikfr.com/blog/zooomr-i-think-i-will-stick-with-flickr.html Continue reading →]]> zooomr_logo_on333_yellow

I recommend you reading Raoul Pop’s review of Zooomr, as it is more extensive and comprehensive.

While browsing Alex King’s blog I’ve stumbled upon a post mentioning that Zooomr is giving away pro account to any blogger who will blog about them, and add a photo from Zooomr to that post. While Flickr pro account costs 25$ receiving something similar for free sounded inviting.


So I’ve registered to Zooomr. The registration is easy because they use OpenID (more on OpenID next week). Except of the blessed use of OpenID, I was disappointed of Zooomr – their UI is unpleasent to use, there’s no sets (only autosets that group images by tags) and overall feeling wasn’t good as using Flickr. Also there is no API, which means no cool widgets or mashups such as we’ve with Flickr.

zoomr

I couldn’t find any information on their website about the Pro account or how it differentiate from the standard account.

Update: I’ve just been upgraded to a Pro account. The only difference as I see it is that the limit has grown from 100MB to 4GB.

I will apply for the Pro account, just to keep an eye on them in order to see how they evolve – it’s beta after all, and they do have some potential. Maybe I will use their services to store the blog images and Flickr as my personal images storage…

What did you think of Zooomr?

Arik

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