Apple has released information on the security updates that were covered in the recent release of iOS 5.1.1. When it was originally released yesterday, all that we knew was that there were various bug fixes. This update actually covers some important security fixes too for Mobile Safari and WebKit based browsers in general.

• Available for: iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation) and later, iPad, iPad 2. Impact: A maliciously crafted website may be able to spoof the address in the location bar.
• Available for: iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation) and later, iPad, iPad 2. Impact: Visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to a cross-site scripting attack. Description: Multiple cross-site scripting issues existed in WebKit.
• Available for: iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation) and later, iPad, iPad 2 Impact: Visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. Description: A memory corruption issue existed in WebKit.

Given that, with iOS 5, Apple introduced over-the-air (OTA) updates to the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, it's interesting that they're still waiting and bundling security patches into larger software updates. OTA updates are done via bit-differential (delta file), and happen on-device and without the need to backup, re-install, and restore, so they're small and incredibly efficient. Apple could choose to push out security updates far more frequently. It's possible they think more frequent updates could annoy users, or their numbers tell them too many users are still updating over USB with iTunes for it to make sense right now. Hopefully, however, they're moving in that direction.

If you haven't yet updated to iOS 5.1.1 and you're looking for some help to get started, here’s where to go:

• How to update your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad over-the-air using iCloud
• How to update your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad using iTunes on Mac or Windows
• iOS 5 help and discussion forum

The Pop Video pico projector is a new accessory from Micron Technology, Inc. that claims to deliver the big screen experience to your iPhone or iPod touch. The accessory clips onto your iPhone or iPod touch and turns it into a projector allowing you to display a lot of your devices content on a projector screen or wall. The video resolution is qHD which is 960 x 540 pixels.

The sleek and portable PoP Vide pico projector is the ideal iPhone or iPod touch accessory to share your favorite photos, movies, TV programs, and video clips! The PoP Video connects directly to your iPhone or iPod touch without messy cords. PoP Video™ is for anyone who enjoys simple and fun entertainment through projecting humor, interests, experiences, and social networking. It's not about the device but rather the person using it...

If you fancy getting your hands on one of these, you can pre-order them now for a cost of $99.  They are compatible with the third and fourth generation iPod touch and the iPhone 4 and 4S.

Source: Pop Video

David is a technology enthusiast, iPhone user, and Texas-based police officer. This is how he uses iOS at work

Unlike most traditional jobs, I don't have an office where I can spend 8 hours a day sitting at a computer doing work. My office is a Ford Crown Victoria, and it is constantly moving from one location to the next. I need to have access to varying forms of information on the go to effectively get my job done. That's where my iPhone comes into play.

Lifeproof case

Police is a dangerous job and the Lifeproof case has already saved my iPhone more than once.

Being a police officer is a dangerous job; I know that's probably shocking news right? We get into car chases, foot chases, fights, and occasionally worse. My point is, knowing it's a dangerous job, I need to have my iPhone on me at all times. It can literally me a lifeline. So I need to protect it from the dangers of my job. The solution I have found to work for me is a Lifeproof case. Lifeproof cases will protect your iPhone from all the elements; water, dirt, snow, and shock. It's waterproof up to 6.6ft, and can withstand a drop from 6.6ft. These are all important factors for me in my daily use since a majority of my time is spent outside in the elements. The Lifeproof case has already saved my iPhone more than once.

$79.12 - Buy now

Spanish for Police

he Spanish for Police app helps me bridge that gap with words and phrases that I may have forgotten or never learned.

Working in Texas this is a must have. I took four years of Spanish in school, and I'm pretty good without this, but I am nowhere close to being fluent. The Spanish for Police app helps me bridge that gap with words and phrases that I may have forgotten or never learned. It covers subjects from traffic stops, to domestic violence, DUI's, and much more. The great thing with this app is when you find the phrase that fits the situation you are in, just press that phrase and you will hear it read outloud.

$2.99 - Download now

Pill Identifier by Drugs.com

Pill Identifier by Drugs.com helps you figure out if someone is just carrying a bag of tylenol versus a bag of hydrocodone.

The war on drugs isn't just about the typical illicit drugs that everyone thinks about. It also now involves prescription medications being abused. Often times suspects are arrested and found to have a baggie of pills on them. Of course there is no label on that bag, so we have to use the identifying information imprinted on the pills to identify what that pill is. Pill Identifier by Drugs.com allows you to enter the imprint number from the pill, and then it pulls up every pill in its database with that number and tells you what that pill is, and usually has an image of the pill also for further verification that you have the correct pill identified. It's important to know if someone is just carrying a bag of tylenol versus a bag of hydrocodone.

$0.99 - Download now

Wiser

With the Wiser app we can identify any potentially hazardous materials and take the proper precautions.

Wiser is an easy to use version of the Department of Transportation - Emergency Response Guidebook. The purpose of the app is to identify hazardous substances. For instance, if we respond to a collision and it involves a tanker truck on fire or leaking, we obviously don't want to get too close until we know what substance is in that truck. With a good set of binoculars we can look at the placard on the truck, read the number on the placard, enter it into the Wiser app and figure out what substance the truck is carrying, and what safety precautions need to be used for the first responders, and for the surrounding bystanders.

Free - Download now

White Pages

White Pages lets you find out a scary amount of information, but that's good when you're trying to find the bad guys.

The White Pages app is probably pretty common on most people's iPhones. You can search for people, businesses, or do a reverse phone lookup. All of these things come in handy when looking for someone. It's scary how much public information is available on the web, but it useful when looking for a bad guy.

Free - Download now

iMessage and ActiveSync

First and foremost, I use my iPhone as a communications tool. As a street level supervisor I receive several phone calls throughout the night from troops about how they should handle a particular call, or to brief me on things that require they notify a supervisor. For the times when a phone call can't be made, we rely on sending iMessages or text messages back and forth to relay important information. Lastly, I take advantage of ActiveSync to have my Microsoft Exchange email and calendar information pushed to my iPhone. This keeps me up to date on the go of all important department-wide crime bulletins that are sent, as well as keeps my appointment schedule at my fingertips.

Safari

The Safari web browser is useful to look up important information on the go, such as Texas Laws

If I have a question about the penal code, code of criminal procedure, or even the transportation code, an answer is just a quick search away via the Safari web browser. There are plenty of apps available, but I guess I'm too cheap to buy them. I think the browser on the iPhone and the information provided on the State of Texas website fulfills my needs.

Conclusion

I know that there are many more apps out there that could be of use, but these are the primary ones I use on a day to day basis. If you work in emergency services and know of some great apps that may help others in the field, sound off in the comments with what you have so we can all get a look and benefit from what iOS has to offer.

You can read more of David's posts at CrackBerry.com and follow him on Twitter @kasperapd

Google is facing an inquest after having allegedly been caught bypassing Apple’s Safari web browser privacy settings on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Google gets the big headline, of course, but Vibrant Media Inc., WPP PLC's Media Innovation Group LLC and Gannett Co.'s PointRoll advertising companies were all named in the report for tracking the web browsing habits of Safari and Safari Mobile users even when users have opted out of such tracking via Safari's cookie settings. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google and the other advertising companies used a special code that tricked Apple’s Safari browser into providing information even though it should have blocked it.

The Google code was spotted by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer and independently confirmed by a technical adviser to the Journal, Ashkan Soltani, who found that ads on 22 of the top 100 websites installed the Google tracking code on a test computer, and ads on 23 sites installed it on an iPhone browser.  The technique reaches far beyond those websites, however, because once the coding was activated, it could enable Google tracking across the vast majority of websites

Google issued a statement to the WSJ claiming that it had mischaracterized what had happened and claimed Google had used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled.

Google has since disabled the rogue code after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal. WebKit, the open-source browser engine that powers Safari (as well as Google's Chrome browser) already has a fix in place to prevent the work around, and Apple should be rolling that out to iOS users in a future update.

An Apple official said: "We are working to put a stop" to the circumvention of Safari privacy settings.

This bypass seems specific to Safari because, according to one of the advertisers, no other major web browser blocks their tracking by default. (Which should make any Chrome, Firefox, etc. users race to their settings post haste.)

This should also serve as yet another reminder not to believe companies by the words, but by their deeds. "Don't be evil" or "we care about every customer" is easy to say, and as technology enthusiasts we're predisposed to believe and even vigorously defend the companies we love. But they're big, they're out to make money, and as advertising revenue increases, we become their products, not their customers.

Were you surprised by this news? Is Google getting more of the attention than they deserve because they have the biggest name? How do you feel about companies bypassing Apple's tracking protection?

Source: WSJ

Have you ever come across a PDF file while surfing the web in Safari and wondered how to save a copy to iBooks for later viewing? Whether you need to save an important forms, an eBook, a user manual, an insurance policy, or something as simple as a nutritional information sheet for your favorite restaurant, your iPhone and iPad have the ability to save to iBooks built right in. And using iBooks to store and manage PDFs is much, much easier than saving tons of bookmarks and waiting for them to re-load each time.

Here's how to do it.

Note: Make sure you have Apple's free iBooks app installed on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. If you don't, you can get it from the App Store.

• Free - Download now

1. launch Safari
2. Go to the PDF link you want to save.
3. Tap the screen once to bring up the overlay menu beneath the address bar.
4. Tap Open in iBooks.
5. iBooks will launch, and in a few moments, it will add the PDF to your collection.

You can find your PDF any time simply by launching iBooks and taping the Library button in the upper left hand corner. Your PDFs will all be on your shelf.

You should be able to do this with any standard PDF you find in Safari and decide to keep.

Bonus Tip: If you have iBooks installed on more than one device, including iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and iTunes on Mac or Windows, and iCloud syncing enabled, all your PDFs will automatically be downloaded to those other devices as well.

Google has just released the too-long-in-coming Chrome for Android browser, and Phil from Android Central wasted no time loading it up on his Galaxy Nexus, and putting it up against an iPhone 4S running Safari, for a classic head-to-head, phono-e-phono, Mobile Nations browser showdown video.

Both browsers are based on WebKit, the project Apple adapted from the old Linux KHTML Konquerer browser and has been sharing back with the open source community ever since. So it's no surprise both score 100/100 on the Acid3 rendering test. Safari makes use of Apple's Nitro JavaScript engine, however, while Chrome has Google's V8 under the hood. That let Chrome edge out Safari in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks.

Safari and iOS in general still offer smoother, more closely-tracked multitouch scrolling, panning, and zooming. (No doubt due to iOS placing priority on interface rendering tasks, while they're left to fight as equals on Android.)

Interestingly, Chrome, like Safari, offers no support for Adobe's Flash player, or any other internet plugin.

Chrome is still in beta and only available for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich right now. No doubt the release version will be even better still.

Likewise, Apple isn't slowing down. With iOS 5.1 on the horizon, Safari will improve as well.

Heck, now that BlackBerry has their new WebKit-based Torch browser, and Microsoft has embraced modern Internet Explorer builds on Windows Phone, it's getting harder to find a bad browser out there.

Check out the video below for full out web rendering showdown.

Source: Android Central

Tired of filling out one tedious web form after another, and wondering how to get Safari on iPhone and iPad to automatically fill them out for you? Luckily, deep within the settings of Safari there is a way to setup AutoFill, something which allows you to automatically input your personal data on sites that permit its use.

• If you haven't already, create a contact for yourself in the Contacts app.
• Open up the Contacts app
• Select the plus sign in the top right corner

• Add in your personal information

• Hit Done
• Open up your settings app

• Tap on Safari

• Tap on AutoFill
• Toggle "Use Contact Info" to on

• Tap on My Info and select the contact you just created or the one you already had
• Now when you visit a site that needs your information, as soon as you select the first text box your keyboard will pop up and there will be an option called AutoFill

• Tap on AutoFill and Bob’s your Uncle, all your details will be automatically filled in for you

Daily Tips range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@imore.com.

The video above shows how Safari on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S trounce the Windows Phone 7 browser without even breaking a sweat.

Mobile Safari is one of the most advanced mobile browser currently available, and it's clear that competitors have a lot of catching up to do.

The proof is in the pudding, folks.

Source: YouTube

Wondering how to re-open a recently closed tab on iOS 5 Safari for iPad? When Apple released iOS 5, it included some nice new updates to mobile Safari, especially on the iPad. One of the best features on the iPad is tabbed browsing, it makes opening and using multiple web pages a breeze. What happens if you accidentally close one of them down and need to quickly open it back up again? Well there is a way to it very easily. We will show you how.

• Open up Mobile Safari
• Look to the far right of the screen about an a half inch down from the toolbar
• There should be a + sign

• Hold your finger down on the plus sign and a box will open up

• The box now shows a list of the web pages that you recently had open and its scrollable
• Click on the one you want to re-open and there you go
• That’s it, you are done

Daily Tips range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

On some websites, like CNN shown in the video above, when I hit "back" to return to the previous page, instead of getting the previous page I get a version of the previous page that's from some time in the past, as much as a day or so. I've also had this happen on sites like Reddit. Unless Apple included highly advanced tachyon-based time travel functionality in iOS 5, there's some problem between the web server, the cache, mobile Safari, and my eyes that's conspiring to give me pages from the past.

Problem

• Go to a web page in Safari
• Tap a link
• Tap the "back" button

You get an older version of the web page you just left.

Work around

• Tap the "reload" button

That gets Safari to render the page again. You can also clear the cache. That seems to alleviate the problem, at least for a while.

• Launch Settings
• Tap on Safari
• Tap on Advanced
• Tap on Website Data
• Tap on Remove all Website Data

I haven't tried this in iOS 5.0.1 yet and it may well be fixed in that build, otherwise here's hoping Apple fixes it soon.

If you use Safari rather frequently on your jailbroken iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch you may want to check out BackForwardList for Safari. The main purpose is to enhance the functionality of the back and forward buttons.

Instead of tapping to go back a page, you can hold down on the back or forward button to gain quick access to your history. I've found this useful when I want to go back to a site I was browsing a few pages back. It's much easier than just tapping on the back button multiple times.

The tweak doesn't add any shortcuts or icons to your springboard and there are no setting to configure. Just download it from Cydia and you're good to go. You can also swipe sideways within your history to delete individual items. BackForwardList for Safari is a free download from the Cydia store.

[Free - Cydia Store Link]

BlackBerry maker RIM is opposing Apple's trademark filing for WebKit, the open source browser rendering engine they developer based on Linux Konquerer/KHTML. WebKit has become the most popular browser engine in Mobile, powering iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad Safari, as well as BlackBerry's Torch Mobile, Google's Android, Palm's webOS, and other browsers -- as well as Apple Safari and Google Chrome on PCs. So popular, in fact, that RIM couldn't wait to advertise they'd finally joined the modern internet by getting a WebKit browser.

Could that be part of the reason for the opposition, fears that Apple would try to restrict use of the trademark? Even CrackBerry.com doesn't seem to know for sure.

Now in what appears to be an odd move (as far as timing is concerned), RIM filed their opposition to the application on August 15th 2011, with an extension granted 3 days later that allows them to officially submit their Statement of Opposition by November 22nd of this year. This claim can be found on the Canadian Intellectual Property Office website. Right now we can only speculate as to why this is happening now. Torch Mobile was one of many developers that were widely known to further develop WebKit. Remember what happened in August of 2009? Well, RIM acquired Torch Mobile, which then enabled them to include a WebKit-based browser on their BlackBerry devices. It will be quite interesting to see what kind of opposition RIM can offer- hopefully it will carry a little more weight than the recorded “Used in CANADA since at least as early as November 2003.” We’ll be sure to report more on this claim as it develops.

Ditto.

[CrackBerry.com]

iPad users that use twitter.com in safari, instead of the downloadable iPad app, will be getting a new HTML5 web app in the next few weeks

Currently, iPad users who navigate to 'twitter.com' are greeted with the old iPhone layout, with an option to switch to the default desktop UI. However Twitter announced on the 'Twitter Mobile' twitter account that they have begun rolling out a new HTML5 based web UI specifically for the iPad, which should reach all users in the coming weeks.

We've launched our HTML5 version of twitter.com for iPad. It will be rolling out to device owners over the next week or so.

The screenshot above shows that the UI is similar to both the desktop design and the recently updated iPhone design.

I haven't had the updated web app yet, but I'm interested to know if any of you have had a chance to play with it yet.

[9to5mac] [@TwitterMobile]

Safari is getting a huge update with iOS 5, which will include a new Reading List for later reading of interesting articles, tabbed browsing (finally!) and Safari Reader for a distraction-free view of the webpage or article you're reading.

Reading List is a huge addition, letting users save an interesting article for later, much akin to Read It Later or Instapaper. Just tap the Reading List button and you're presented with all the articles you've recently saved.

Tabbed browsing is just how you'd expect it to be in Safari, with a look and feel the same as Safari on Mac OS X. This is a much-welcomed addition.

Safari Reader is a button you tap to clear all distractions and view the article in a text-only view with inline images. It's going to make reading on Safari painless, especially when you're on a site with a bunch of annoying and distracting ads.

We're looking forward to these additions in Safari for iOS 5 -- what about you?

Twitter is rolling out a significant redesign to their mobile website, the one you see when accessing Twitter.com via Safari on iPhone or iPod touch, and other mobile device browsers. The new web app layout is molded around the official Twitter for iPhone app and is heavily doused in HTML5 goodness (however the menu bar has been switched to the top instead of the bottom).

We want you to be able to access Twitter no matter where you are; regardless of what device you use; or, whether you prefer to access Twitter through a mobile application or the browser. Today, we’re starting to roll out a new version of twitter.com for mobile devices. This web app allows us to provide a high-quality and consistent Twitter experience on high-end touchscreen devices – whether or not an official Twitter application is available. It was built from the ground up for smartphones and tablets, which have more advanced browsers that support the latest web technologies, including HTML5.

We're not seeing the redesign on our end just yet, as Twitter has only allowed a small percentage of users to see the new layout. Word around town is that it looks and functions a lot better than the previous design, and judging from the screenshots, we get the feeling we'll all be in full agreement once it's rolled out to everyone.

Any TiPb readers out there seeing the update?

[Twitter Blog]

Yesterday, one of our readers, Aaron wrote in to tell us Amazon Cloud Player was suddenly playing -- if not nicely, than with less hostility -- on his iPad. Since it's US only, I couldn't check it myself but I asked him what was different from the previous, play-one-song-at-a-time-via-QuickTime "support"

He said it was; it played in his Safari browser, didn't launch QuickTime, his music controls worked, and it would continue to play in the background. He was also kind enough to make us the video, embedded below.

Why less-hostile rather than nicely? You still have to ignore the warning about it not being compatible and push on through. Hopefully this means Amazon is working on it, however, and it will eventually, if not soon, be a seamless experience for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

If you're using Cloud Player on iOS, let us know what you think of the experience now. Good, good enough, still needs to get better?

[Thanks Aaron!]

Cydia may be getting some competition from a new browser-based alternative called Lima. The development team behind the jailbreak installer, named Infini Dev Team, says the new package installer will be fully functional from Mobile Safari and let users install unapproved 3rd party apps and extensions just like Cydia.

Lima is going to be a browser-based dpkg Installer. Meaning all you have to do is visit a website in safari and you have a fully fucntional package installer!

The Infini Dev Team recently put out a working version of Icy, a Cydia alternative from Rip Dev that hasn't been in development for some time now. Icy was a fast, lightweight package installer that many users preferred over Cydia, and Infini Dev is apparently taking a very stripped-down approach with Lima as well. We're not exactly sure how the technology behind Lima works or when it will be available, but things appear to be functioning as described. Check out the video after the break to see Lima in action!

Would you be open to the idea of a browser-based package installer, or would you rather stick with Cydia as a long-trusted option? Let us know in the comments!

[Infini Dev Team]

New to iPhone, iPod touch or iPad and trying to figure out how to change the default search engine to something other than Google? For many users Google is synonymous with web search but if you prefer Yahoo! or Microsoft Bing, it's an easy change to make. And we'll show you how after the break!

If you want to change your default search engine from Google to Yahoo! or Bing, here's what to do:

• From the home screen, tap on the Settings app
• Tap on Safari.
• Tap on Search Engine.
• Select the new Search Engine.

Once you quit settings, your selection will remain the default Search Engine until you change it again.

Bonus Tip: Just because you set one search engine as default for the search field doesn't mean you can't use others. Just enter their URL (google.com, yahoo.com, bing.com, etc.) in Safari and you can use any one you wish, whenever you wish.

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you'd like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it's especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we'll even give ya a reward...)

Want to find out how to clear your browsing history in Safari? Need to make sure no one has a way of knowing what websites you've visited on your iPhone or iPad? Keeping that special gift you got your friend a secret or any other reason (at TiPb we don't judge). Lucky for you there's a quick and easy way to clear all of your browsing history in Safari so hit the jump to find out how!

To clear your browsing history in Mobile Safari all you need to do is follow these quick steps:

1. Go into the Settings app and select Safari

1. Scroll down to the very bottom and tap 'Clear History'

1. Confirm.

That's it! All of your browsing history will be gone the next time you launch Mobile Safari, so you don't have to worry about someone finding something you didn't want them to see!

Bonus Tip: From the Safari settings pane you also have options to clear cache and cookies. Mobile Safari stores a cache of websites you visit to help reduce bandwidth usage and server load. Cookies are used to store authentication information, site preferences etc. If you want to clear your cookies and cache just tap 'Clear Cookies' and 'Clear Cache'. You'll be asked to confirm for both, just like when you cleared your browsing history.

Bonus Tip 2**: Need to clear more than just safari? Check out our full iPhone and iPad clearing tip!

Tips of the day will range from beginner-level 101 to advanced-level ninjary. If you already know this tip, keep the link handy as a quick way to help a friend. If you have a tip of your own you’d like to suggest, add them to the comments or send them in to dailytips@tipb.com. (If it’s especially awesome and previously unknown to us, we’ll even give ya a reward…)

While iOS 4.3's Safari is roughly twice as fast as previous versions thanks to the newly ported Nitro JavaScript engine, asynchronous mode, and HTML 5 application cache, it looks like Web Clips (web pages saved to the home screen as icon bookmarks) and WebViews (web browsers embedded in apps) are still using the significantly slower iOS 4.2 tech.

The Register suggests a conspiracy -- that Apple is deliberately throttling Web Clip and WebView performance so web apps can't compete with the App Store and cut into Apple's 30% share of revenues. Of course, many web apps are free and Apple's 30% share of similarly free App Store apps is exactly zero. Likewise, lack of WebView support hurts the performance of App Store apps, not web apps. (iTunes and App Store on iOS are native wrappers around a WebKit UI, after all.)

So, while such theories are dramatic and link baity, like with the just-improved AirPlay and still not-fixed AirPrint, sometimes Apple can only implement so much of a new feature in the first release cycle. Therefore, it's probably safer to assume it's a bug unless and until it remains unfixed in a subsequent update. At which point even TiPb will start sharpening the pitchforks and lighting up the torches, b'okay?

UPDATE: Looks like the reason is security.

[The Register]

As you can see from the video above, the iPad 2 using the Apple A5 chip combined with more RAM performs much better than the original iPad when browsing in Mobile Safari. If you load up all nine tabs, you'll see that the original iPad starts to choke up pretty badly when compared to the iPad 2. This is due to the original iPad only coming with 256MB of RAM while iPad 2 comes packed with 512MB. (We hoped for as much as 1GB in the video before getting more test results back. Maybe next year!.)

The original iPad tends to "kill" background tabs whenever it runs out of available memory, which can get pretty annoying if you use the iPad primarily for web browsing. The iPad 2 performed flawlessly and had no hiccups when browsing. Also the dreaded "checkerboard effect" -- where significant lag would occur before Safari could render the web page content -- is nowhere to be found. Scrolling in Safari is smooth as butter, and gone are the days when switching between tabs meant loading the entire page from scratch.

The difference in performance is quite clear, and browsing on the iPad 2 is definitely a step up from the original iPad in every way. If you were able to pick up an iPad 2 then let us know your thoughts on RAM performance and how it compares to the first iPad in the comments below!

Earlier today Google rolled out their Instant Previews feature for mobile devices like iPhone. The feature adds elegant thumbnail previews to your search results and works perfectly on your iPhone or iPod touch, even bearing a resemblance to the way Mobile Safari handles tab management.

Instant Previews has been available on the desktop since last year but I never found myself actually using it. I've only been playing with it on my iPhone for a few minutes but can already tell you I'll be using Instant Previews a lot more on the go than I ever did on the desktop. Just tap the little magnifying glass next to your search results to see Instant Previews in action.

If you don't have your iPhone handy then check out the video after the break to get a better idea of how it works, and don't forget to let us know what you think in the comments!

During Apple's iPad 2 announcement yesterday Scott Forstall announced that Mobile Safari was getting a 2x performance boost, in part by porting over Mac OX's Nitro JavaScript engine.

As you surf the web, your fingers will love the responsiveness of the new Nitro JavaScript engine powering Safari. It runs JavaScript up to twice as fast as in iOS 4.2.2 Which means you get more speed behind each page load. And sites with lots of interactive features can appear on your screen even faster.

Users should see noticeable speed improvements under iOS 4.3 when visiting highly-interactive and complex websites across iOS devices, and when paired with the A5 chip and (presumably) more RAM on the iPad 2 it should really scream. Mac OS X Lion has recently been given a WebKit2 boost as well but there's no word yet on whether that will be carried over to iOS or when.

Are you looking forward to the Safari performance boosts coming in iOS 4.3? Let us know in the comments below!

[Apple]

Switching from Droid or another Android device like the Samsung Facinate to the iPhone -- maybe the new Verizon iPhone? -- and curious which are the best, most must-have apps you need to make yourself feel at home? Well read on for TiPb’s top 5 most recommended, most must-have apps to get your Android experience maximized on iPhone.

Google Mobile (Voice search + Google Goggles)

Unlike Android, iPhone doesn't (yet) have broad and deeply integrated voice features in iOS. While there's some Voice Control commands for making calls and playing music, that's about it. Enter Google Mobile which not only adds voice search but also bundles in Google Goggles functionality. From location and maps to contacts and the web to most anything you can say or point your iPhone 4 camera at, Google Mobile gets you answers and fast. [Free - iTunes link]

Also check out:

• Siri was bought by Apple for a reason. If you're in the US, Siri is your voice-activated artificially intelligent assistant. [Free - iTunes link]
• Vlingo not only lets you use your voice to call or search but tweet on Twitter and update your status on Facebook. [Free with in-app purchases - iTunes link]

Google Voice

Yes Google Voice is finally available for the iPhone. MInd you, it's still US only but if you want the app you probably have an account already. It's not as deeply integrated as Android but it has all the features you know and love, including push notifications for new SMS text and voicemail messages, listen and/or read voicemail, Google Voice number displayed as Caller ID, access to your iPhone contacts, and it will run in the background under iOS 4 or later. [Free - iTunes link]

Also check out:

• Line2 isn't free but it is business-centric with full on VoIP functionality, cheap rates, and international availability. [Subscription - iTunes Link]
• Skype lets you make free VoIP calls between devices/computers -- including video calls! -- and cheap calls to landline. Free/credits - iTunes link]

Mailroom (Gmail)

You can access your Gmail account via IMAP or with full push via ActiveSync right from Apple's built-in Mail app and while you'll get unified inbox and threaded messages you won't get Stars and you won't get labels. Likewise Gmail.com won't give you the ability to access contacts or view attachments. Enter Mailroom, essential the Gmail.com webapp inside a native iPhone app wrapper that gives you most of the best of both worlds. (See our tip on using Mailroom for a better iPhone Gmail experience.) [$2.99 - iTunes link]

Also check out:

• Google Mobile, mentioned above, gives you push notification for your Gmail. [Free - iTunes link]
• Boxcar not only gives you push notification for Gmail but will open it for you in Mailroom. [Free - iTunes link]

Waze (Google Navigation)

Google hasn't yet made a version of their free Google Navigation app for iPhone but Waze provides a free crowd-sourced alternative. It's full on voice, turn-by-turn directions that learns as you drive and will even let you munch tokens and reward you for your contributions. Yes, it's navigation gone social. [Free - iTunes link]

Also check out:

• NAVIGON MobileNavigator if you want to go up to a premium navigation experience with all the onboard maps and bells and whistles that come with it. [$39.99 - iTunes link]
• AT&T Navigator, powered by TeleNav, keeps your maps online, your downloads small, and is subscription based so your upfront costs are much less. [Subscription - iTunes link]

Safari (Porn and everything else)

Apple's iTunes App Store is curated and Steve Jobs says that's to protect you from porn. He also says the Android Market is a porn store. He neglects to mention iPhone has pretty much the best browser in the mobile space (Flash aside) and the web, it be filled with porn. It also be filled with pretty much everything else, including many awesome Google web apps like Google Docs that work just great in Safari. If you can't find something on the App Store, launch Safari, hit the Google search box (irony!) and chances are you'll find it on the web. [Built in]

Also check out:

• Skyfire is a browser that does server-side translation of Flash to iPhone-friendly H.264 so if you ever think you're missing your favorite Flash video, this could fix you up. [$2.99 - iTunes link]
• Apple's iPhone web app directory has a great list of web apps should you want to find a bunch more. [Web link]

More Google

Google has a bunch of apps in the App Store, including Google Places, Google Latitude, Google Authenticator, Panoramio, and Google Earth. If you really miss your Google fix, check them out. [Free - iTunes link]

More iPhone apps and games

Once you've gotten that Google fix and you're ready for the best of the rest, check out TiPb's Top 10 iPhone apps where we list off some of the best, most must-have social networking, communications/IM, productivity, music/internet radio, photography, utility, and location apps, along with casual, time management, and hard core games. We've also got an ongoing series of top app lists in different categories and we're adding more all the time, so keep your eyes peeled!

Bonus: Jailbreak

If you've been rooting your Droid or Android and don't want Apple telling you which apps and hacks you can install on your device, allow us to introduce you to the wonderful world of Jailbreak. We're talking the Cydia Store, themes and customizations, notifications and easy settings access, and pretty much everything else you can think of and Apple would never approve. Check out our Jailbreak Starters Guide to get you going, our Top 5 Jailbreak apps and Top 5 Jailbreak themes for some of our favorites, and head on over to the Jailbreak Forum for expert help and discussion.

Your top apps?

So there you have them, our top 5 best iPhone apps for Droid/Android switchers. Be sure to check out our Picks of the Week and iPhone App and Games Forum for more recommendations, and if we missed any of your favorites leave them in the comments below!

We knew Apple had added accelerometer and gyroscope support to iOS 4.2.1 for iPhone, but leave it to Occipital, the company who brought us 360 Panorama, to show it off in full, Augmented Reality mode.

What they've done is created an Augmented Reality type experience for viewing panoramic photos all through the Safari Mobile browser. As far as we know no other mobile browser is equipped to be able to make use of this... yet. To sample this simply visit http://occip.it/pt3dmqna on your mobile Safari browser and you will see a Gyro On notice show up. Once that appears move your iPhone/iPod touch around and check out the panoramic picture they use as an example. (iPad won't work -- no gyroscope.)

If you have 360 Panorama, once you complete an upload of a panoramic photo you captured, you can use the URL to view it in Safari Mobile or send the link to others for them to check out what you captured.

This feature could be used for other things such as web apps and can only help using Safari Mobile become even better. Try this out on your iPhone 4 or iPod Touch and let us know how you like it. Also if you upload some cool panoramic shots leave the URL in the comments section so we can all experience what you experienced!

For more, see our iOS 4.2 walkthrough for iPhone and iPod touch.

[ The Next Web ]

While AirPrint and AirPlay integration, and Find in Page are the big user-facing features new to iOS 4.2 Safari, MobileXWeb points out that Apple also snuck in a few improvements under the hood:

• Accelerometer & Gyroscope support through the DeviceOrientation API
• WebSockets API from HTML5
• Updated HTML 5 Form Support
• Partial XHR-2 Support
• New JavaScript data types
• New DOM events
• Enhanced SVG and Canvas support

If you are a developer let us know how useful these additions will be to your Web Apps. If you're not a developer that might look like mumbo jumbo to you but rest assured it means more better web applications could be coming your way soon, and since Apple uses Safari's WebKit to render everything from iTunes to App Store or iAd to Apple.com, and Google uses it Gmail and pretty much all their sites, there's potential for a lot more, lot better content coming our way.

Video after the break!

[MobileXWeb]

Google Instant (beta) appears to be showing up on the Safari browser for some iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users. I just checked mine and I've yet to have it roll out here in good old Michigan City (we don't even have 3G yet, so my expectations aren't that high). For those of you not familiar with Google Instant, you search on Google as you normally do but instead of having to hit the search button and wait for the page to come back, results populate as you type.

Rene's had it for a while but didn't see fit to tell the rest of us. Shame on him. It will definitely be interesting to see how this feature works on iOS.

If any of you have instant yet, let us know what it's like in the comments!

via 9to5Mac

Google has posted an update to their blogger account notating some new changes to their mobile version of Gmail.  From the looks of it, scrolling looks to be much improved as far as smoothness goes.  Before the pages seemed to be a bit more choppy and the distance it would scroll wasn't always very accurate.  That problem appears to be fixed.

They've also added a floating toolbar that will remain static even when you scroll.  This should make it a lot easier to jump around your mailbox instead of having to scroll all the way back up a long thread in order to return to your inbox or another folder.  Google is noting these updates are compatible with devices running iOS 4.0 and up.

They're also asking that if you have suggestions or comments, you should feel free to visit the Google Support Forums or tweet it and mention #gmailmobile.  Do you guys use the web version of this app at all? I personally just have Gmail set up as exchange.  Seems a lot less work to me.  What do you guys think?

In an effort to slow the already glacial pace of the iOS-friendly HTML5 standard, the W3C is telling developers to hold off on deploying the technology in their web sites due to lack of interoperability in certain areas.

"The problem we're facing right now is there is already a lot of excitement for HTML5, but it's a little too early to deploy it because we're running into interoperability issues," including differences between video on devices, said the official, Philippe Le Hegaret, W3C interaction domain leader. He is responsible for specifications like HTML and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).

For example, Apple's Safari supports only H.264, Firefox only OGG Theora and Google's V8, and Google supports everything. (Internet Explorer 9, currently in beta, will bring its own unique set of support as well).

Typically the way things have moved at all in the browser space is innovation and implementation by each individual bowser maker, then standards have followed as web developers have built sites and usage has demanded it.

Apple, Google, probably Microsoft won't slow down with HTML5, so no worries there, but it's possible they'll have to drag the W3C forward with them, kicking and screaming as they do.

iPhone, iPad, and other mobile devices won't be waiting for them.

[Infoworld, Thanks Antony for sending this in]

iOS 4.2 will finally give iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad the ability to find text on a Safari web page. It can be hard to find a specific snippet of text on a long, paragraph strewn web page. On Windows or Mac, you just hit CTL-F or CMD-F, type your text, and off you go. Now in iOS 4.2 beta 1 you just use the regular old search field (still confusingly labeled Google by default) and start typing the text you want to find.

Where previously you only got suggested search terms, now you get a second list at the bottom for words you can search on the page. Tap one and the first match on the page is highlighted in yellow and a set of buttons slide up on the bottom for "Next" and "Done", as well as a counter for how many matches of the word there are on the page, and which one is currently highlighted (e.g., 7/16). Hit next until you find the one you want, hit done when you're finished. If you want to change the find term, the search box is repositioned alongside the controls to make it convenient.

No more manual scanning, no more javascript bookmarklets. Just happy surfing.

One more pic after the break.

A lot of people have been waiting for Flash on an iPhone (unofficially of course), and if you're jailbroken, you can have it now, via Frash.  Frash is basically a port of Flash 10.1 for mobile.  We also have to keep in mind, it's in a severe Alpha stage.  And it shows.  But if you just can't wait to get your hands on a way to run Flash on an iPhone, click on through for some more thoughts as well as a walkthrough complete with video of how to install.

First for my thoughts on Frash. Honestly, a year ago I would have been more excited to have Flash on an iPhone. Maybe it's just me, but ever since El Jobso essentially put the ban hammer down when it comes to Flash on iPhone, a lot of companies and web designers have been more wary when coding websites. It seems like more and more sites everyday are embedding code in order to make their sites more iPhone friendly. A huge example is Vimeo. I hated it when I'd be browing news sites or blogs and videos would be embedded with services like Vimeo. You just couldn't watch them. Now, they load nicely in a Quicktime mobile player and you're good to go. Facebook also supports iPhone mobile video viewing from within their native app. This solved most of my Flash woes overnight.

I can also see why some people still want Flash. Some websites still use splashscreens written in Flash. It's especially irritating to not be able to get to a website's main page just because the intro is written in Flash. Most of the time, you can type index.html or something of the like into the address bar after the web address to bypass Flash, but not always. (Not to mention it's a pretty annoying workaround.) If you're someone who tends to deal with a lot of Flash content, Frash is probably your best solution as of now.

I wouldn't recommend installing Frash on any iPhone model below a 3GS. Safari will most likely do nothing but crash on you. And again, keep in mind Frash is still in it's very infant stages. But if you're still interested in giving Frash a go, follow these instructions to install or watch the video below which also provides a walkthrough and demonstration of some of the bugs I've experienced with Frash so far.

• Jailbreak Your iDevice via JailbreakMe.com, you can find directions here.

• Next, you'll need to add a repo to Cydia. Tap Sources along the bottom, then go to manage, tap edit at the top, then add the following repo: http://repo.benm.at/

• Once you're done adding the repo, search "Frash" in Cydia and install. That's it, you're done. You should now be able to access flash data via Safari on your iDevice.

YouTube Link

CrackBerry Kevin decided to put the brand new BlackBerry Torch 9800's brand new BlackBerry OS 6 WebKit browser up against iPhone 4's iOS 4 Safari and Captivate's Android 2.1 Chrome in a good, old-fashioned browser battle royal.

The results? Win, lose, or draw, RIM has certainly come a long way when it comes to browsers. See the video above and CrackBerry.com's play-by-play for more. Let us know your thoughts below.

How does a photographer use his iPhone to get the job done and what iPhone apps help get him through his day? TiPb’s iPhone at work contest aims to bring you just such slices of the iPhone life. Here’s JustinHammondPhoto's answer and as a small token of thanks we’re sending him a $20 iTunes gift certificate. If you want to see your name up on the TiPb home page and get a gift certificate all your own, head on over to the TiPb iPhone Forum and share your story now!

I'm a professional photographer from Massachusetts. I have the wonderful job of photographing some of the most beautiful women in the world in the coolest locations all over the country. Models, celebrities, NFL Cheerleaders, it goes on and on. My work has been in magazines, advertisements, Maxim, websites... the works! I love my job!

I honestly realized for the first time when reading this contest how much I actually use my iPhone on a day to day basis for what I do. It's a lot! Especially now that I have my iPhone 4, it's been even more. Here's when:

• I own a studio, but I'm very often on location shooting, which means no wifi (on the beaches, bars, outdoors, etc). So having a 3G connection is great. I often pull up Safari in the middle of a photoshoot to come up with a pose idea, or sometimes girls want to show me a picture of a shot they really love so it's easy to Google image search some ideas! It helps out a lot during a shoot!

• Also, because I do travel to photoshoot, I'm always using Maps! Maps is so crucial to getting around because I barely know areas well. It's definitely got me out of so many jams or has even helped find shooting locations! I remember this one time I was doing outdoor shooting and I pulled up my map and noticed a large pond nearby so we walked toward where it was and got some really beautiful shots by the water at a place I would have had no idea about if it didnt show up on the gps.

• It works great in times of urgency! Even last night, the "model light" on my strobe died (lights the model so you can auto-focus on her when there's low light/lights off). Well, I pulled out my iPhone, opened the new trusty video camera, turned on the new amazing light from the iPhone, and my assistant held it to the model! It was perfect! I was so happy about having the new iPhone 4 last night.

• Also with the new video feature, being HD, I have decided to do some "behind the scenes" videos that I will be posting in the near future of my photo shoots. This is really great for my website and facebook page as a lot of models/fans follow my work, and it's real fun at photoshoots. I am beyond excited about that. I may even start video blogging and doing tips/pointer videos for photography.

• I also use it for networking with models and clients or even friends with my photography. I save all of my edited photos to my iPhone so when I am out and about, when someone asks what I do, I just open up Photos and show them my work right from my phone - they look amazing on the new retina display! It really allows me to have a portfolio with me at all times. Such a perk in the industry! It's like carrying my book with me in my pocket!

Then obviously the basics! Calendar for booking shoots/remembering what I have to do that day, and Email for keeping up with everything going on in my life in and outside of photography.

iPhone tip: Always keep it charged/charge every night! I use my iPhone so much, so my battery tends to go fast. I do have multiple chargers to make sure I am never without it. The iPhone really is my personal assistant. If it could only bring me coffee and water and move around lights, I wouldn't need to hire my real assistant anymore!

Favorite apps: Safari, Calendar, Mail, Photos, Maps. These are my most important and all Apple created! Thank you Apple!

You can see some of Justin's work at Justin Hammond Photography. Are you a photographer? If so, what apps do you use to help you with your job?

When you tap into the Safari's URL bar in iOS 4 and start typing, Safari starts to do a "keyword search", i.e. display predictive results based on your bookmarks and history. Anything that contains the text you're inputing either in the URL or history is listed below the URL field so the moment you see what you want you can just tap it and go.

This makes it easier to find something if you don't remember the exact web page address or if you know you recently saw a site, and know what it was about, but don't remember where exactly it was. Just start typing what you do remember and let Safari do the heavy lifting. Highly convenient and certainly "awesome". [To misappropriate the term from Mozilla]

When you try out the new Safari URL bar, let us know how it works for you. For more, see our complete iOS 4 feature walkthrough.

[Thanks to @jaerre for the reminder]

Summary of the new features include:

• Safari Reader
• Even Greater Support for HTML 5
• Better Performance
• Bing Search
• Safari Extentions

How about our readers? Are you seeing a speed difference? If you find a site that can take advantage or Reader, post it in the comments!

You can download Safari 5 here.

***UPDATE: In order for Reader to appear, you literally have to click on an article on a website. For example, click on this article in its entirety and the Reader button will appear in the smart address bar.

I'm sitting here at the airport waiting for my flight (or the first leg of my flight rather, grrrr!) to San Francisco for WWDC 2010 and catching up on the latest, greatest, coolest, and craziest rumors to hit the web -- namely Safari 5, a new version of Xcode, and more.

Safari on the iPhone and iPad is typically ahead of the curve when it comes to supporting Apple's version of (still emerging) HTML5 and CSS3 standards, and their Nitro Javascript engine, but desktop Safari typically leads the way in terms of cool features like local RSS, Top Sites, etc. According to Macgenerations Safari 5 looks to increase that lead:

• Safari Reader (does that remove Google ads for that "calmer experience", I wonder?)
• 25% faster Javascript rendering
• Bing as a search option. (Enemy's enemy, indeed!)
• Dozens of new HTML5 features including Geo Location, full screen video, captioned video, section elements, AJAX history, EventSource, WebSocket, draggable elements, and more. (Begun these Flash wars have).
• Improved developer tools.
• Smarter address field
• Improved tabs settings
• Hardware acceleration for Windows
• Easier Top Sites/Full history switching,
• Private browsing (aka porn mode) icon for easier on/off
• DNS pre-fetching and improved page caching
• XXS auditor
• Faster running JSON (for better web apps).

MacRumors meanwhile hears Xcode 4 might get shown off as a "major update".

Less rumor and more wishful, if awesome, thinking, Lonely Sandwich wonders if the "lame" Video app on the iPad is a precursor to it getting an Apple TV app as part of Apple's next gen Apple TV, iTunes.com rollout. Now that would spectacular.

[Macgeneration via 9to5Mac, Macrumors, Lonely Sandwich, photo credit: Flickr/Adam Jackson]

H.264, the video codec Apple supports for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad playback, and for the HTML5 video tag in Safari, and now Microsoft is supporting it as well, which means its 66% share will likely go up. Add to that Steve Jobs think the competing, Firefox-supported license-free alternative, OGG Theora, will face patent infringement claims, and it's looking like we have a web video standards winner.

As anyone who read Steve Jobs' thoughts on Flash knows, he made a strong case for H.264 video and his hopes/belief it would render the need for Flash's FLV container, and especially its older, software-bound H.263 codec obsolete. TechCrunch contacted Encoding.com and found out it might just be already. According to the graph above, and given YouTube's 40% market share alone, it looks like H.264 is up around 66% and growing.

That's bad news for Adobe, and for OGG Theora whose competing standard is implemented alongside H.264 in Google's Chrome browser, and exclusively in Mozilla's Firefox. Worse news is that Microsoft has announced they're going exclusive for Internet Explorer 9, and like Apple they're doing it with H.264.

Mozilla backs Theora as a matter of policy, since even though H.264 is free for non-commerical end-users for years to come, it's owned by a consortium who could theoretically seek a license in the future. Theora is theoretically license-free in perpetuity -- but companies like Apple believe that's also theoretical and only ever one lawsuit away from changing.

Steve Jobs, sending from his iPad again, says exactly that:

All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other "open source" codecs now. Unfortunately juste because something is open scourse, it doesn't mean or guarantee that i doesn't infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.

So Apple is paying for H.264 and not risking getting sued for Theora later, and they're banking on H.264 uptake to be so fast and far, Flash won't be needed for video playback. At 66% we're getting close to that point. At 75-80% we'll be at it. H.264 will be the standard and all of Apple's devices and platforms will already support it -- and support it well.

Now H.264 becoming the standard doesn't mean it's the best choice or even the right one, just like DVD, Blu-Ray, USB, MP3, etc. might not be the best or right choices for their standards, but at a certain point all the major browsers and platforms have to get behind something that's good enough so that when users hit the web or load a video, it just plays.

Firefox should add H.264 support as well. It's time to check that box off and start arguing about the next one. 3D or a smell plugin or something...

[TechCrunch, fsfe.org via Microsoft blogs, 9to5Mac]

Well, technically not Apple the entity, but an employee of Apple named Anders Carlsson announced WebKit 2 yesterday and for geeks it could easily have been a Jobsian "One more thing..."

This is a heads-up that we will shortly start landing patches for a new WebKit framework that we at Apple have been working on for a while. We currently call this new framework "WebKit2".

WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process. This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it.

They're also offering non-blocking API which Clint Ecker at Ars Technica

should result in much more responsive applications which hook into WebKit2. Theoretically, while the renderer is rendering something, the main application loop can move on to doing something else as requested by a user.

WebKit is the open-source browser rendering engine that originated as KHTML/Konquerer on Linux but was taken under Apple's wing and became the core of Safari on both the desktop and the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. (Google also uses it for Chrome, Android, and Chrome OS, Palm for the webOS browser, and RIM is developing a WebKit browser for BlackBerry).

What this means for iPhone and iPad users, of course, is that we'll eventually get faster versions of Safari that when one page crashes just drops us back into another page rather than taking the whole browser down with it. Put that together with the other advances in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript (including frameworks) Apple has been pushing out, and the future of the web for developers and users gets really interesting.

9to5Mac has posted up a walkthrough of the iPad's version of the Safari web browser, running on the iPhone 3.2 SDK's simulator. Instead of sliding in new screens, iPad Safari uses Apple's new popover menus to handle bookmarks, search, and other UI tasks.

We have to admit, it's looking great to us and we can't wait to get our geeky, multi-touchy hands on the real thing.

Video after the break!

Apple has just released desktop Safari for Mac and Windows to 4.0.4, which improves full history search performance, has the mandatory stability improvements, and security fixes, but the big news as far as we're concerned is the number one item on the list -- Improved JavaScript performance

Desktop Safari is the big brother of the iPhone's Mobile OS X Safari, and they share a rendering engine (WebKit), and a JavaScript engine (Nitro), and improvements in desktop Safari and Nitro have traditionally filtered down to Mobile Safari with the subsequent iPhone OS update. That's right, we're looking at you iPhone 3.2 (where ever you are!)

Since the current iPhone 3.1 Safari is still outperforming even brand-new devices like the Droid, that may seem a little greedy, but we know Google's Android and Palm's webOS aren't sitting still in the rendering race, and have updates of their own in the pipeline, so once again, competition benefits the end users. Bring. It..

More than 2 years post-iPhone launch, no news on Flash ever coming to the iPhone, yet Apple is pressing ahead with technologies like H.264 video (YouTube App's been using it since day one), HTML 5 and CSS animation (iPhone Safari supported them first), HTTP Live Streaming, and now WebGL for hardware accelerated 3D-graphics, and TuneKit, the framework behind the new iTunes LP rich media content.

Read on to find out what they are, how they work, and why they might make plugins like Flash increasingly unnecessary...

Says developer blog Wolfire:

WebGL is basically an initiative to bring 3D graphics into web browsers natively, without having to download any plugins. This is achieved by adding a few things to HTML5, namely, defining a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 and letting you draw things into a 3D context of the canvas element.

This would bring 3D-gaming (or any 3D application) right into the browser with hardware acceleration, with no plugin like Flash needed to hog your memory, heat up your processor, or crash the browser. (Browsers can do all of those things well enough without the extra help). In addition to WebKit (which is the foundation of Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, Palm's Web, BlackBerry's just-purchased Torch Mobile, and some Nokia devices), Firefox and Opera are also supporting it. Internet Explorer? Shrug.

TuneKit is the foundation behind iTunes 9's new iTunes LP and iTunes Extras formats, according to AppleInsider:

Similar to Apple's use of the SproutCore JavaScript framework to build its MobileMe web apps, TuneKit provides media developers with a familiar JavaScript framework for creating interactive bonus materials. TuneKit, like SproutCore, proves that a proprietary middleware runtime plugin such as Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight is simply unnecessary to deliver this kind of interactive media content, thanks in part to rapid advances in JavaScript rendering engine optimization.

Like TiPb, they couldn't help but notice the 720p nature of the current iTunes LP and iTunes Extras formats seem destined for the Apple TV, and we're keeping the oft-rumored iTablet on that list as well.

Adobe Flash on the other hand, still hasn't produced an optimized version for Mac OS X, never mind iPhone OS X, according to Apple is the number one cause of browser crashes, continues to experience security threats (though Javascript is no angel here either), and is under increasing privacy scrutiny due to Flash cookies. (If you've never checked, here's the page on Adobe's site that shows which websites are storing information about you in the Flash plugin).

Since, at the end of the day, users don't care about Flash or WebKit/browser technology, they just want their videos and games, things like WebGL and TuneKit could very well replace large amounts of Flash (and competing formats like SilverLight) on the web, especially the mobile web.

And personally I'm fine with that. A series of cutting edge, specific, highly optimized technologies are sometimes better than aging, overextended architectures anyway (feel free to insert iTunes jokes here).

Desktop Safari, predecessor and big brother to the iPhone's Mobile Safari web browser, has just received an update chock a block full of the usual security and compatibility fixed, and stability improvements. Mac users (and Windows users?!) can get it via Apple's Software Update or directly from the web via Apple.com/safari.

Under the theory that where goes desktop Safari, so goes the iPhone and iPod touch's Mobile Safari, it's not hard to imagine any and all applicable fixes getting rolled into the iPhone 3.1 firmware which should ship by Apple's next iTunes and iPod music event, typically held in September (and given the rapidity of exploit discovery, and the media-darling status of the iPhone, can't come too soon).

If you're browsing the web on a PC, you can just hit CTRL-F or CMD-F and quickly find any text on a webpage. It's great for finding things fast, especially on long reams of text, and Safari does a nice job of it -- just not Mobile Safari on the iPhone, not yet.

Editor emeritus Mike Overbo brought something very similar to us two years ago (along with a ton of others -- check that link!) when iPhone 1.x made bookmarklets all the rage. Since then, Apple has added a lot of functionality, but still hasn't deigned to gift us with Find... on page. Rafael Cimatti (via App Advice) is keeping the handy Javascript bookmarklet alive via Cydia (though it works on any iPhone). It can't fully replace a built in command, with next, back, etc. options, etc. but if it isn't 100% right, it is 100% "right now".

Here's the bookmarklet: Find...

Either bookmark it on your desktop browser (drag it to the bookmark bar on desktop Safari) and sync it over, or on your iPhone copy the code after the break, bookmark a random page, edit it, change the name, and paste in the code (check the App Advice link above for step by step instructions).

And next time you're on a page, hit the bookmark, type in your text, and find away!

Have an iPhone Pro Tip of you own to share? Send it in!

[via Daveizzle]

javascript:void%28s%3Dprompt%28%27Find%20text%3A%27%2C%27%27%29%29%3Bs%3D%27%28%27+s+%27%29%27%3Bx%3Dnew%20RegExp%28s%2C%27gi%27%29%3Brn%3DMath.floor%28Math.random%28%29*100%29%3Brid%3D%27z%27%20+%20rn%3Bb%20%3D%20document.body.innerHTML%3Bb%3Db.replace%28x%2C%27%3Cspan%20name%3D%27%20+%20rid%20+%20%27%20id%3D%27%20+%20rid%20+%20%27%20style%3D%5C%27color%3A%23000%3Bbackground-color%3Ayellow%3B%20font-weight%3Abold%3B%5C%27%3E%241%3C/span%3E%27%29%3Bvoid%28document.body.innerHTML%3Db%29%3Balert%28%27Found%20%27%20+%20document.getElementsByName%28rid%29.length%20+%20%27%20matches.%27%29%3Bwindow.scrollTo%280%2Cdocument.getElementsByName%28rid%29%5B0%5D.offsetTop%29%3B

Google Blogs (via Gizmodo) has announced that the long-rumored Geo-Location based services in Mobile Safari are indeed included in iPhone 3.0 and being put to use in "My Location" searches by Google.com on the iPhone.

As of today, when you visit www.google.com from Safari on your iPhone 3.0, you can choose to turn on My Location by tapping on the link on the homepage. When you tap on the "update" link, your location will be updated and displayed right there on the homepage. Whenever you want to refresh your location, just tap the "update" link. Testing this in New York, my search for "jazz clubs" returned a handful of places within walking distance. I picked one, tapped the phone number, made a reservation, and we were set for the night.

As to privacy concerns, Google stresses the service is opt-in and can be turned off via the Preferences link at the bottom of the page. Also, it currently only works in English in the US and UK, though other languages and regions are said to be coming soon.

Good news for those looking for a local burger joint, bad news for those hoping Latitude wouldn't be stuck in the browser...

We're going to kick off the Palm Pre vs. iPhone 3G S excitement with a simple browser smackdown.  The short version: the iPhone 3G S is faster in our video above, but the Pre is close and actually is edging out the iPhone after the just-applied 1.03 webOS update.  The part you actually should pay attention to is "time to content," i.e. how long it takes to load up the stuff you actually want to read as opposed to the javascripty-bits. Bottom line: speed-wise there's a hair's-breadth between the two browsers, it's so close that you really ought not be making your purchase decision based on it -- or bragging about it either way.

Feature-wise, we give the edge to the iPhone 3G S -- they are on version 3.0 while the Pre is just getting started at 1.02 / 1.03.  The ability to pop up a link in a new browser window is quite nice -- not to mention Autofill.  I myself prefer the Pre's Card metaphor to the in-app tabs of Safari, but that 's a matter of taste.

Stay tuned for more as we pit these devices against each other!

[cross-posted at PreCentral.net]

Update: As noted in the comments and in a raft of emails, you can open links in a new card on the Pre with Opt + Space + Tap.  It works, but Palm, really, Opt + Tap isn't really doing anything here.  Just saying. Thanks everybody!

Two iPhones enter, only one can be left standing. Which one will it be? Well, both devices got the Nitro JavaScript rendering engine boost courtesy of iPhone 3.0, but the iPhone 3G S brought a little gun to this knife-fight in the form of double the RAM, a faster GPU, and a super souped up processor with higher clock speed and phat'er pipes. (Think 486 vs. Pentium on the desktop).

So let's just load up our friends CrackBerry.com, PreCentral.net, theiPhoneblog.com HQ, and Steve Job's perennial New York Times test page and see.

(No, not which will win -- we already know the answer to that! -- but by how much?!)

Well, at least kill the need for Flash on the iPhone? Daring Fireball says a simple "yes" to Yahoo! Tech's question.

The idea is that a standards based technology, open and broadly used, could make redundant proprietary and sometimes bloated and buggy plugins like Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.

Apple's Safari, including Mobile Safari on the iPhone, and Mozilla Firefox are already supporting HTML5 features. Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- so far -- isn't.

The article gives pros and cons for both sides of the debate. Since Apple is introduction the third generation of their iPhone software tomorrow, and still no Flash in sight, we likely have a good idea which way they're leaning already...

Last week we posted on Google's Latitude service coming to the iPhone by way of Safari. Of course, as Computerworld (via MacRumors) points out, for the location-tracking buddy service to work in the browser, the browser must support geo-location, and not just for Google.

According to BrowserSphere developers were told back in March that Safari would support the Geolocation JavaScript classes, which "work with the onboard location services to retrieve the current location of the device."

So we guess IP addresses won't be the only way for annoying web ads to try and localize us any more?

Daring Fireball has been looking into Google's new Gmail WebApp for the iPhone and the technologies behind it. We already know the iPhone packs a version of Apple's Safari Web Browser which is, in some ways, even more advanced than desktop Safari on the Mac. SQLite database caching, for example, for example users continue to archive or star messages even when there's no internet connection. What's more interesting to him, us -- and likely users -- is how that technology improves functionality.

Says Gruber:

I use the native iPhone Mail app to read email on my iPhone, but I’m tempted to start using the Gmail web app for one reason: I waste a lot of time switching back and forth between Mail and Safari after tapping a URL in an email. When using the Gmail web app, tapped links simply open in a new Safari tab. The iPhone Mail app needs a built-in web view, like what most popular iPhone Twitter clients offer.

Google's Alex Nicolaou has blogged about the process.

We once wondered what the future of WebApps would be in a post-native apps world. Looks like Google expects -- and is out to prove -- things still look very bright.

Anyone else considering ditching the built-in mobile Mail app for some web-based Gmail?

Looks like another desktop Safari 4 Beta feature has found its way into the iPhone 3.0 version of the browser. Now, when you go to a site with an enhanced security certificate, the text on top of the browser turns green (like the green bar, we get it!), with little green lock icon beside it, and the name of the certificate's trusted organization. For example, the above screenshots show how Apple's order status page looks on iPhone 2.2.1 (top right) and iPhone 3.0.

What does this mean for users? In an age of increased phishing attacks, where bad sites try to trick you into thinking they're your bank or shop and steak your login or credit card info, this is one more visual cue in your assessment process for determining if you can trust that the website is what it says it is.

Come iPhone 3.0, look for the green text on top of Safari and carefully check to make sure the company it identifies is the one you want to be dealing with.

We mentioned yesterday that iPhone OS 3.0's Mobile Safari Browser was being reported as faster than the current iPhone OS 2.2.1 version. Now Ars Technica has run the numbers and the results are pretty impressive. Check out their full report for all the details, but this sums it up nicely:

According to our sources, the 3.0 beta still has some stability and speed issues, so that makes these results that much more impressive. While the overall average gives the iPhone 3.0 beta a 300 percent speed advantage, some of the individual tests show 6x, 8x, or even 11x improvements—the bitwise "AND" function even runs 16x faster than in the current version of Mobile Safari.

Should make the release version of the new, Nitro-powered Mobile Safari 3.0 fairly impressive, come summer! Bring on them multi-app Facebook pages, the iPhone will be ready! (Joking... a bit.)

We so fondly remember Palm's Roger McNamee stating the Pre would be a million times faster on the web than the iPhone (now retracted), and even our sister-site PreCentral.net jumped on that band wagon, saying the Pre looked to be 4x faster than the iPhone.

Of course, we mentioned that on Sprint, lacking simultaneous voice and data, even a million times zero is still zero. Less flippantly, however, when Safari 4 Beta shipped for the desktop with its new ultra-fast Nitro (formerly SquirrelFish) rendering engine, we figured it would only be a matter of time before that scaled down to the iPhone's version of Safari (based on the same WebKit foundations as desktop Safari, as is the Palm Pre browser and Android Chrome Lite).

Now Daring Fireball and Wayne Pan posit that turbo boost might have already happened in iPhone OS 3.0:

Wayne Pan has braved the NDA waters and published JavaScript benchmarks for iPhone OS 3.0, and they are impressive — with results ranging between 3× and 10× faster than iPhone OS 2.2. And I’ll confirm that MobileSafari on iPhone OS 3.0 passes my simple “could be Nitro” recursion depth test.

From what we've seen of 3.0, it seems that way to us as well. Along with HTML5, CSS, 2D and 3D animation, anti-phishing, AutoFill, etc., it will be interesting to see what Apple and the WebKit team can pull of by the time iPhone 3.0 launches this summer...

Apple has gotten some much-deserved heat in the past for not adapting anti-phishing measures into their Safari browser. Phishing is when "bad guys" make look-alike websites and try to trick users into entering personal data like passwords or credit cards numbers, so they can be used to break into user accounts or make fraudulent purchases. We've had some warnings about MobileMe phishing attacks in the past for example.

Safari 4 Beta on the desktop finally took steps to address this, and it looks like Apple is rolling the anti-phishing alerts out to Mobile Safari as well! As more and more people start using mobile browsers for banking, email, and other security-sensitive tasks, Apple can't be too careful.

Also of note in the screen shot above is auto-fill. We're guessing this works like the desktop, automatically entering common data in text fields like name, email address, etc. (Of course, the convenience comes at the expense of the very security mentioned above -- balance your usage accordingly!)

Ars Technica has a great article up on the future of web design, involving 2D and 3D graphics and transformations, and what's most interesting is that it's the iPhone's Mobile Safari browser that right now seems to be leading the way in surfacing this next-gen (Flash killing?) goodness for general users:

The WebKit team added CSS Transforms to nightly builds of WebKit back in October 2007, transforms that included scaling, rotation, skewing, and translation in 2D space. As the specification matured, 3D and animation capabilities were added. Eventually, the 3D transforms were broken out into a specification of their own. Though WebKit has had these 3D transform capabilities for some time, only Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch has them enabled.

Check out some of the other demos, and get the full scoop, over on Ars.

Apple has just released the first public beta of their new Safari 4 web browser for both the Mac and Windows (the Windows version now looking like an actual XP or Vista app). New features include an iTunes/Finder-like CoverFlow visualization for exploring browser history, and Apple TV commercial-esque visual wall of Top Sites (which should cause the same potential pr0nbarassment for some as Chrome and Opera's "favorite" visualizers in the past), the ability to search, spotlight-like through past sites, Chrome-style top-mounted tabs, robust developer tools... and most important for the iPhone and iPod touch's future -- the new Nitro Engine for screaming fast JavaScript rendering.

Yes, JavaScript engines are the new speeds and feeds. Bottom line, the more script, the slower and heavier the site. Hey, BlackBerry still turns JavaScript off by default on the Bold and Storm to get anything approaching decent rendering speeds. But with Google's V8 and Firefox's TraceMonkey helping push the technology -- not to mention every Web 2.0 site ladling on the AJAX -- we're going to need all the power we can get, especially on the iPhone.

As for the rest: CoverFlow already works well on the iPhone, though I'm not sure we need it in Mobile Safari, and the smaller screen might make Top Sites a little too tiny to be useful. And the search? Heh. We still need Spotlight on the entire iPhone, so how about we get that rolled up together?

Anything else you want to see in Mobile Safari 3.0?

According to Admob (via TUAW), Apple's share of the mobile Web is big and might just be getting bigger:

Worldwide requests from Apple devices grew 28% month over month to 1.2 billion in January. Building on its strong December, iPod Touch growth outpaced iPhone growth in top markets. The iPod Touch now represents 40% of Apple requests, up from 20% in September.

People like great mobile browsers that can handle HTML, CSS, and AJAX, who'd have thunk it?

Of course, competing devices from Nokia, Palm, and Google, are beginning to use Apple's WebKit in browsers of their own, Firefox keeps threatening to push their mobile Fennec client to release status, and RIM is inching the Bold towards usability, so can Apple and the iPhone/Safari team maintain their leading edge?

WebKit is Apple's open source evolution of the old Linux Konquerer KHTML browser, and it forms the foundation of Safari on both the desktop and the iPhone (and Google Android, Palm Pre, Nokia tablets, etc.). Their Surfin' Safari blog has just announced CSS animation support, but the better news (via MacRumors), is that iPhone (and iPod touch) Safari already supports both CSS animation and 3D.

Want to check it out? Just hit up this awesome animated falling leaf demo on your iPhone!

Overly provocative headline not withstanding, and while this doesn't address the ubiquity of Flash video, it should go a long way towards enabling more scalable and open interactivity on the web. (Flash sites don't always scale well to small screens, after all).

Okay, I'm a web geek, I admit it, but is anyone else excited? Or do we just fear that it will all-too-quickly be perverted into iPhone optimized punch-the-monkey banner ads?

It looks like Apple has begin to approve some 3rd party web browsers for the iPhone. Like the (Jobs save us) "fart" apps that were pulled or pending for a long while only to flood the market on some magic-8-ball decided day, some of these web browsers were biding their time in the App Store approval queue for a good long while according to MacRumors:

 Edge Browser (Free) - No loss of screen real estate to the address or navigation bars. Incognito ($1.99) - Now you can browse without leaving a history of any kind. WebMate:Tabbed Browser ($0.99) - Web Mate simplifies browsing by queuing up all the links you click on, then allowing you to view them one by one when you're ready. And Shaking Web ($1.99) - adds a sophisticated algorithm to compensate small hand shaking to allow for easier reading.

BUT (you did see the big old BUT in the headline, right), those thinking, hoping, praying, or reporting that these are actually alternative rendering engines need to back on up a second. To the best of our knowledge, these are merely different UI implementations of the built-in iPhone WebKit rendering engine, much like those already used in Twitterrific, 1Password, and other long-ago approved Apps. The only difference -- that TiPb can tell -- is that these are stand-alone iPhone WebKit implementations (like MobileSafari, though more limited due to SDK restrictions and non-default status).

So, no Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or (Jobs save us again!) IE 6 for the iPhone just yet, okay?

Still, for those who want different user experiences and features, well, now you can go get them! Anyone try one yet?

The previous attempt to make an end run around the iPhone's lack of cut/copy and paste involved shared code called OpenClip and relied on a loophole Apple closed in iPhone OS 2.1

This latest tilt at the text editing windmill targets only 2 apps instead:

Pastebud—as the service is called—works using two bookmarks in Safari. One prepares and loads the page you are viewing, ready to select text at the touch of a finger. From there, you can copy any text you want and create a new mail message with that text in it. In addition to that, you will be able to copy and paste in the text field of a different web page.

Check out the full story and video over at Gizmodo. And then let us know if you think this is enough -- for now -- to satisfy your cut/copy and paste cravings?

Wired's blog picked up a story from iPhone Atlas today about a minor MobileSafari browser UI change that sees the (defaults to Google) search box surfaced right on top beside the URL address box (currently it only pops up when the top box is activated to save on vertical real estate). To compensate, the Refresh button gets demoted and tucked inside the refresh box. Not sure about the usability on this change yet...?

The more interesting speculation is about cut and paste, which Wired claims NO specific info on, but offers this as part of the ongoing search for some reason why Apple hasn't yet implemented this seemingly core functionality:

It's possible that Apple is taking so long to implement copy and paste not because it is difficult, but because Apple is reinventing it. Imagine a system-wide menu added to all applications which, instead of shuffling items off to a clipboard, lists all the places you can send that file (or text string). This would be like the existing "Open with" option available in the Mac's right-click menu -- each application effectively reports to the OS exactly what kind of files it can handle and the OS remembers this. Thus a picture could be sent to not only the Photo app, but to any other photo program. Text could be sent directly to any open dialog box in, say, Safari.

Sounds good to us. What about it, Joz?

WebKit, the open source foundation behind Apple's Safari for Mac and MobileSafari on the iPhone (not to mention Google Chrome, Nokia, and Adobe) introduced the SquirrelFish JavaScript engine a while back, and billed it as the fastest on the planet. Then came Mozilla's (Firefox) TraceMonkey. Then came Google's V8. But you just can't keep a good SquirrelFish down -- not when it's willing to go... Extreme!

Surfin' Safari, the WebKit blog, made the announcement this week. But what does it mean for iPhone users? Muchfasterwebsiterendering.

As WebApp's (browser-based productivity tools like Google Docs and MobileMe, or Web 2.0 social sites like Facebook and Twitter) grow not only in popularity but in function, they become heavier to load and slower to run, largely because of all the JavaScript being processed in the background. This is especially true for a mobile device like the iPhone. The ability to tear through those pages -- without crashing! -- becomes incredibly important in the growing "cloud" based computing world.

In other words, this will make future versions of MobileSafari screaming fast.

Can we have it now please?

(For those interested in how SFX compares with TraceMonkey and V8, check out the stats!)

Dieter just told us about Crackberry Kevin's uber-frustrating experiences trying to pit the iPhone 3G and Blackberry Bold head to head in the browser war to end all browser wars. But -- silver lining -- for iPhone users, not only did we snag bragging rights, but a handy tip as well!

Unlike the Blackberry Bold, the iPhone defaults to having Javascript enabled. As anyone who's waited -- and waited -- for an overstuffed Facebook profile to load already knows, Javascript can be heavy lifting for a browser. For WebApps, it's a necessary sacrifice, but if all you want is casual browsing, you can turn Javascript off and send MobileSafari into turbo mode.

Here's how:

From the iPhone home screen, tap Settings. Scroll down and tap the Safari button. Under Security, slide Javascript to Off.

There you go, you've just switched to light, clean HTML and CSS mode (still technically "just the internet" -- unless you're in the UK...). In Crackberry.com's tests, it made a big difference on some sites. Let us know how it works for you!

(Thanks to Crackberry Kevin!)

Between the time you click a link and a web page finishes loading on your iPhone, there are many factors that ultimately decide just how fast that process will be, including connection speed (2.5 G EDGE/3G HSDPA/WiFi) CPU speed, and rendering engine. Like desktop Safari, Mobile Safari uses Apple's open source WebKit rendering engine, and it seems like for 2.0, WebKit has gotten its turbo on, especially in handling Javascript. Says Daring Fireball:

For all the hubbub regarding the new App Store, most “iPhone software” runs in the web browser. But improvements in WebKit performance often help native iPhone app performance, too — a slew of my favorite native iPhone apps have built-in WebKit browsers (e.g., NetNewsWire, Twitterrific, Instapaper, and Cocktails). When WebKit performance improves, any app that uses WebKit improves, and WebKit improved a lot between iPhone 1.1.4 and 2.0.0

The original iPhone on 1.0 was already fast compared to some 3G phones because of the speed of its CPU and the optimization of its WebKit engine. Now it's getting silly fast. And I don't think we've even gotten the extra nitro from the new Safari 4 and SquirelFish tech yet either?

Check out Daring Fireball for the graphs and stats...

Hot on the heels of the just released Safari 3.1, some of whose features are reportedly trickling down to baby brother MobileSafari on the iPhone 2.0 firmware, Apple has reportedly begun seeding early builds of Safari 4 (5526.11.2) to developers.

The big news? WebKit's screaming fast SquirelFish Javascript engine is a go, and 53% faster, which will be huge for Web 2.0 apps like Google's... and the newly announced MobileMe service from Apple, of course!

Other new features include the ability to spin off "Site Specific Browsers" (or SSBs), which are basically thin browser clients for your favorite Web 2.0 apps -- imagine a dedicate window on your desktop just for MobileMe. Continued CSS attribute additions like gradients, masks, and reflections are also on spec (Gee, gradients and reflections? From Apple? What a surprise...)

Combined with the CSS and HTML 5.0 features already added in 3.1, such as animation, video, and audio tags, Apple seems to be retaining its focus on open, web standard interactivity, in conjunction with old nemesis Flash and similar -- sometimes buggy -- technologies like Silverlight on the desktop (for now), and in lieu of them on the iPhone. Add in QuickTime X, and Apple is definitely trying to leverage some space away from the current, pseudo-proprietary web video giants.

While OS 10.6 Snow Leopard isn't expected until mid-2009, Safari 4 seems on the fast track for a much sooner release.

Can another MobileSafari bump for the iPhone be far behind?

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We're running a new series here at TiPb (Titanium Powerbook? No, The iPhone Blog!) that brings older but still relevant/interesting/noteworthy articles, reviews, and blog posts back into the forefront of the discussion. Hopefully, we'll be able to uncover some great articles that you might have missed and offer further insight on everyone's favorite toy.

Also, it'll help transition our still new merger, PhoneDifferent fans will get a taste of TiPb writing and TiPb readers will catch up with what has happened in the PhoneDifferent world! Think of it as a blog within a blog or for the metaphorically inclined, dinnertime stories at a big happy family reunion..

Today, we'll bring back the topic of Bookmarklets. Mike Overbo, our Editor Emeritus, found that Bookmarklets extend the reach and capabilities of the iPhone's Safari browser. Essentially, Bookmarklets are small computer applications stored as a URL on your bookmarks bar. Examples would include a Find feature, IMDB search, eBay search, etc.

To use these Bookmarklets, simply store them to your iPhone's bookmarks and when you are in need of, say a quick Wikipedia search, open that particular Bookmarklet and it'll prompt you with a direct search screen rather than waiting for the page to open up. I use Bookmarklets everyday to quicken my online searching (darn that EDGE), take a look and see if there is anything you can use!

Read On For The Rest of the Links!

Collection of Bookmarklets There are a ton of links to Bookmarklets all across the interweb in this article. You can probably find a link to all the relevant Bookmarklets in the world here.

Bookmarklet / Favelet Smorgasbord The ever-so-helpful Mike even created some Bookmarklets on his own for the PD faithful! In this article there is a ton of useful Bookmarklets that range from math applications to simple general searches.

Tabbed Browsing Bookmarklet And to cap it off, we include probably one of the better Bookmarklets available, Tabulate allows Safari on the iPhone to re-create the 'open in new tab' feature. A great Bookmarklet that I use nearly everyday.

Well, that's it for Bookmarklets and this edition of In Case You Missed It. Hopefully you'll find these tools useful and we'll come back soon for more great iPhone articles, neat iPhone features, and news that you may have missed!

We've covered the iPhone Flash saga ad nauseam here, but in an interesting post involving the technology itself, NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons (via DaringFireball) shares some interesting error/crash logs highlighting the instability-adding benefits of Flash, and the rapid catchup of Microsoft's copycat, Silverlight:

I’ve said it before — one of my favorite things about the iPhone is no Flash. I will now add and no SilverlightPlugin.

As a web developer who uses Flash routinely, I've also come to enjoy its absence on the iPhone (and the absence of like technologies, and even prehistoric kin like animated GIFs), and the amazing increase that absence give to the information over noise ratio. It's led me closer towards "Web 2.0"-style AJaX for interactivity, and away from the proprietary, and often overkill, that is plugin technology.

What do you think?

Have you ever been surfing the real internet on your iPhone, discovered and amazing picture, and wished you could save it to your photo album?

Well, now you can.

Here's how: Touch the image you want to save, hold your finger there for a very long time, and -- boom! -- iPhone will ask you if you want to Save Photo, Go To URL, or Cancel.

It's that easy.

For more information, visit Gizmodo's anonymous tipsters who just love them some digging around in Apple's iPhone 2.0 Beta 3 software.

The folks at Mozilla are still fuming mad over Safari-gate. The developers behind the popular open source browser Firefox stated flatly that no efforts will be made to port Firefox to iPhone, blaming Apple's Gestapo-like restrictive software license.

So this means I can't look forward to a browser that consumes half my memory and grinds to a halt on AJAX-heavy websites? Tragic.

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Blimey! Hey, Bert - you see this news on the telly today? Yeah, tarts. It says ere that iPhone is kicking Nokia's bum something awful in the browser business - a real flogging as it were. Some blokes at a firm called StatCounter is sayin it'll overtake Nokia soon in mobile web share, and you know how the Finns are about losing.

Remember what they did when they lost the world cup soccer championship? Helsinki burned to the ground, it did. Bloody business that was. God save Safari.

ReadVia TUAW

iPhone users can now more easily access and update their Twitter feeds thanks to Twitter's efforts to improve support for mobile browsers, including Safari. Now when you access Twitter.com from your iPhone, you are greeted with a mobile friendly version of the service instead of the standard "pinch me please" desktop version.

Finally I can inform my followers of important moments in day. "I'm eating a ham sandwich, sitting on the john."

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Apple has released their latest, greatest, fastest, and coolest new browser yet -- Safari 3.1 (big brother to the MobileSafari Touch browser built into the iPhone).

Safari is based on Apple's open-source WebKit (a branch of the Konqueror/KHTML engine), the same foundation Nokia, Google's upcoming Android, and even Adobe's AIR runtime get their render on with.

In addition to faster rendering and Javascript, what makes this latest release so exciting is built-in support for the new HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) 5 draft. Apple VP of Marketing Phil Schiller tells us:

"Safari 3.1 for Mac and Windows is blazingly fast, easy to use and features an elegant user interface. And best of all, Safari supports the latest audio, video [as tags -- yes!] and animation standards [CSS animation FTW!] for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience."

And (looking at you Google Gears!) local SQLite databases for offline functionality.

These features, while nice for the desktop, seem perfect for an upcoming rev of Safari on the iPhone as well. Being able to easily code rich media sites that support enough interactivity to avoid the more complex Flash will give a lot of much-needed power to entertainment web-sphere. Offline data access, of course, opens things up wide for software-as-services WebApps like browser-based office suites. (Picture collaborating on an online spread sheet, taking off on an airplane with the browser keeping your portion of the data live and available, and then syncing back up with the team when you land).

Lighter? Faster? More Standard? To steal Dieter's catch-phrase -- Yes Please!

Already rocking Safari 3.1? Head over to Webkit's Surfin' Safari blog for the latest Acid3 (standards compliance test) results and sample some of the new features!

The New York Times is reporting that the iPhone started its life out as a "Safari Pad". An Internet tablet if you will. Once Steve Jobs saw it, he used his panache and morphed it into an iPhone. The author also goes on to say that when he spoke to Steve Jobs at the recent MacWorld in January, he asked if there would be a larger form-factor iPod touch device. Steve Jobs replied,

"I can't talk about unannounced products."

I would personally love a tablet sized device that had Wi-Fi and a data connection a-la Amazon's Kindle. What is in the future for Apple?

We've heard it before, Google has an iPhone fixation. Well it's looking like that fixation works both ways - apparently the earlier numbers we saw that said the iPhone was on the web more than any other mobile web browser were, how shall we say it? ....Ridiculously conservative.

Google sees 50 times more web searches from iPhones than they do from any other mobile browser:

Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset, adding weight to the group’s confidence at being able to generate significant revenues from the mobile internet.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. - Financial Times

If you still doubt that the iPhone was the #2 smartphone in the US, you can stop now.

Just. Wow.

What feature request has been on the lips of every iPhone user since the idolized gadget first came galloping out the gate? I'll give you a hint, it starts with the letter "F", and is the same thing your inebriated Uncle Frank does at family get togethers after knocking back one too many martinis. Of course, I'm talking about Flash.

GearLive claims that Apple will be announcing Adobe Flash for WebKit (aka mobile Safari). There have been rumors to this effect for some time, but with the blessed arrival of the much anticipated SDK now only days away, this seems plausible. Still, I wouldn't start bookmarking YouTube.com on your iPhone just yet. Let's wait for Apple make this rumor a reality.

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It seems that Mozilla has finally acknowledged the need for a mobile browser on the mozilla codebase that isn't wreteched. PC Advisor reports that the mozilla foundation will be putting resources towards a mobile browser. And they didn't act until now on the mobile browsing kit on the iPhone, 3 months after WebKit shines on the iPhone. To add insult to injury, Nokia has been using Apple's WebKit, the browsing engine that powers Safari on the iPhone, instead of anything based off of Mozilla's code, though Nokia also has a mozilla-basbed browser on their N800 tablet.

For those of you that are aware of Minimo, the project to bring mozilla to mobile devices, erm, make that Windows Mobile devices, the project is essentially dead. Minimo, doomed with only one developer who was not willing to expend extra time on the project, will never see an update again. A mobile browser project will now instead start from scratch.

You know, Opera has really been on top of the browser space. They put opera pretty much everywhere they could, and really got it out there. Their J2ME browser, Opera Mini, is a breakthrough bit of software for featurephones. I'm not generally liable to say anything pleasant about Internet Explorer, and by extension Pocket IE, but Pocket IE was a sight better than Minimo. It makes sad that Mozilla didn't get until now that the mobile browsing world isn't really a segment of the market where you want to be in last place.

Information Week reviewed the browsing experience on many current U.S. handsets, and came to the conclusion that the iPhone provided the best user experience. I'll provide two quotes to give some context.

"There's no need to compare the Safari browser on the iPhone with a desktop browser. It is a desktop browser"

"The good news, as you might expect, is the Apple iPhone. The genius of Apple is its ability, over and over again, to completely reinvent, from the ground up, the user interface for hardware, and to support it with brilliant software. Web browsing on the iPhone is a paradigm shift, a completely different experience -- just as the BlackBerry was, in its time, a paradigm shift."

To be fair, Symbian -- a popular mobile system elsewhere in the world -- wasn't tested most likely due to the fact that no one uses Symbian in the States. Anyway, they're right in that MobileSafari delivers the same page that you'd see on a desktop browser. There are still some limitations, of course -- there's no Flash, no Java, and you can't download files. Some complicated sites don't work fully yet on MobileSafari; docs.google.com being a notable example. Is it still better than browsing on any other mobile platform? Well, yeah. Duh.

Enophi is a new online service designed specifically for iPhone users. This RSS feed reader allows you to track your favorite newsfeeds, sprinkled with some social web trappings as well.

The service works as advertised and is free. Just point your iPhone to enophi.com and register. Create a list of feeds, then sit back and let your fingers do the walking...or scrolling, such as it is.

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Mundu has a long pedigree in the world of business-class mobile instant messaging software. I have used their Mobile Messenger client on PalmOS and Windows Mobile - it works like magic. So it didn't take long for their developers to show some iPhone love.

The company has announced a web based service that fully supports iPhone, via Safari of course (we've heard this line before). To access the web client simply point your iPhone to iphone.mundu.com. Login to any existing IM accounts (Yahoo, Gtalk, AIM, or Windows Live Messenger protocols supported), and text your way to repetitive stress injury.

The service is in beta, so don't look surprised when Safari chokes and drops you back to the homescreen.

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InfoWorld pits three reigning Smartphones against the iPhone, comparing the browser experience of each platform. The verdict: Safari wins. Color me shocked.

This was a foregone conclusion. Mobile web browsers are simply crap compared to iPhone. I speak from experience as a Smartphone aficionado, having used every platform under the sun. None of the devices referenced in this article delivers even a remotely comparable experience to Safari.

iPhone includes a real web browser - a desktop web browser. Not the toy browsers you'll find on PalmOS, Blackberry or Windows Mobile, that render webpages through a paper shredder, producing a mangled stack of images and text.

While I won't deny that iPhone has a few shortcomings, web browsing isn't one of them.

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Coolgorilla.com breaks down language barriers and offers a novel way to meet foreign women in bars with the help of its talking translation service. Avoid those embarrassing social faux pas as you stumble to form poorly structured sentences from a book.

Just visit CoolGorilla.com on your iPhone - select any available sentence from the phrase book and your iPhone will repeat it back in the desired native tonque of your guests.

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What better way to waste spend your time than downloading thousands of Widgets, slideshows, gamecasts, and feeds right on your iPhone. Plusmo offers a very simple iconic web frontend that delivers easy access to online content, suited for mobile devices. It works very similar to another online mobile content service called Widsets.

Plusmo goes a bit further my creating a homescreen-like interface and enabling web content developers and bloggers (that would be me) to create one-click publishing links that allow users to quickly subscribe to your mobilized content.

And like so many other Web 2.0 services...this one is free!

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Chapura has added a new application to its product lineup, called FoldedMirror. What this application does is enable iPhone users to connect with Outlook Calendar and Contacts folders right from their device, by mirroring data created on a PC running Microsoft Outlook. A host PC is required, with Outlook running at all times, in order for this process to work. FoldedMirror doesn't come cheap, however. A single user license will set you back $49.95. Ouch!

I haven't yet put this software to the test since I already use a hosted Exchange account but it looks very promising. You can read the full press release here.

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Over the years, NewsGator Go! has remained one of my all time favorite mobile RSS feed readers. The mobile client app to NewsGator's popular RSS aggregation service was been available for Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Blackberry for some time now. And while the iPhone may not support third party software, yet, Newsgator provides a mobile web accessible service that supports iPhone. Just point Safari (via iPhone) to m.newsgator.com and login to your NewsGator account. From there you can access your feed through a simplified web interface optimized for iPhone. Enjoy!

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Earthcomber is an interesting location-based service that bills itself as a "personal radar", providing an organized list of events and entertainment in relation to where you are. Just type mobile.earthcomber.com on your iPhone (Earthcomber will work with ANY web capable mobile phone) and Earthcomber's server will detect your locale. From there you are provided with category-based list of services such as Food, Music, Movies, Recreation & Sports, Adult Entertainment, etc.

The service works really well, based on my own testing. Not only did it correctly identify various entertainment venues in my area, I was even provided with basic mapping and driving instructions as well.

An online media service called Texterity delivers mobile editions to popular print magazines right to your iPhone, via Safari. In a nutshell, what Texterity does is simply digitize each print magazine page, turning it into an image file that can then be displayed and viewed within Safari much like a photo. Just point your browser (from the iPhone) to http://iphone.texterity.com/magazines/. Tap on any magazine that you like and a fully illustrated thumbnail library appears, representing pages from the selected magazine. Using the "Pinch" gesture, allows you to zoom and drag any portion of the document, making it readable. Believe it or not this is a workable solution. I've tried it myself.

Unfortunately no adult content is available, sorry pervs. And what's worse Rachael Ray's "EveryDay" Magazine is among the top featured. Having to see RR on my TV is nauseating enough. On my iPhone the experience is even more hideous.

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Psst...hey, buddy. Over here. So, you want to chat with your friends using AIM or iChat, on your iPhone? Well I got something for you. There's this place on the internets called FlickIM. Just point your browser (via iPhone) to flickIM.com. You punch in your AIM ID, they look the other way, and you send instant messages to your "associates". No questions asked.

I said no questions!

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Marcus Kazmierczak has created a fun little web based app called Name Tag, which is fairly self explanatory. Just visit the link below...punch in a name, and be a nobody no more.

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SeeFile is an online media storage and collaboration service focussed towards creative professionals. The company recently launched a service that offers up to 5GB of storage for photos, documents, video, and other forms of media, accessible right on your iPhone through Safari.

Where the cool factor comes into play, is that you can also manipulate and edit documents right from you browser as well, through an AJAXy interface. I like.

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Zimbra has announced mobile account access to iPhone users via it's new web service front-end called iZimbra. Zimbra, for those of you unfamiliar with the product, is an open source messaging and collaboration solution that is what one might describe as a Microsoft Exchange clone, offering the same functionality and collaboration exchange as Microsoft's proprietary corporate communication suite.

What iZimbra does is basically bring something very similar to OWA (Outlook Web Access) formatted to iPhones's mobile browser.

I've always been very curious about Zimbra and it looks extremely promising. I subscribe to a hosted Exchange account, so iZimbra is something I would find very compelling and usable were I hooked to Zimbra account.

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So now we know how iPhone will handle RSS, and as we feared it's through Safari. Apple has developed RSS viewing through a Safari-based web app (reader.mac.com). However, iPhone should be able to support my favorite RSS solutions; Google Reader. Can't wait to try that out.

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The folks at 101 Cookbooks have developed an iPhone-friendly versions of their website to better accommodate its native screen resolution (HVGA). Don't ask me why they thought it necessary given that Safari already enables full web browsing, negating the need for such "mobile web" content. Buy hey, who am I to argue.

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ReadThanks to Chris Kerins for the tip

The list of development projects for iPhone web apps is growing. BarCamp offers a retreat for developers who are devoted solely iPhone.

iPhone Developers Camp is an upcoming gathering, inspired by BarCamp, SuperHappyDevHouse, and MacHack, to develop web-based applications and optimize web sites for iPhone. It is a non-commercial event, organized by volunteers, with attendance free to all. By the completion of the weekend event, a number of iPhone-ready web applications and web sites will be launched to the public. The event will be held in California, and out-of-town guests are welcome.

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Fifteen days to go before iPhone officially launches, and already web apps are popping up like ragweed in my backyard. This interesting concept is called iTweetr, which acts as a web-based Twitter client accessible through Safari. It works under Firefox too. Visit http://dev.deanjrobinson.com/itweetr/yourusername to try it out under your own Twitter account.

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Some industrious haxor developer has created an interesting yet simple demo web application, highlighting what is possible via iPhone's Safari browser. I still have very mixed feelings about this framework. Maybe I've been hanging around PDAs too long, but I prefer system-native applications as apposed to the Web 2.0 approach.

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