Offline Storage with Safari (Offline iPhone Webapps)

Resources can have 3 states

You can think of every resource as being assigned one of the following 3 states by Safari based on your manifest: missing, cached, online. Cached resources are stored in the Safari store; Safari can display cached resources when offline. Online resources will be retrieved from the server when offline (sometimes also called white listed). Finally missing means that the resource is not in the cache and that Safari won't try to get it from the cache when offline, so loading that resource will fail.

How states are assigned

If the HTML links to a manifest, by default the HTML is cached and all the other resources are missing. So you need to include every resource used by your page in the manifest to either tell Safari that it can be cached (images, CSS...), or that it should need to establish a connection to a server (end-points for Ajax requests).

Checking the state of resources

To see what state Safari assigned to your resources, open the Web Inspector, go to the Resources tab, and switch to the view by Time. Resources that are missing will show in gray. It is harder to see the difference between resources that are cached and online. Most likely you'll notice that online resources take a longer time, and of course you can check your server log to see if a resource is loaded as you reload the page. For missing resources, you can also open the Activity window (from the Window menu); Safari will show a message in red "The URL can't be shown" next to missing resources.

Checking if caching is happening

You can check if any caching at all is happening by looking at the value of window.applicationCache.status. In general the value will be 0 (UNCACHED) if the page isn't cached and 1 (IDLE) if it is.

The text/cache-manifest content type

What they the spec says about the text/cache-manifest content type isn't a joke ;). Make sure that your manifest is served with the appropriate content type, or it will be ignored.

Same site policy for the manifest

You need to serve the manifest from the same site from which the page is served. If you link to a manifest on another server, Safari will just ignore it. In the manifest itself, you can however list resources loaded from other sites that you would like to be cached, for instance libraries you load from the Google CDN.

iPhone SDK and the Single Application Policy

Apple announced last week that you will be able to run only one application at a time on the iPhone. This means you won't be able to have applications that run in the background, maybe keep a connection open to a server and notify you when appropriate.

I see really two classes of applications that will be in great demand:

1. Games. Obviously.
2. Push applications.

By push applications, I mean applications that always have the latest information for you ready to use. (That information can be pushed through a connection which is left open, or the application can poll the server from time to time to download the latest information is almost an implementation detail as far as this discussion is concerned.)

Consider these examples:

• An IM client;
• A Twitter client that notifies you when one of your friends have posted a new message;
• A Podcast application that downloads shows over the air (say at 3 in the morning, so it doesn't bother anyone);
• A New York Times reader, which always have pre-downloaded for you all the latest articles from the New York Times;
• A Skype client, which notifies you when someone is calling you.
  

It looks like Apple's policy will prevent developers from creating this type of applications. Talk about a missed opportunity!

More Features not Announced and the $20 Upgrade

Listening to MacBreak Weekly's Keynote Analysis made me realize how many iPhone features were not announced at the keynote. Even some that we expected to have in the iPhone when it first came out, as most modern phone have those capabilities:

• Take video video clips
  
• Send and receive multimedia messages (attaching photos and video clips)

Of interest was the $20 upgrade for the iPod touch. Andy noted, somewhat sarcastically, that this must be a way for Apple to test their upcoming iPhone/iPod touch software store accessible though iTunes.

It could also be the beginning a a trend for Apple: I have been wondering how Apple would deal with software updates to the iPhone. Should they make the updates available only on the latest iPhones, or should they make them also available for free for older iPhones? Maybe Apple will pick a way which is somewhere in the middle: make the updates available to existing iPhone, but for a charge. This is somehow similar to what Apple is doing with new releases of Mac OS X.

Steve Jobs Keynote: What Apple Did Not Announced

This morning, the MacBook air was the big thing: a super-portable laptop, both cool and expensive. It is innovative, but maybe not as much as the "tablet iPod touch" some imagined (like an iPod touch, but with a much larger work surface).

For those of us interested in the iPhone, Steve's keynote this morning was almost a non-event. We had a minor upgrade to the iPhone software; really nothing earth shattering. I (any many others) expected Apple to announce at least a couple of items from the list below:

• A new 3G iPhone to be released in June, maybe also equipped with a GPS and tactile feedback
  
• A new Apple Bluetooth stereo headset which you can use with the iPhone (A2DP)
• A new ultra-small Bluetooth keyboard for the iPhone (or maybe this one is more wishful thinking on my part than a prediction)
  
• Some of the new iPhone applications created by vendors who go an early access to the iPhone development kit

I am not sure that we tend to underestimate what technologies can do in the long term, as Ray would argue, but for sure we overestimate what they can do in the short term.

iPhone Geek Tax

Bill Maher called those additional $200 that we paid for getting the iPhone before the price drop the geek tax. This is so appropriate; I love it! Watch the video of Bill's diatribe (38 seconds).

And if you want to hear more of Bill, subscribe to the podcast of his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher, which is so far free to download over at HBO.

Jott, Hold that Thought for Me

I started using Jott a while ago and then stopped using it as I was listening more and more Podcast in my car. Then Erik started using the service, which reminded me how great Jott was. Let me tell you quickly how it works:

• You create an account for yourself for free on jott.com. As part of the registration process, you need to tell them about your phone number.
• Then, you just call their free 866 number from your phone and leave a message. (Jott knows who are thanks to caller id.) Soon after, you will receive an email with the text of the your message.

Yes, Jott does voice recognition for you. If you wish, you can also listen to the audio of your message. What is amazing is that their voice recognition works stunningly well, without training. It works much better than any software I had tried in the past. What amazing voice recognition technology is Jott using? Humans! According to their FAQ:

We use a combination of machine and human transcription to convert your voice to text.

Of course, this raises concerns about privacy. There is a good chance that a human listens to every message you leave. This is one more reason for not leaving confidential information in your messages. Again, from the Jott FAQ:

Our transcribers have no way of associating your personally identifiable information with the recorded jotts they are transcribing (unless, of course, you make that information part of the recording). They operate in a “clean” environment that is also used for transcribing sensitive medical dictations, with no tools or other equipment that would allow them to record or make use of this information.

Tactile Feedback coming to the iPhone?

Nokia started talking about tactile feedback a while ago, and they now have running demos:

Don’t be fooled by simple vibrational imitations folks, this is the real McCoy – you press a key on the screen, and it clicks under your finger with exactly the same sort of fingertip feedback as if you’d pressed a conventional keyboard key.

People have a lot of features in mind for the iPhone v2, but tactile feedback doesn't seem to be on the top of most people's list. But I bet it is for Apple.

Tactile feedback would be a great improvement to the soft keyboard. When I first started using the iPhone, one of the first thing I did was to disable the keyboard sounds. But then, months later, I found that those little sounds made a big difference: they provide some feedback as to when the key is pressed. The sounds somewhat compensates the lack of tactile feedback. Of course, real tactile feedback would be better, as for one the sound is not always easy to hear. Would even a soft keyboard with tactile feedback would become as good as a real keyboard? Is this the beginning of the end for keyboards as they are today?

Thanks Erik for your comment to my earlier post Nokia Touch is on the way which triggered this post.

Nokia Touch is on the way

We knew it would be coming, and here it is: Nokia announces S60 Touch.

S60 touch user interface comes with support for tactile feedback, which means that there is a physical pulse and feedback when the user taps on the screen.

Nokia's press release is quite dry, as you would expect, so head directly to their concept video.

Do-Dos and Notes Synchronization on the iPhone

When you design a product, hardware or software, making it simple and elegant often equates to making the right choices for the user, and focusing on providing a great experience out of the box. Contrast this with proving many options, considering each one is as good to the next, and letting the user choose.

Apple strives to be on the side of simplicity and elegance. Before Leopard was released, everyone thought that do-dos and notes synchronization would come to the iPhone with the new release of Leopard, because the new mail application in Leopard has those features. But this hasn't happened so far. Synchronization with Mail is now possible on the Mac side, but what about Windows? Apple can't ignore Windows. Can they provide a different, inconsistent behavior on Windows? Most likely they don't want to? Could Apple be planning something as wild as a version of their Mail application for Windows?

Some iPhone Love

I seems I have been fairly critical of the iPhone in the past. Most of my comments have triggered by the disconnect between what the iPhone is today, and what it could have been. But don't get me wrong: I do consider the iPhone to be a fantastic device. And I do even more so today. Let me tell you why.

As you might have noticed by the lack of traffic here, I was lucky enough to be on vacation last week (more on this later!). I was traveling without my laptop but not without my iPhone. And for a whole week I have been have able to keep up with my email and blog reading, all from the iPhone. Even if have been using the iPhone for a few months now, I have been struck by 2 things:

1. After one week of writing all my email on the iPhone I became much faster with the iPhone soft keyboard. I have been using a two-finger technique, with the two thumbs doing the typing and the rest of the fingers holding the phone. I feel that I am now as fast with the iPhone as I used to be with my Nokia E62, a Blackberry type of device that comes with a full keyboard. This is something I never expected to be possible with the iPhone soft keyboard.
2. If your email server provides an IMAP access (which is something new for us Gmail users), then the iPhone mail application works quite well. I have been surprised by how well it works while offline (think: in an airplane): it will just transparently send all the commands to the server next time you have a connection. It also can prefetch the body of the messages, so you can read your email or catch up with mailing lists while offline. Let me tell you: I've done plenty of email on those planes!

And of course, but this is nothing new, Safari is a blast. It is just much better than everything else I have seen on any other phone. Overall, the iPhone has been a very solid device, and I am not convinced that any other phone would have done a better job.

iPhone Missing Features, Hardware, and Software

Most of the problems and lacking features with the iPhone can be entirely solved with software. Except for a real keyboard, there isn't much that I really miss when it comes to the iPhone hardware. The question is: as Apple fixes their software and adds new features, will new versions of the software run on old iPhones after new models come out?

This is how it is with Mac OS X. Doing the same for a phone would be quite a shift in the industry, and if one company can do it, it will have to be Apple. But will they have the guts to make a move that can hurt their sales of new iPhones models in the short term to make their platform stronger?

The 5 Things the iPhone Can't Do

When switching from a Nokia E62 to an iPhone, I have been first struck by how elegant the iPhone is. Then I've been hit by all the things that I was doing on the Nokia and that I couldn't do anymore with the iPhone.

To make it short, I'll just go through the top 5 things I can't do anymore on the iPhone:

1. Make phone calls - When at home, I used to make almost all my calls with my cell phone. The Nokia E62 as well as its predecessor worked like a charm, also on the AT&T network. With the iPhone, calls are often breaking up and the iPhone occasionally tells me that my calls can't me made in the first place. So now I avoid making calls on the iPhone from home.
   
2. Use the great Gmail Mobile application (there is a Java as well as a native Symbian version). It is super-fast, both using very little bandwidth, but also making easy to navigate through email thanks to a number of keyboard shortcuts.
3. Get an Internet connection from my laptop through Bluetooth/GPRS. This wasn't very fast, but it was super-convenient (think: at the airport or during that meeting at a company that doesn't have open Internet connections).
4. Transfer media to the phone wirelessly. I was doing that through Bluetooth. The iPhone has Bluetooth; it has WiFi; but you need to connect it with a cable to your laptop to transfer files.
5. Download podcasts directly from the phone. Nokia even provides an application for you to do that: Nokia Podcasting. With the iPhone, I need to download podcasts from my laptop, connect the phone to the laptop with a cable, and then transfer the podcasts through iTunes.

The iPhone PDF Viewer

Not much has been said about the PDF viewer on the iPhone. Most of the time, it is treated as just a bullet point in a feature list: "oh yes, and you can also view PDF attached to emails".

This is too bad because the PDF viewer is one of the best features of the phone. I have been using multiple PDF viewers running on S60 (the Nokia platform based on Symbian), including one from Adobe. None of those comes close to the iPhone PDF viewer. My only beef with it is that you can't save PDF files on the phone for off-line viewing. Why Apple doesn't make it easy for us to read those PDF we received earlier while on a plane?

The iPhone and the Cow

Is it ethical (or even legal) for Apple to brick your unlocked iPhone when you install the latest iPhone firmware update? Leo Laporte made a great argument that it isn't, using the cow analogy. Vincent Ferrari of the Apple Phone Show replied saying the analogy is flawed, and changed it around to show that what Apple did is perfectly legitimate. Now before I continue, you might want to check their arguments:

• Leo's iPhone is a cow
• Vincent's but...

I agree with Vincent: Leo's analogy is not completely accurate. But Vincent doesn't go all the way t0 the logical conclusion that should come out of his analogy.

So, you bought a cow from Apple, agreeing that each month you will also feed the cow some special food approved by Apple. Then at some point you decide to buy cow food from another provider, because that other food has some benefits to you. You own the cow; it is your right to feed whatever food you want to the cow. Until this point everyone agrees, and everything is good. Now Apple comes up with a special free shot that will make your cow produce more milk. You decide to give that shot to the cow, then cow dies. Apple says: too bad, you shouldn't have given non-Apple-approved food to the cow in the first place.

Who is responsible for the death of the cow? Granted, Apple is not entirely responsible, because you knew that there was risk of the cow dying when you gave that shot, and you still decided to go ahead.

To me the question is one of intent: did Apple purposely design the shot so it would kill cows fed with food that wasn't approved by Apple? If it was possible for Apple to take some simple steps to ensure that the shot isn't deadly to cows fed with food not approved by Apple, did Apple avoid taking those steps? If the answer is the answer is yes to any of those question, then what Apple did is not ethical, and maybe even illegal.

iPhone: Not convinced by that keyboard yet

I switched to an iPhone just over 3 weeks ago. My previous phone was a Nokia E62. I would have a lot of good and bad things to say about that Nokia, but for sure one of the good things was its full QWERTY keyboard. I didn't get a chance to compare it to one of those Blackberry keyboards, but it is for sure more comfortable to me than the Treo keyboards: the keys are larger and the keyboard itself is wider.

I wasn't sure what to expect when switching to the iPhone. Some predicted the iPhone keyboard would be a lemon, while others found it much better than the Treo keyboard. I will have to agree with the usability study done by User Centric: if you are used to the real QWERTY keyboard on your current phone, be ready for a big disappointment when you switch to the iPhone.

The correction algorithm is nice; very much so. But you will come to hate it if like me you occasionally write in a language other than English. And considering how multicultural the U.S. is, I assume I must not be the only one having a problem with this. This in one major deficiency of the iPhone. At the very least Apple should have provided a quick way to disable the correction algorithm.

And then, even when writing in English, I am much slower on the iPhone than I used to be on the Nokia E62. I was frequently writing a few paragraphs worth of text on the E62. Doing the same on the iPhone would be a waste of time, and I rarely write more than a couple of sentences on the iPhone.

This is too bad, as the ability to capture text is IMHO one important feature of a mobile device. Maybe we all need, in addition to our iPhone, to have a Hipster PDA!

Gmail Mobile Missing "Report Spam" on the iPhone

I mentioned yesterday that the Gmail Mobile site was improved to expose more of the functionality you get in the full HTML version. I loved the Report Spam button, which you can use to quickly report all the checked messages as spam. But this morning, I notice that this button is gone:
But is seems to be only gone from the interface when you access it from the iPhone. Access the same site from a desktop browser (or another mobile browser), and you will get a slightly different UI with the Report Spam button:

So Gmail seems to be serving a different page for iPhone users. Nothing wrong with that, but please, provide at least the same amount of functionality in the pages you build for the iPhone as in the pages built for other devices!

Gmail Mobile Improved

Great news for those of us who are using the Gmail Mobile site: the site has been revamped and the changes became visible to me this morning:

• You can now select messages and perform an action on those messages (for instance mark as spam). Previously you could not mark a message as spam from Gmail Mobile. Instead, you had to click on every single message and then click on Trash message. This was slow, and still not equivalent to marking as spam.
  
• Pages have been changed slightly to take into account those of us using a tap interface (think: iPhone). Previously the action Archive was so close to Forward and Mark unread that hitting the right action required some skill. Now some space have been added between those links, which makes Gmail Mobile much more usable.

This is some great news for those of us who want to access Gmail from our iPhone. I am thrilled! It still isn't as good as the actual Gmail Mobile application (which I used to run on my Nokia E62, and which runs on most phones where you can install applications), but this is a very nice step in the right direction.

The iPhone Jack Connector

Reading from all the people who are complaining that their current headphones can't be used on the iPhone I though that the iPhone would come with a 2.5 mm jack connector. That connector is smaller that the more usual 3.5 mm jack connector that is used on most headphones, and it is often used on smart phones, including Treos and some Nokia phones. I owned a Nokia E62 that comes with a 2.5 mm, and finding 2.5 mm headphones or a 3.5 to 2.5 mm adapters has been notably hard.

But the iPhone has a 3.5 mm connector. However, normal headphones won't fit that connector, not because this is some time of special 3.5 mm connector, but because the opening on the iPhone is not large enough. How stupid is that? Fortunately you can easily get around this. Don't get one of those ridiculous Belkin adapter. Instead just cut a little bit of plastic off the end of your jack connectors. I did that on a couple of headphones and it works like a charm!

iPhone, Wait no more

I have to admit: I now have an iPhone. I got it as a gift from my wife for our one-year wedding anniversary. Thank you Yue, this is one of the best gifts I have ever received! Woo-hoo! :D

(And if you thought that I was posting too much about the iPhone already, now beware, it can only get worse.)

A Real Skype Client for the iPhone

We have seen at least one company that lets you place Skype calls from your iPhone. But so far, this has been been through a call-back. This is not end-to-end VoIP. You are still using your airtime. Because of this, I am sure AT&T doesn't mind too much.

What I hope to see in the near future is a true Skype client running on the iPhone. I don't expect it to work well over GPRS, but you will be able to use it over Wi-Fi.

Because the iPhone is a closed platform, creating a Skype client for the iPhone will require a number of hacks. This means that most likely we won't get an "official Skype client" for the iPhone. And because the Skype system itself is closed, we haven't seen a lot of third-party Skype client for any platform. Creating one for the iPhone will be a double-challenge!

But ultimately, this will be done. And at that time it will be interesting to see how Apple and AT&T react.