GirlieMac! Blog

Boring Friday night activity - fixed UI glitch on iCO

March 08, 2008 By: admin Category: Dev, iPhone, GirlieMac! News No Comments →

I’ve been sick and still recovering from.
Anyway, my iPhone WebApp, iCuteOverload became look uglier after a few firmware updates ago and I had ignored since, but I finally fixed today.

It looks like box-sizing: border-box stopped woking on the recent WebKit, so I needed to use WebKit’s own declarations by adding “-webkit-” prefex, to adjust the box-model. It was easy fix but didn’t figure out soon enough :-p (maybe because I was watching House M.D. while debugging). Then I looked at the latest iUi code and well, the fix was already there… I should have just downloaded from beginning.

Oh well.

iPhone SDK is Out

February 27, 2008 By: admin Category: Dev, iPhone No Comments →

Apple’s official iPhone Dev Center page is updated, and there’s a link for the newly announced
SDK. Time to learn Cocoa?

Actually, I wonder how long it takes to over-number Symbian S60 apps.

Adding a WebClip Bookmark Icon for iPhone and iPod

January 18, 2008 By: admin Category: UI/UX, Dev, iPhone No Comments →

While MacWorld is held here in San Francisco, I am commuting to Sunnyvale… At least I am trying to catch up with all these exiting news from Apple.

One iPhone dev-related announcement caught my attention is a WebClip. -The WebClip is a web bookmark icon that is displayed on start screen on iPhone (and iPod), and looks just like an application launch button. (To make it work, you need to upgrade the firmware to 1.1.3.)

To create a custom icon is as easy as adding a favicon.ico for desktop website.

First, create a 57×57 png image. (Don’t worry about round-corners and shine.)

Then do either:

1) Place a PNG image named apple-touch-icon.png at the root directory of your web server.

or

2) Add <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/customIcon.png"/> within the <head> element of the page.

Once added to the springboard screen, round-corners and glassy overlay will be added to your icon nicely

Sweet! Y!Go Web Made News in Japan too

January 10, 2008 By: admin Category: Yahoo!, WAP, Nokia, Dev, iPhone No Comments →

Y!Go Web Screenshot

自分がコアメンバーの一員として制作したプロダクトが日本のニュースでも紹介されているなんてちょっと嬉しいかも。

Anyway, it’s pretty sweet that I can show what I’ve been working my ass off for, to my friends and family in Japan. I wish we could launch this in Japan, as well as Europe and Asia that we’re planning to launch soon. But since Y! Japan is operated separately from us, I dunno if they will…

Well anyway, I’ve tried oneSearch in Japanese (see the screenshot), although we are not supporting Japan. Well, the temperature is shown in fahrenheit in weather section, because well of course, this is a US product. -will I18N’d later… Pretty neat, right? Seriously Y! Japan should consider, since Apple will start selling iPhone there sooner or later. I guess.

I found more news by searching just now:

Android Uses WebKit

November 16, 2007 By: admin Category: WebKit, Google, WAP, Dev No Comments →

android My guess was wrong.

I somehow thought Google will partner with Firefox as a defaul browser for their new mobile project (now “Android”), however, Google’s choice was WebKit, accordeing to their SDK. Actually now I think this is a wise choice, since many (mobile) web devs are familiar with developing with WebKit thanks to Apple to make iPhone popular. And needless to say, WebKit for mobile including Nokia N-series is the one of the beat browser around.Anyway, as the storonger-than-ever WebKit is gaining even more power, “Sarfin’ Safari” (Webkit.org’s blog) has announced new features for Safari 3:

Enhanced Rich Text Editing
Faster JavaScript and DOM
Faster Page Loading
SVG
XPath
New and Improved XML Technologies
Styleable Form Controls
Advanced CSS Styling
Reduced Memory Use
Web Developer Tools

Opera Mini Out of Beta

November 10, 2007 By: admin Category: Opera, WAP, Dev No Comments →

Looks like Opera Mini 4 is now official. I just updated Opera Mini on N95 and played around.

Although I don’t know if there’s any new features added from Beta 4, the nice new features added for 4 (compared to 3) includes “mini” version of the entire web page, just like Nokia’s WebKit, and landscape mode.

The page rendering speed seems to be just as fast as I expected - faster than WebKit.

As long as I’ve been testing on the beta and now this official 4, as a web developer, I am happy with the improvement on CSS support. So many pages that looked like crap on Opera 3, are now beautifully rendered. It supports better table layout and more semantic markups (Now, I can use the strong, H1 tags etc. without making terrible mess) and CSS3 including media queries. Although limited, it supportes some JavaScript events as well.

Also, Opera launched a developers’ community site called Dev Opera recently, to help us developing better on Opera.

iCuteOverload Update - Launch YouTube app

September 09, 2007 By: admin Category: Dev, Girlie Stuff, iPhone, GirlieMac! News No Comments →

OK, iCuteOverload beta (preview at: girliemac.com/cute on iPhone!) is almost official.

Before handing to Megan, I made another change - converting YouTube Flash embed (that is not supported by iPhone) to YouTube video link to open in iPhone’s YouTube app. Thanks to Isao Yagi, who gave me tips to my regex question on php-user list, I could make this work.

Here’s how the regex code in php looks.

pattern to look for:
$p = ' /<object[\S\s]+?http:\/\/www\.youtube\.com\/v\/([\w\-]+)"[\S\s]+? <\/object>/i ';.
This look for a html object tag that includes YouTube link, and capture the video ID to re-create a new link.
As long as I found, the video ID can contain any alpha-numeric char (\w) and hyphen (\-).
Use /i to make it case-insensitive just in case.

replace string:
$r = ' <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\1"><img src="images/watch_youtube.png" alt="watch!" width="200" height="56"/></a>';
then use preg_replace function to replace the string:
$content = preg_replace($p, $r, $content);

I use an image button link to launch YouTube app.
The captured video ID for Flash is now taken as a query string. This should work fine!

However!!! I just found that NOT all YouTube videos are available for iPhone yet…
So when I try the latest CuteOverload entry, I got this sad message, “Could not load movie”.