Ingenious Creations

Posted 07/13/2011 at 8:25am | by J Keirn-Swanson There are some pretty good reasons to stick with mobile Safari: it's the iPhone default, so links automatically route to there from other apps, it's pretty speedy, and, even though the app is simple to use, Apple's crammed a ton of functionality into that little guy -- whether in iPhone or iPad flavors. But sometimes... well, sometimes Safari leaves us a little cold, leaves us wanting something a little more full featured, something we don't have to install a bunch of bookmarklets to make work. RichTech has put together a fine app here with Atomic Web Browser, an app that looks pretty simple at first glimpse. Eight buttons, two text boxes, and the mobile world. The larger text box at top is for URLs while the smaller handles your searches, just like in Safari.  In the iPhone version, across the bottom are seven buttons, all of which lodge up top near the search and address bars in the iPad's roomier version. The familiar navigation arrows, the bookmark/history book, the + sign for bookmarking a current site, the gear for settings, the down arrow for downloading and saving either pages or files, and the diagonal full-screen arrow. These familiar buttons will show up throughout most browsers What Atomic brings to surfing the internet -- right out the gate -- is something most alternate browsers zeroed in on, and that's Apple's poor management of tabs. Mobile Safari in either flavor, with its shift to a window gallery of your tabs, a completely new screen being the only means of accessing them, is no one's idea of good design. Atomic lets you run a whole string of tabs, and then tap and slide your finger across the tabs bar to navigate through the ones that run right off the screen. Tabs with a splash of color The other innovation these third-party browsers worked on was spoofing. Typically, a site can recognize what browser you're using, so if a mobile version of a website exists, savvier web masters redirect iPhone users to the mobile version. But sometime the mobile version isn't your cup of tea --it's got fewer access points and a stripped down interface. Atomic lets you misinform websites that you're running a desktop version of Safari (or both mobile versions), Firefox 3, and even IE 6-8. Green and profile with all your buttons down below Read More

By РAre you bored with your iPad? Free with your app. A weekly selection of must-read articles from each week’s edition of The Economist. Looking for one intuitive task manager accessible from all your devices ? TaskPad is your solution. The highly acclaimed original revolution has been completely reengineered for iPad. Perfect Browser is the fastest and most advanced feature-packed fullscreen web browser to date. Experience Better-than-Desktop Class web with breakthrough features incl. REAL-Tabs, Automatic Scrolling, Video Output, Desktop Browser Rendering, Offline Pages, Private Mode, Precision Scrollbar, Multi-Touch Gestures, Fast Tab Switching, In-Page Search, Font Size Adjustment, Web Compression, Fullscreen & more. When connected over 3G or Wi-Fi to a Slingbox SOLO or PRO-HD (Slingboxes* sold separately), you can play anything you can see on your home TV on your iPad. View and control video sources such as: Noteshelf is a powerful note taking app that provides extremely smooth handwriting and a comprehensive set of notebook templates. Related Posts Read More

Dr. Serkan Toto currently works as the first and only Asia-based writer for the TechCrunch network, mainly covering Japan-related technology and web companies for TechCrunch, CrunchGear and MobileCrunch. Serkan also works full-time as an independent web and mobile industry consultant with a focus on the Japanese market. He is sept-lingual, holds an MBA and is a PhD in economics. Serkan... → Learn More Lunascape, the company behind the eponymous triple-engine browser for desktop PCs, has just released its first browser created specifically for the iPad. Dubbed iLunascape, the browser is available for free in the App Store, and it’s a more than solid alternative to Safari on the iPad. Most importantly, iLunascape allows for desktop-like tabbed browsing on the iPad (a first for a free app). Up to six tabs can be opened at the same time, and users can switch between them easily via thumb taps. Tabbed browsing works great (and fast), especially because iLunascape comes with a iPad-specific UI that takes into account how most people actually hold and use the device (see below). The so-called “In Reach Interface” clusters not only all tabs but also most buttons (page forward/back, search, home, etc.) at the bottom of the screen in both portrait and landscape mode. In other words, all major functions can be reached quickly, without having to move your fingers across the screen. Other features include a screenshot capture and storage function, rotation lock, and “simple bookmarking”. iPad users should definitely give iLunascape a spin (again, it’s free). Other browsers for the device include Atomic ($0.99), Perfect ($2.99), and iCab Mobile ($2.99). [crunchbase url="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/lunascape" name="Lunascape"] Sponsored Ads Sponsored Ads Sponsored Ads Read More

A few weeks ago we learned how to watch Netflix on a jailbroken iPhone. Unfortunately this hack doesn’t work for the iPhone 4 but some smart guy over at ModMyI figured out how to tweak it so you can watch Netflix on an iPhone 4. UPDATE: This post is outdated. Netflix now has its official iPhone app in the App Store. Click here for more info. Step 1: Download the Netflix app for iPad to iTunes. Step 2: Right click on the Netflix app you just downloaded and select ‘Show in Windows Explorer’ if you’re on a PC, or ‘Show in Finder’ if you’re on a Mac. Step 3: Rename Netflix 1.0.4.ipa to Netflix 1.0.4.zip and extract the zip file to your desktop. Step 4: Look for the Payload folder inside the extracted folder. In there you will find the Netflix.app folder. Step 5: SSH into your iPhone and copy the Netflix.app folder to /private/var/stash/Applications/. Step 6: Change the permission on the Netflix.app folder to 755. Step 7: Reboot your iPhone. Step 8: Now go to the App Store from your iPhone and download Perfect Browser. Open the app, go to the settings and select Safari iPad under Desktop Rendering. Step 9: Still in Perfect Browser, navigate to Netflix.com, login, and find a movie to watch instantly. Perfect Browser will close and QuickTime will start playing your movie. Done. That wasn’t too hard, was it? Read More

Developer Saied Ghaffari's company, It's About Time, should be well known to TUAW readers. We highlighted the widget iPad app the company created, which regretfully never made it to the App Store. Apple essentially banned all widget apps, so Saied and company decided to try something different: creating a web browser optimized for touch navigation on the iPad. The result is the Life Web Browser. Ghaffari's team looked at the shortcomings of Safari and alternatives such as Perfect Browser before beginning design. Safari doesn't provide tabbed browsing, and tapping any link opens a new window that must be loaded prior to viewing. Perfect Browser adds tabs, but Ghaffari's team found that tabs weren't exactly the best interface for navigating an iPad browser. In addition, tapping a link opens a new tab and the user must wait for that tabbed window to load. Life is built upon WebKit, the heart of Safari, so any features that are added to future versions of Safari should make it into Life. But that is where the resemblance ends. Life comes preloaded with a number of popular websites and will automatically remember your favorite sites as you use the app. While you're looking at the home page in Life, you'll notice the edges of two other pages, one to the left and another to the right. To navigate to these other sites, you can use the left / right arrows at the bottom of the page (which conveniently have the name of the sites on them), touch one of the edges (this works well when you're holding the iPad in both hands), or swipe right or left using four fingers. You swipe through sites as if you are swiping through pictures in iPhoto. Other gestures work as usual: a one-finger swipe for scrolling a page and two fingers for zooming in and out. Three fingers navigate back and forward on one page. The "side pages" are loading while you're looking at a page. When you're ready to move to one of your other favorite pages, they're already loaded and ready to view. Want to view a page in full screen mode with no buttons or the address bar? Tap the full-screen button at the bottom of the screen to toggle full-screen viewing on and off. The Q (queue) button is the key to another powerful feature. Let's say you're checking out TUAW. Tap the Q and Read More

Editor-in-Chief, iLounge Published: Friday, June 4, 2010 Category: iPod, iPhone, and iPad Gems: Apps, Games + More Apple has pitched the iPad as the future of reading—a device capable of transforming everything from web sites to newspapers and magazines into more engaging, “magical” experiences. This week’s edition of iPad Gems looks at four recent App Store releases that each provide hints as to the future of reading on this device, and are notable for that reason, though they all have significant caveats that preclude them from being end-all, be-all solutions. We diverge a bit from our usual format for this roundup, focusing on the promise, the good, and the bad of each app. Our top pick of the bunch is GoodReader, but two of the other applications also receive our general-level recommendation. Read on for all the details. A1 Perfect Web Browser The Promise: The name couldn’t be much cheesier, but A1 Perfect Web Browser for iPad ($3, version 1.0) from Ingenious Creations is a desktop computer-inspired enhancement of the Mobile Safari web browser, “the fastest and most advanced feature-packed fullscreen web browser to date.” A1 adds a collection of small but non-trivial features to Safari, including tabbed browsing, evolving the iPad browsing experience to something that’s much closer to using a Mac or PC. The Good: A1 includes full support for tabbed browsing, effectively enabling you to skip instantly between numerous web pages—and to load those pages automatically every time the application starts, if you desire—a feature that’s so big and generally well-executed that Apple’s left with little excuse for omitting it in the next release of Safari. Touching a tab brings it up immediately, without any of the forced reloading seen when switching between pages in Safari, and you can use two-finger gestures to swipe between tabs if you desire. The app also includes font rescaling, a “desktop web rendering” feature to let MobileSafari request pages as if it was desktop Safari, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, or Internet Explorer, and various fullscreen modes that temporarily eliminate the iPad’s status bar, the app’s own navigation bar, and tabs to provide more browsing real estate space. In-page search is also supported. The Bad: A1’s interface looks like a second- or third-rate version of Firefox, lacking the elegance of Mobile Safari and cluttering the screen with various arrows and overlays. An arrow-based scroll bar for faster navigation floats on the right side, with Read More

Posted 05/13/2010 at 10:34am | by Michelle Delio The App Store’s loaded with browsers intended to provide a speedier, richer experience—after all, Mobile Safari leaves ample room for improvement. With the exception of Opera Mini, all the competing browsers are built using the same WebKit code base (WebKit is the open-source browser engine at the heart of Safari), so any performance gains come from added features like improved tabbing, faster scrolling, image/ad blockers, and page compression. Some of these features are useful and do contribute to faster, more efficient browsing. That said, all third-party browsers running on iPhone and iPad are inherently handicapped. Since you can’t chose an alternative app as your default web browser, basic activities like opening links from other apps aren’t a matter of click and open. And given their second-class-citizen status as non-system apps, third-party browsers can’t run in the background, so there’s no behind-the-scenes rendering or storing pages in RAM. Undoubtedly, a walled garden makes for a tidier ecosystem, and hey--if you prefer to do your own landscaping, you can escape from Eden with only a bit of effort. But the point here is that third-party browsers have issues that really aren’t the fault of their programmers. We looked at a dozen browsers for this review, and cut the list down to five of the very best - Atomic Web Browser v 2.8.0, iCab Mobile 3.2., Mercury Browser v2.3.2, Opera Mini v 5.0.1, Perfect Web Browser v4.0 -- plus Safari. To try and create the most level playing field possible, and because we like complicating things, we ran our tests on the same iPhone 3GS in two locations in New York City (Upper West Side of Manhattan and Soho) and two in Miami (Coral Gables and Coconut Grove). We ran each round of testing twice (midday and midnight) in both locations using both AT&T’s 3G network and a private (home) Wi-Fi network. Speed gains of three to five seconds were apparent in Miami with all the browsers including Safari when using 3G. New York City’s 3G network was noticeably less speedy and stable than Miami, service on the Upper West Side seemed a bit more stable than Soho, but no appreciable speed gains. Wi-Fi provided speedier browsing than NYC’s AT&T network, but there was no measurable difference in Miami. Time of day had no noticeable impact in either location in our tests. After we figured out Read More

Opera Software announced on Wednesday that they're going to offer a sneak peek of their Opera Mini web browser for the iPhone during Mobile World Congress 2010 (MWC). Several features of the Mac-based Opera will be included, like tabs, Speed Dial and the password manager, says Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner. He also mentioned his app's compression technology that will make browsing fast and reduce data surcharges. For more details than that, we'll have to wait until the cat has been let out of the bag. Two years ago, Opera claimed that they submitted an iPhone browser to the App Store only to have it rejected, a claim that was later refuted. In a comment posted to the Opera blog earlier today, Espen André Øverdahl, the Community Manager at Opera Software, said "We have not submitted it yet to the Apple App Store. However, we hope that Apple will not deny their users a choice in Web browsing experience." Before you assume that Apple will deny an iPhone browser because of Mobile Safari, note that there are several other web browsers in the App Store already, including Perfect Browser 3, Full Browser and Mercury Web Browser. As John Gruber notes, however, the browsers that are in the store use the system version of WebKit. [Via Daring Fireball] Read More