Apple's Award-Winning Customer Support in Action

At the beginning of November last year, I finally managed to get my hands on an iPhone 4. I’m nothing short of delighted with the phone, which addresses many of the issues that I had with my old iPhone 3G (slow performance, crappy camera, no rotation lock, etc.). When I went to update my iPhone [...]

The Web Browser is Dead. Or Pregnant. Or Something.

In August, Wired published an article entitled “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet“, along with a companion piece “The Web Is Dead? A Debate“. (The latter benefits from the participation of Tim O’Reilly, whose vision of the internet’s future is as insightful as any I’ve seen.) The provocative title, predictably, engendered a lively [...]

Can Apple Save the Publishing Industry?

I’ve read the Economist religiously for over 15 years. For many of those years I bought a copy every week at the newsstand, and I’ve subscribed for the past couple of years. A few weeks ago, I let my subscription lapse. The reason is a web service-cum-iPhone application called Instapaper. Dragging their bookmarklet into your [...]

Are Web Apps an Endangered Species?

The launch of the iPhone App Store got me thinking about the future of web apps. After all, Apple had initially announced that the SDK for the iPhone would be Safari. In other words, iPhone applications would be web apps. As a proponent of using web technologies for application development, I rejoiced. The approach is [...]

Apple Ramps Up Its iPhone RIA Platform

While industry observers focus on AIR and Silverlight, efforts by Adobe and Microsoft respectively to implement their vision of a more compelling web experience, Apple is slowly slipping in through the backdoor. The other day I hypothesized that Apple’s aggressive tactics for pushing Safari on Windows users were all about plans to turn WebKit into [...]

Steve Jobs Says Flash Sucks

Well, actually he didn’t. When CNet initially reported on the last Apple shareholder meeting, his comments about Flash on the iPhone, buried in a list of bullet points, seemed innocent enough: Turning back to the iPhone, don’t expect support for Adobe’s Flash technology anytime soon. The full-blown PC Flash version “performs too slow to be [...]

Flash on the iPhone?… Probably Not

There’s a reason that they call them rumors. The other day, a lot of sources (including Just Browsing) were pointing to a Gear Live article claiming that Flash support for the iPhone web browser is just around the corner. Ryan Stewart, who works for Adobe, doesn’t rule out the possibility but says on his blog [...]

Flash Coming to the iPhone

Support for Adobe Flash is high on the list of iPhone browser improvements I’ve been yearning for. According to Gear Live, the wait is nearly over. As rumors go, this one is pretty plausible, as is the author’s speculation that the launch will be timed to coincide with the release of the official iPhone SDK [...]

Apple Edges Towards RIA Viability

MacRumors is reporting that Apple has shipped a new Safari beta to developers with a number of HTML5 features: audio/video tags, SQL storage, downloadable fonts, CSS transforms/animations and a new DOM function (getElementsByClassName). This puts Apple in pole position among browser vendors with respect to HTML5 support, although Mozilla is hot on its heels with [...]

Browser Trends: Web-Enabled TVs

Is the television next in line for a big technology-driven overhaul as the transformation of mobile phones into miniature computers continues apace? A panoply of set-top boxes are vying to serve as the brains of the humble boob tube, from PVRs (TiVo and company) through game consoles (XBox, Playstation, Wii) to streaming media boxes (Apple [...]