Need to add a developer console to the iPhone or iPad mobile safari browser without a Mac?
Apple provides a great set of developer tools. However, to use them you need to plug your iPhone or iPad into a Mac. There are times when this simply is not feasible or convenient.
A few years ago a colleague of mine and fellow developer, Craig Verrastro, invited his daughter’s music teacher to come present to my department. Why? Because he was seeing impaired, and we wanted the team to see what browsing the web (especially our own applications) was like for someone using a browser for the visually impaired. There were many very interesting moments during the exercise, but one really stuck out for me. At one point he encountered a site that detected that he was using a seeing impaired browser, and redirected him to a simplified version of the site, which was also the site’s “mobile friendly” version. This frustrated him and he immediately found the link to go to the full site. He pointed out that he disliked sites that did this. He said he noticed most people with normal eyesight often disliked these sites just as much, “who wants only a part of the site? No, I want the whole site. If it’s interesting enough to go on the full site, why wouldn’t I want to get it too?” He had a great point and I feel many mobile users feel the same way. I have not found any statistics, but I feel most mobile users do not mind a site optimized for their device, but don’t want some sort of reduced experience.
When I was a teenager I had a job at Burger King. If you have never noticed it before, there is a large digital clock next to the drive through window, which tells the employee how long the cusotmer has been waiting for their order. Measuring drive through wait time is a core KPI (of course, this was before I know what core-KPI meant) for these stores. In the end, what this really meant was that the drive through attendant would often just hit the “served” button as soon as the car drove up to window, instead of when the customer was actually served their order. To counter this, the stores started installing pressure pads underneath the drive through windows, to detect when the car actually drove away instead of relying on the teenager at the window. This is the real reason they will sometimes ask you to pull through and they will bring you your food, instead of making you wait at the window for a delayed order – it’s not for your convenience, they want to get you off that pressure pad.
So it seems that every job I work on, the same topic comes up. Someone, at some point will say, “just use an iFrame for that”. Then I need to go down the old tired road as to why that would not be a good idea.
Well, this article is going to be a bit utilitarian for me. I hope to put down in a single place all the reasons iFrames are not a cure-all solutions so that I can save myself some time in the future and just point people to this URL. As such I may update this post on occasion as I refine these points. Feel free to use this post for that same purpose if you like, and please post any suggestions or points I have missed to my twitter account (@rwbDev), I’ll be sure to credit you if I add the point to this article.
From iPhones to huge monitors, regardless of portrait or landscape orientations, the Craft Profit Calculator HTML5 app now accommodates all screen sizes and shapes.
Anyone who knows me knows that I Iove a good chart. So it was a natural, and fun, next addition to my Crafting Profit Calculator. Adding these charts packs in a ton of information into this small and very simple tool – and it was a great excuse to play with Google’s Visualization API.
Some of you may recall the Craft Profit Calculator I created for my wife last year. It’s very simple web app I use occasionally to try out new ideas; initially created to play with HTML5. I released a new version today. It has a few new features, but the one I want to call out initially is the waterfall charts
As a result, and just for a fun little Saturday project, I created a HTML5 Mobile App for Apple and Android tablets. It’s a simple little calculator someone can use to determine the pricing of their Etsy crafts. Take a look at my Crafting Profit Calculator.