New Project: WorldWatchr

I just started my new WorldWatchr project (http://www.worldwatchr.com).

This application makes it easy to monitor web images which are continuously updated (like web camera pictures). Now you can stay in touch with your home, famous places of the world, the current traffic conditions and much more by watching your favorite web cams. It can cycle through all your cameras and updates the images periodically.

The images don't have to be produced by web cams. You can monitor any image which is updated over time like weather radars, traffic maps and so on.

You can link from your web site to WorldWatchr so that your web cam can be easily added. Just use

http://www.worldwatchr.com?add=URL&title=TITLE

with your web cam URL and an optional TITLE as parameters (make sure it's properly encoded).

WorldWatchr - iPhone version

WorldWatchr has a special iPhone version:



Please open http://m.worldwatchr.com on your iPhone and take your web cams with you.

Hint: Send your web camera URLs by email to get them easily on the phone.

New iPhone Project: Mileage

I just released my new iPhone Application: Mileage. It makes it quick and easy to calculate the fuel consumption of your car. In addition to the mileage it can give you the cost per mile and the maximum range.

http://mileage.speedymarks.com

WorldClockr: Missing Timezones added

WorldClockr now contains a complete list of all timezones to choose from (please shout if I missed another one). Especially all non 1 hour time zones like Indias +5:30 have been added.

You can now have these timezones for your embedded clocks and in the iPhone version as well.

Servers are up again

Thanks for your patience.

Why Apple made Safari so fast

Apple claims that Safari is the fastest browser on any platform, and they seem to be right. Since I read that news I have been asking myself:

Why on earth did they put so much engineering effort into such a feature? Does anybody think Firefox, Opera or even IE are too slow? Compared to the network imposed waiting times the rendering doesn't matter. All browsers seem to be fast enough, so putting in more development time to optimize the rendering speed even further doesn't make any sense, right?

This is what I thought until I got the new iPod Touch in my hands. And now I understood. The Safari browser on the iPod (and the iPhone) is fast, by far the fasted browser I ever saw on a handheld device. I feels like a desktop browser and this must be the reason why Apple optimized Safaris rendering speed. Well done.