How to make web form bring up phone keypad on iPhone June 18, 2008

I seemed to recall a web form bringing up the phone keypad (nice big numbers, for when you only want to input numbers) on my iPhone’s web browser, Safari. I looked into it, and found a apple web dev thread (in reverse order, as it’s an e-mail) saying that if you use name=”phone” in the input field, it will bring up the phone pad. That’s great. Sadly, it apparently breaks in iPhone OS 2.0. (Don’t know about zip, as Ben Nadel found, though).

I was looking at Web Forms 2.0, a part of HTML5/WHATWG, and it seems to make all this unnecessary. There’s the ability to specify what a field is, and hopefully the iPhone will adopt it and act better. But non iPhone users might not understand what I mean here…

On the iPhone, in the address book, clicking in the e-mail field (or clicking in the to field in a new e-mail) will produce the keypad you see advertised, but at the bottom there will be buttons for @, ., and .com. This is because these are things that go in an e-mail address, not a space button. On websites, it’s / . and .com. Again, things that actually go in a website address. This is why the input types of email and url are great. date is great too, because the iphone uses… well, it’s like an odometer with rolling wheels, and you can ‘roll’ to Dec 31, 1955 easily. Much easier than typing it in.

In short, Web Forms 2.0 will enable the iPhone “virtual” keypad, and other virtual select options, to be just so much more awesome.

Firefox still sucks on macs June 18, 2008

And I’m not talking about the petty things, which anonymous said was

a level of nit-picking that would get a Trekkie crucified and ridiculed off the net.

I’m talking about the bigger things. Like skipping selects in tab navigation, or the “Would you like to restore your previous session?” box that is inoperable for about 20 seconds while it ‘loads’ the blue question mark circle. Sure, you can click the button, but it won’t register. It won’t even delayed register, you have to just keep clicking it every so often until it accepts your click (and oddly, the button doesn’t seem to depress like a normal button, it acts more like a .png of a button with no on-mousedown attached). I haven’t looked for a bug for this one, but it’s just plain annoying. Oh, and how Firefox goes through a variety of colors in the toolbars while it ‘boots’. It’s like e-paper flashing, it’s just annoying.

My New Hobby: SDK vs Jailbreak apps June 18, 2008

Today Download Squad featured Urbanspoon, so I mentioned StreetFlow (an App Worth Jailbreaking For). I complained about Loopt being unable to write an app for jailbroken phones, which as far as I can see is not that difficult (Twinkle can tell me about where I am, and the accompanying search for restaurants would really narrow down the list of places, making it easier). There’s a great book about it (I own a copy, and I am still “meaning” to read it) called iPhone Open Application Development. I IRC with the author.

I love when I can point out a Jailbroken app that can do something right now. Like, how Band can do the exact same thing on Jailbroken phones as… Band can do on App Store phones. Huh.

(If there’s a good API for giving a site info from the iphone to make it easy to create my own Loopt/BrightKite/FireEagle app for jailbroken phones, that would be good enough, but as far as I can tell no such API exists for BrightKite/Loopt… maybe FireEagle, but I can’t get into that one)

More on the list June 17, 2008

I was just apologized to for her “expecting more than i’m capable of”, and wanting me to “make leaps that I don’t” (i.e. going from “lift” to “separate”).

- in the middle of this I was interrupted by more apologies-

I had in the previous apology asked if she was saying I was retarded, because it seemed to be of that mind. Now it is a “communication issue”, and that she expected too much to think I knew what Pine Sol was when she didn’t explicitly ask for Pine Sol. I responded that I asked her, yesterday, if she knew the difference between Intel and Pentium (an actual job interview question I’d been asked before), and she didn’t. And I said, likewise, she expects me to know the difference between Mop and Glo, Pine Sol, and Tilex? Her response was that I should know what Pine Sol is due to its heavy advertising on television, and I let her know that I really don’t watch television. I haven’t watched TV in… 3 years, at least. All I remember from the Pine Sol commercials was a black woman advertised it, and they had a new scent at one time.

She says we may have a communication problem that needs to be addressed. :-/

Starting the list of pros and cons June 17, 2008

My girlfriend’s name is Sarah.

Yesterday, Sarah sent me out to get some items while she volunteered at the SPCA. One was mop & glo. CostCo didn’t have any, so I read all the other cleaning products, including Pine Sol, to see which is for mopping. None said they were. I grabbed Tilex, because we have tile floors, and it actually came in a big 64 oz container so it was reasonable. Apparently this was not, so we got Pine Sol just hours later, when buying food and other things. So, no harm done. (She wanted me to include this when I made the list, so I’m doing that.)

Today Sarah got her arm caught in her birds cage, past the elbow. In a part where the bars don’t detach. So, she said “lift it, and so I did, and she went “OW”, because apparently by “lift” she actually meant “hold down the bottom bar, and pull up the top bar, to make room to remove the arm”. She bitched at me, and I told her that if she asks for help again I will not, since apparently doing what she says is not what she wants. She then said something about asking me to do something was like asking a 5 year old, simply because I took her word for it when she said to “lift”.

She does get mad at me quite a lot simply for doing as she asks, so I’m finally starting the list.

The American Dad After School Special June 15, 2008

Steve’s Crush, Stanorexia, Intervention, Inside Out.

I’m not so sure I want to claim my ID June 14, 2008

Jeez, man. I’m a real jerk on this website. I’m apparently really not that bad in person, several “internet friends” have said so. Same for on Skype, I’m a nice to talk to fellow. So why would I want to go to claimid and say, hey, this is me, this is me, this is also me. I want to start a real blog about similar stuff that I write about here, except do it professionally. I don’t know if I’ll even continue this site that nobody cares about, maybe just to riff on stuff on the side. Anyway, it’s absolutely nuts to think that most people are going to want to claim their id. Maybe some frat boys or sorority girls who think that everyone needs to know how awesome they are and then get ‘creeped out’ when someone shows them that they just revealed everything someone would need to know to steal their identity (including their home address), but while I think it’s a very noble idea indeed (like XFN is), it’s just not going to work the way we are today.

I would love if people could, for example, join okcupid with the express intent of making friends. Myspace isn’t there to make friends. Facebook definitely isn’t, most people think you’re creepy if they don’t already know you in real life. What are we so stuck up on? Why are we so scared of other people? Has the media done this to us, made us afraid to say hello? Sure, I’ll probably not want to be friends with everyone, I’m not interested in sports and so I’d probably piss off some jock if I said hello and he assumed that meant I was “queer” or “a faggot”. Likewise, if I say hello to a girl I am quite liable to piss off her boyfriend, which has happened in the past. Guys can’t be friends with girls? Oh well.

In short: I love the dream of brightkite, dodgeball, and the like. Making friends merely by social networks? “Hey, Jill is nearby, wanna go say hello and not do something creepy like pre-arranging a meeting?” That’s awesome! People in real life NEED interest tagging, the idea that my phone might tell me that a person nearby shares similar interests with me and we’d probably have a lot to talk about simply makes me excited about a future where the shyness barrier doesn’t apply! But right now, that looks like a distant distant future. Hell, I can’t tell Delicious Library to sync with LibraryThing, GoodReads, OR Shelfari. What chance do I have of a real-life mobile social network on the fly?

Ugh. This post sucks. What an awful rant.

Breaking the Apple NDA here June 10, 2008

There’s a NDA you get to sign when you sign up to become an apple iphone developer. Since I didn’t, I’m breaking nothing.

You are disallowed from writing apps for jailbroken iPhones when you pay the $99 fee. That’s why people who are working on official apps are unable to port them to the jailbroken Installer.app ‘free app store’. Pretty lame of Apple, huh? It’s like forbidding people from creating apps that work on 10.4.

iPhone headset and headphones combined June 9, 2008

Well, I’d personally just call it a headset or stereo headset like they have for computers, but apparently phone headsets are mono.

A friend was wondering if he could somehow make a modified version of the Logitech Bluetooth Headphone for MP3, which basically allows one to turn a headphone jack into an A2DP jack. If he could use the 3 ring (microphone added) version, and add a mic to the headset, the lack of A2DP wouldn’t matter. (Apparently nokia uses the same prongs?)

But nobody’s done it yet. WTF. Technically the bluetooth headphone for mp3 could be plugged into the Shure iPhone Headset Adapter, but it only gets the job halfway done unless it’s some really great mic.

Meh.

Firefox 3: A Safari User’s Review, reviewed June 3, 2008

I’m sometimes ashamed to admit that I subscribe to the RSS feed for MacApper. Originally, they highlighted some neat new mac apps. Now they highlight whatever they’re advertising. I could be missing something, sure, but if a free alternative to a product exists you surely won’t find them mentioning that.

Onto the ignorance. I just picked up Firefox 3: A Safari User’s Review by Peter Craddock. He obviously notices the huge back button, and while I thought most mac users read Daring Fireball (and thus would have caught his review, which mentions the small toolbar buttons fix. Peter thinks this is just a ‘problem’ and that it cannot be fixed.

Next he notices the awesomebar, but he really doesn’t. It’s like he just started Firefox 3, let it import his Firefox 2 data, and then wrote a review based upon cursory glances. He calls it “the “recent use & favourites” drop-down menu”, but doesn’t even notice it’s built in search capabilities (it will search your recent history, so if you type ‘dar’ and you went to daring fireball recently, it’ll be ’suggested’, there’s a demo video at the BBC).

On the find bar, which he finds disconcerting, is that it doesn’t work exactly like Safari. I actually agree, I wouldn’t mind some functionality to do this, but then again, I wouldn’t want it to work exactly like Internet Explorer for Windows users. I looked deeper into this expecting that there simply HAD to be a bug asking for Safari 3 (I don’t think this was in Safari 2) type functionality, so I searched for ALL find bar bugs on mac and found nothing even close. So Peter: feel free to file a request for enhancement bug. I filled out some of the boxes for you. (If you have to sign up first, just come back and click my link, it SHOULD work. Let me know the bug number in the comments when you create it!)

I don’t have issues with much of the other stuff except the hatred for Larry UI. It’s for EV, is a major benefit for phishing protection, etc. I guess they could put the ‘welcome’ page on a https site for example purposes. But, go to paypal.com, and you’ll see the certificate issuer and verification that it’s really paypal. Good stuff.

(I ended up taking too long to get this posted, I was going to post it almost immediately after the post I’m reviewing, but had trouble finding the info on he Larry UI. I hate not citing, so I saved a draft then never came back to it. Sorry )