New iPhone Project: Ruler

Turn your iPhone into a ruler and measure the scale of any small thing. You can switch between imperial and metric scales.

ruler.speedymarks.com

Add to Firefox Sidebar     Add to Opera Panels

SpeedyMarks on the side

After optimizing all my iPhone applications for the browser sidebars it's now time to put the SpeedyMarks itself into the sidebar too.

It's great to have all your visual bookmarks only one click away without creating or switching tabs. Just put

http://www.speedymarks.com/sidebar.html

in your sidebar and there you are or simply click one of these links:

Add to Firefox Sidebar     Add to Opera Panels

You will see that the sidebar version shares the same SpeedyMarks as the desktop version (from either cookie based or server based storage) but comes with its own settings for background color, SpeedyMarks size and link target.

Please note: Alternatively you could use the iPhone version of SpeedyMarks, which works great in the sidebar too but it manages its collection of SpeedyMarks indepently.

iPhone apps in browser sidebar

As you probably know it makes complete sense to run iPhone optimized web applications (e.g. the mobile Google Reader) in the browser sidebar. iPhone applications are usually optimized for a 320 pixel wide browser window which is the perfect size for Firefox's sidebar and Operas panels especially on todays wide screen monitors where a full screen web page would be too wide anyway.

Of course you an run all my iPhone applications in the sidebar already. Just open the application in Firefox or Opera, add a bookmark and check Load this bookmark in the sidebar on Firefox or Show in panel on Opera.

But if you want to run more than one of my iPhone applications in the sidebar you need to create a lot of bookmarks and constantly click your booksmarks to switch. There is no need to. Just put

http://start.speedymarks.com/sidebar.html

in your sidebar and you can easily switch between all my iPhone applications on your sidebar. It even comes with a convient button to add the bookmark automatically:

Add to Opera Panels

Login to your SpeedyMarks

As a SpeedyMarks user you might have noticed the new Login link on the upper right hand corner:



An often requested feature of several users has been the server storage of the visual bookmarks. Yes, I heard you and I'm excited to let you know it's done now. Just login using your (existing or to be created) Google Account and all your SpeedyMarks are stored on the server (on the Google server farm to be precise). This makes it possible to access your SpeedyMarks from everywhere even with multiple browsers. And the best, it does work for the iPhone SpeedyMarks as well, which are separate from the desktop bookmarks:



Don't worry, SpeedyMarks doesn't ever see your Google Account password, rest assured. If you logout you are back to the local cookie based SpeedyMarks specific to each desktop and browser (and you have the option to clean your server storage before you leave).

Now you have the choice to either use the server and share your SpeedyMarks or keep them completely local and private.

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.

Firefox on Apple TV - Anybody?

For quite a while now I'm looking a for a decent surf box for my living room. I think all the Media-Center-PCs aren't good enough; they are way to big. The other option would be to use one of the new game consoles. But:

• the Wii doesn't do HDTV (at least until now)


• the XBox is too loud


• the PS3 too expensive and consumes too much energy (180 Watts on standby!)

Now there is the new Apple TV box. Actually the perfect hardware for a surf box. Small, quiet and with HDTV support. Fortunately it's running a stripped down version of OSX so it should be no problem to install and run Firefox on it. OK, I can hear the question already, why not Safari? Wait a minute: an unmodified desktop browser (either Safari or Firefox or any other) will be of almost no use. In order to be a perfect surf box there have to be certain modifications:

• Usage of the Apple Remote because nobody wants to use a mouse in the living room. Sorry Safari but I can't see the support for that (except Apple is doing it them self). It will be hard enough to come up with a good usage scheme to allow page scrolling, link following, bookmark access and so on with the limited keys of the Apple Remote.


• Running in full screen kiosk mode and get rid of unnessary toolbars.


• A basic onscreen keyboard will be necessary to enter a URL and fill in forms (but in the beginning a local customizable start page will do).


• Integration into the Apple TV menu. That should be easy, because this RSS extension already did it.

So in summary Firefox seems to be the perfect browser to try because it can be customized to almost any extent, can be enhanced by a huge collection of extensions and almost all websites support it.

Is anybody working on that? Please let me know.