Words That Never Were

Bookmark Any URL in Full Screen Mode on your Home Screen

nospam@example.com (Rudis Muizneks) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 10:00:20 -0500

There was a lot of buzz when the iPhone OS 2.1 came out about the ability to run web applications without Mobile Safari. See this article at Apple Insider if you missed the news.

The only catch is that it will only work for web applications that have been specifically programmed for that functionality.

So what if you want to have the full-screen no-Safari functionality on web apps that haven't included the line of code that enables full-screen mode on home screen bookmarks (such as Google Reader? You have a few options...

You could write an email a day to the developer and beg them to implement it.
You could break in to the developer's home and steal their code, then implement the web application yourself with full-screen mode enabled.

...OR...

You could do it yourself by bookmarking your own simple HTML file that loads in full-screen mode, then redirects to the web application using javascript. I'll give the code to do this below, but note that it requires you to have your own hosting provider to put the html file up (any free one should work, preferably one that doesn't mess with the HTML to insert ads and whatnot).

Here's the code for a full-screen Google Reader:

01 <html>

02     <head>

03         <title>Reader</title>

04         <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" />

05         <meta name="apple-touch-fullscreen" content="yes" />

06         <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />

07         <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/iphone-icon.png" />

08         <script type="text/javascript">

09             //location.href='http://www.google.com/reader/i/';

10         </script>

11     </head>

12     <body>

13     </body>

14 </html>

Throw that file onto the web, browse to it in mobile safari, and add it to your homescreen. Voila! Full-screen reader, right? Not quite yet.

Note that on line #09 the javascript that redirects the browser to Google Reader is commented out. You have to do this initially in order to bookmark the page. After you've added the file to your homescreen, remove the "//" from line #09 and save the file in place of the one you bookmarked. From now on, when you click the homescreen icon for your file, it will load on your iPhone in full-screen mode, and redirect you to Google Reader instantly.

The nifty thing about this is that you can do it for any website at all, not just web applications. You just need to change the location line on line #09 to any URL you want. Other things you'd probably want to reconfigure for different apps:

The text of the <title> tag on line #03 is the default name of the icon when adding it to your homescreen (but you can change this on the fly when adding the bookmark anyway).

The "viewport" meta tag on line #04 should be ok for most web apps, but you might want to change or remove it for regular websites if you want to be able to pinch-zoom and scroll around on them.

The "apple-touch-icon" link on line #07 is the icon that the bookmark will display on your homescreen. You can point this to the webapp's real icon by copying it from their site, or create your own.

I hope you enjoy this brave new world of Safari-less web browsing!

Yet Another Old-Time Radio Podcast

nospam@example.com (Rudis Muizneks) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 12:22:34 -0400

This is something that I've been personally using for a while, and figured I might as well throw it out there in case anyone else in the general public would enjoy it.

I have written a few simple scripts that generate a podcatcher-friendly XML feed containing two old-time radio shows from OTR-Reviews.com every day at 9pm EST. The series are random each time, but the episodes within each series are followed sequentially (and loop back to the first one after the last one has played). I've just reset all the counters, so all shows will start at episode one starting today, but the vast majority of the series don't follow much of an overarching storyline, so it's safe to jump in and enjoy them at any time.

If anyone is interested in getting a copy of the perl scripts to run their own personalized feed (perhaps with some shows omitted), just get in touch with me. This feed is in no way affiliated with OTR-Reviews.com, and I'm not sure how they'll feel about people using their bandwidth through it. If someone over there has a problem with it, just let me know and I'll take it down.

You can subscribe to the feed at http://www.rudism.com/otrcast.xml.

One gadget to rule them all?

nospam@example.com (Rudis Muizneks) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:25:06 -0400

The iPhone is tantalizingly close to my perfect device. I wanted it to replace three other gadgets that I used regularly: my 60gb iPod video, my Dell Axim x50v, and my ancient nokia cell phone.

The iPod and phone are no-brainers. I've also always wanted a GPS, so that's a bonus (even without turn-by-turn directions). I was a little hesitant about the move from 60gb to 16gb, but I can live with just a subset of my library, and Pandora more than makes up for it. The sticky point is the Axim. The iPhone needs a few things to be able to satisfactorily replacece my old PocketPC:

Birthday and Anniversary Notifications
The fact that it doesn't do this is, quite frankly, idiotic. You even have to jump through hoops to ensure all your birthdays and anniversaries show up in your calendar. The iPhone is broken until Apple does something about that.

File Management
Really, Apple? A device with beautiful image and text viewing and zooming abilities, with a full web browser, image browser, and PDF viewer—with no way to sync eBooks, images larger than 640x480, or PDFs? WTF? Fix plz.

Space Trader
Funnest mobile game ever. Nuff said.

Also! A night sky astronomy app that let you take a snapshot of the sky, and used the GPS and data service to identify the stars in the picture to tell you their names would kick ass.

Point to Ponder: When did the X-Files start sucking?

nospam@example.com (Rudis Muizneks) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:57:03 -0400

Having my sense of nostalgia triggered by the release of the new movie, I am thinking about getting some X-Files seasons on DVD, but it's been so long since I've watched them that I can't remember which season was the last good one. You know, before the whole underlying conspiracy theory mythos jumped from the back seat to the front seat and the show stopped being about solving paranormal mysteries each week. And don't even get me started on the post-Duchovny period. Blech.

Based on the season descriptions on Wikipedia, I'm pretty sure seasons one through four are a good bet. The only one I'm not sure about is five. I know it was the last season shot in Vancouver, and was supposed to be the final season, based on everyone's initial contracts, but I can't remember how prominent the underlying mythos was through that season. All of the nonsense about the syndicate, cancer man, Krychek, and so on really doesn't interest me too much—I much preferred the earlier format where each episode was essentially self-contained, with only minor story arch elements loosely tying the series together.

On the other hand, some of the most memorable episodes came from later seasons. The Cops episode in season seven, while admittedly gimmicky, was awesome. And Bruce Campbell guest-starred as a demon in season six. And anything with Bruce Campbell in it automatically becomes the most awesomest thing ever in the entire universe.

Decisions, decisions.

Using iTunes with Juice Receiver (Part II)

nospam@example.com (Rudis Muizneks) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 21:45:44 -0400

In the last post, I covered how to use Perl to get podcasts downloaded with Juice to show up in the "Podcasts" section of iTunes.

The only real problem with that alone is that you still have to manually delete old podcasts from your podcasts directory (either directly, or using Juice's "Cleanup" tab). That's a pain in the ass. What follows is a nice little windows script that you can run to automatically delete podcast files that you have listened to and deleted in iTunes.
Continue reading "Using iTunes with Juice Receiver (Part II)"

Using iTunes with Juice Receiver

nospam@example.com (Rudis Muizneks) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:52:00 -0400

For various (bug-related) reasons, I strongly dislike the podcast feature in iTunes. Mainly because, at random, it will mysteriously delete episodes of podcasts (giving "could not be found" errors when trying to play or sync them to my iPod).

I tried a number of different alternatives (YamiPod, Floola, myPodder), but all had their limitations and bugs of their own. After trying a few different podcatchers, I decided that Juice is my favorite. For a while, I used a combination of Juice, RockBox (open source alternative firmware for the iPod that allows you to just copy your music directly to the player without iTunes), and SyncToy to keep my music and podcasts up to date, but this was lacking as well. While I don't like the podcast features of iTunes, I do like the clean look and feel of the iPod interface, and the way podcast episodes are auto-bookmarked and marked as new or listened automatically—something that RockBox simply can't compete with.

Now, Juice does support iTunes, but it doesn't put your podcasts into the "Podcasts" section—it just copies them over as regular songs and creates playlists for each show to keep track of the episodes. This is lame. What follows is my hacked solution that lets Juice put your podcasts where they belong in your iTunes library.
Continue reading "Using iTunes with Juice Receiver"