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Posts tagged with "browser"

iChromy Wants To Bring The Chrome Experience To The iPad

Released earlier today for free on the App Store and developed by the same folks behind web-based bookmarking service Diigo, iChromy is a new third-party iPad browser that aims at bringing the Google Chrome experience on the tablet, obviously without using Chrome’s underlying Chromium open-source project, which can’t be implemented by developers due to Apple’s restrictions. From the name of the app to the iTunes description, the developers of iChromy don’t hide their intentions of developing a heavily Chrome-inspired browser for the iPad; while it still might not look as beautiful as this mockup, I took the app for a quick spin to see whether Chrome (which I love and use on my Mac desktop) could have a proper, unofficial, lightweight counterpart on the iPad.

iChromy is free and the developers will likely introduce a Pro version with more features and deeper Diigo integration in the future, but right now what we have is a simple iPad browser that lacks several must-have functionalities (most of them also available in Safari and not necessarily in powerful alternatives like iCab Mobile) but it’s got tabs on top, a Lion-like Reading List (with the same eyeglasses icon) and decent memory management. More importantly, iChromy has an Omnibox that allows you to search and type addresses in the same bar, like Chrome. So while tabs on top and the Omnibox make for a nice Chrome-like experience that reminded me why it’s still possible to innovate in web browsers on any device, iChromy falls short in the details: you can’t re-arrange tabs, you can’t tap on the status bar to scroll a webpage to the top, you can’t pin tabs. The Omnibox is really, really nice, but the app’s keyboard doesn’t have a .com button and there’s no way to get search suggestions or modify the default search engine. Bookmarks and history are displayed in the Omnibox, but the lack of the .com button on the iPad’s soft keyboard is annoying. Similarly, you can create bookmarks by hitting the “star” button in the Omnibox, but you can’t organize these bookmarks in folders, sync them back to the cloud or import / export them. The Reading List, however, works fairly well in the way it makes entire webpages available offline. Too bad it doesn’t sync anywhere else either, which comes as a surprise considering Diigo’s cloud-oriented nature.

In spite of its missing features, I can’t say iChromy isn’t “nice” in how it mimics Chrome for Mac. The browser is very lightweight, it never crashed on me with multiple pages open in the background and, personally, I think it’s always great to see a browser with tabs on top (I was a huge fan of Safari 4 beta, until Apple killed that magnificent tab implementation). Overall, I see Chromy as an interesting experiment that a) needs some obvious adjustments like the .com button, top scrolling and search suggestions and b) with an upcoming Pro version could have a chance to become a Chrome-inspired, powerful competitor to my personal favorite iCab. We’ll see. In the meantime, go download the app here.

Evernote Revamps Chrome Extension, Announces Developer Conference

Evernote, the digital capture tool that allows you to save anything from the web and access it from a variety of devices and computers including iPhones and Macs, announced earlier today an updated version of the popular Chrome extension that, following the recent interface changes to the iPhone app, offers a more elegant way to clip content from webpages and have it synchronized with your Evernote account.

The new extension, available here, packs a whole new UI with slick buttons and text entry fields for quick tag and note input, but more importantly adds a new Article Clip feature that, with just one click on the browser’s toolbar, automatically selects the main content of an article to save it as full-text in Evernote. The extension worked perfectly with all the blogs I’ve visited today, and the new extension window makes it easy to edit the title, tags, notes and notebook. If you feel like you don’t want to clip the whole article, but only a portion, the extension is also capable of recognizing a selection and enable you to switch between that and the full article from a dropdown menu. The same menu is also being used to only clip a page’s direct URL, if you prefer to bookmark stuff, rather than archive it as a text document. Read more

Opera Mini for iPad Now Available

A few months after the first teaser shots and previews that confirmed Opera was working on an iPad version of its alternative browser featuring visual tabs and updated sharing options for the larger screen, the Norwegian company has finally released an update to its Opera Mini web browser this morning, bringing new features and an updated interface to the iPhone 4’s Retina Display, but most of all a native version to the iPad. You can find Opera for iPad now in the App Store.

We’ll have a full review of Opera for iPad later this week on MacStories, but in the meantime we’ve taken the app for a quick spin and we’re positively impressed with it. Visual tabs play an important role on the iPad, as they allow you to keep multiple pages open at once and actually see their previews concurrently on screen to quickly switch between them. Animations of the tab drawer at the top seem very smooth, though I’ve noticed that Opera Mini for iPad sometimes opens web pages in their iPhone mobile web view, rather than the desktop one as Safari for iPad does by default. This might be related to the server-side compression Opera does to speed up browsing, but we’ll make sure to further look into the Settings to resolve this issue. As for other features, a big Opera logo in the upper left corner allows you to access a popup menu with Bookmarks, History, Settings, and Sharing options, which include Facebook, Twitter and My Opera. Pages can be opened in background tabs, and overall the interface has been polished to look great on the iPhone 4 with minor tweaks here and there as well.

From the changelog:

  • Updated design with a fresh new look and feel
  • Super smooth pinch-to-zoom and panning
  • Support for iPhone 4 retina display, iPad, and iPad 2 devices
  • Direct share on Facebook, Twitter, and My Opera
  • Open new page in background tab
  • Improved international font support for Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, and other non-latin languages

Opera Mini for iPad can be downloaded here for free. Check out more screenshots and the promo video below. Read more

Tweet It Makes Tweeting from iOS Simple and Integrated

There’s no shortage of Twitter clients with embedded web views on the iPhone and iPad: most Twitter apps nowadays allow you to check out a webpage inline without leaving the timeline and jumping to Safari, thus making it easy to follow links from people you follow and go back to the main view in seconds. However, most of the time I still find myself discovering articles and stuff I want to tweet when browsing the Internet using Safari or iCab mobile: whether it’s a new post by Ben Brooks or Shawn Blanc, or a cool video I stumble upon on YouTube, I want to be able to easily send a webpage from the browser to my Twitter client of choice. But that’s usually not possible, as Twitter clients typically don’t offer integration with the system browser in the way I want – that is, being able to send both the webpage title and URL from Safari to the client. And those apps that do offer bookmarklets to send a link from the browser straight to the app are often limited to the link itself and not the title, which I always have to copy and paste manually.

Tweet It, a new $1.99 universal app released today, provides a sweet solution to tweet links to webpages including the title of the original source, also allowing you to set up a custom URL shortening service for a bit of personalization, and other options to make tweeting super simple. Tweet It is solely focused on enabling you to tweet links: the app supports multiple Twitter accounts but there’s so timeline at all – it’s an app to tweet links you found interesting. Sure you can send regular status updates too, but the focus on browser integration is made obvious by buttons to shorten a link using CloudApp, bit.ly and goo.gl, or an embedded web view that, through another button, lets you open webpages within Tweet It and choose to insert a title, URL or title+URL in the message. Alternatively, if you’ve copied a link from Safari and you launch Tweet It, the app will detect the link in your clipboard and offer you the possibility to fire it off to Twitter. There’s more: with the installation of a bookmarklet, you’ll be able to send a webpage title and URL from Safari to Tweet It in seconds. In any way you want to share a page, Tweet It has you covered.

Tweet It is minimal, simple and powered by a delicious UI. It runs both on the iPhone and iPad, and it’s got some clever ideas to make tweeting links a real pleasure. You can download Tweet It at $1.99 from the App Store.

Google News Goes Local on Mobile Browsers

With an official post on Google News’ blog, Google has announced that starting today in the United States, Google News will be able of displaying location-based content on iOS and Android mobile browsers. By giving access to your location information in iOS Safari, Google News will find news relevant to where you are in the US with a new section called “News near you.”

To use this feature, visit Google News from the browser of your Android smartphone or iPhone. If this is the first time you are visiting Google News on your phone since this feature became available, a pop-up will ask you if you want to share your location. If you say yes, news relevant to your location will appear in a new section called “News near you” which will be added at the bottom of the homepage. You can reorganize the sections later via the personalization page.

The updated section is available now on news.google.com, but it’s restricted to the United States. Remember you’ll have to grant Safari access to your location, otherwise the feature won’t work.

Survey Shows iPad Still Primarily Used for Web Browsing, Email, Video

In an unsurprising turn of events following the launch of a survey among readers who own an iPad, BusinessInsider posts a chart detailing how people use an iPad. And unsurprisingly, the usual suspects are on top: the chart shows people use iPads to browse the web (36% in May 2011, 37.7% in November 2010), whilst 23% rely on the tablet for their email needs and communication skills happening on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks that presumably have a native iPad app, otherwise that would count in the “web browsing” section, I guess. The iPad is also strongly used to watch videos (14.52% up from 11.50% in November 2010), play games and “use other apps.”

The end results of this survey don’t come as a surprise to anyone, but they confirm a widely popular theory – that Safari is the most powerful app Apple could have ever bundled with the iPad and iOS by default. Not only does Safari replicate most of the functionalities seen on the desktop, with the recent iOS 4.3 update it also got some nifty new Javascript engine that makes opening webpages blazing fast. That’s why every little feature that didn’t find its way into Safari and is requested a decent amount of users can become the reason to develop an alternative browser for iPad. The browser on the tablet is the best way to access the internet – it is for me, and clearly it is for other people, too.

What about those other apps? Watching videos with Plex or other media managers is a great experience, especially when combined with AirPlay and an Apple TV in your living room. Playing games? Between Angry Birds and Sword & Sworcery there’s plenty of choice to go by. Other apps? They must refer to things like OmniFocus, Simplenote, LogMeIn, Instapaper and Screens. It’s all about the apps, but Safari is still king when it comes to spending time with an iPad, browsing the web.

Amazon Cloud Player Now Works with iOS Safari

Back in late March, Amazon launched Cloud Player for the web and Android devices, an online interface that, relying on music uploaded to your Amazon account via Cloud Drive, allowed you to stream music from the cloud via a web browser or the native Android application, built into the OS with direct connection to Amazon’s servers to fetch and stream songs on the go. The service, however, wasn’t working with iOS devices, and it wasn’t a Flash issue: somehow, the website itself didn’t want to cooperate with Mobile Safari on iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. We noted that there was a way to make it work by using an alternative browser like iCab Mobile and changing the app’s user agent, but it was convoluted and far from being a reliable alternative to playing music locally in the iPod app, or from third-party services like MOG and Spotify, which do have native iOS apps. The lack of iOS compatibility for Cloud Player left many wondering whether the company intentionally decided to block the service, betting exclusively on the Android platform – which is the foundation for Amazon’s new app marketplace.

As noted by TechCrunch today, however, Cloud Player seems to be working in the iOS browser now. Songs stream just fine, and they even pause automatically during an incoming phone call or if a Push Notification is received. It’s unclear how Amazon exactly “unlocked” the feature and why it went online so quietly without any major announcement, but my guess is the Cloud Player team simply added a string to allow Mobile Safari to start a QuickTime streaming session within the browser.

You might think this had to due with Flash or another technology that iOS wasn’t compatible with, but it wasn’t. It looked like something else was simply blocking it from working. Well, good news. That’s no longer the case.

If you visit Amazon’s Cloud Player through the Safari web browser on an iOS device, you’ll see that it does in fact now work. You’ll first hit a warning page telling you that your browser is not supported, but just ignore that. Click into the music in your drive and it will begin playing.

MG Siegler notes the implementation is still far from perfect (uploading requires Flash, but you wouldn’t be able to upload files from iOS anyway) and the solution implies listening to music in a regular browser window. Still, it’s a start for Amazon, and it reignites speculation of a native Cloud Player app for iOS coming in the near future. The website, for now, is restricted to US access only.

Rumors in the past months pointed at Apple building a full-featured music streaming service based on iTunes, wrapped inside the upcoming iCloud infrastructure for Mac and iOS devices. There’s little doubt at this point Apple hasn’t at least considered the possibility of letting users upload their music collection or subscribe to an à la carte service for streaming songs off the cloud. With the WWDC roughly a month away, we should know more about Apple’s cloud plans and new music options soon.

Opera Follows The Canary and Releases “Next” Version

Looks like releasing unstable, buggy, developer-only versions of popular desktop browsers is a priority these days for the big players in the scene. Google started this trend with the Beta, Dev and (recently launched on the Mac, too) Canary Chrome channels; Mozilla followed earlier this year with Aurora, a new name for the old Minefield pre-beta version of Firefox; Opera has now entered the “developer-only, please report bugs” marketplace as well with Next, a new name for the internal dev builds that were never released to the public. Opera’s current Next version is dubbed 11.50 Swordfish which, alongside bug fixes and general improvements (as usual), adds a brand new plugin system for Speed Dials that will allow developers to build extensions for the browser’s popular start page – like live-updating weather widgets and other fancy toys. Opera Next, like Chrome Canary, has the huge advantage of letting you run it side-by-side with your existing Opera profile – the dev build is unstable, so you might not want to use it as your main browser. However, you can still sync the two using Opera Link.

Opera Next for OS X can be downloaded here.

Lima: Browser-based Cydia Alternative Demoed on Video

With 1.5 million users logging into the app every day and an estimated user base of 10 - 15 million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users, Cydia has become the undiscussed leader of the jailbreak community thanks to the thousands of tweaks and utilities available for download and purchase. Developed as an alternative to the App Store to find a place for those apps that Apple would never approve, Cydia turned into a full-featured marketplace where users can go to find the latest modification to the iPhone’s graphic files, or hacks to enable functionalities that Apple left out in the last software update. Cydia is the single reason to jailbreak an iOS device, but some developers think there’s still room for healthy competition and fresh new concepts in the jailbreak scene.

Lima, created by the same folks behind the Icy package installer, is a new browser-based Cydia alternative that’s still in the early stages of development but will be focused on speed, reliability and ease of use. Instead of building an app package, the devs of Lima opted for the browser option: Lima will likely gets its own homepage, and let users log in with their online accounts to download and install tweaks. It’s unclear whether Lima will allow users to add custom sources and how many developers will support the platform once it’s available, but devs weighing in iPhoneDownloadBlog’s original coverage seem to confirm that Lima will offer an option to manage repositories, as well as a backup system for installed packages.

You can follow the development of Lima on the Infini Dev Team’s blog, and check out the first demo video below. Read more