Phone Safari Notes and Quirks

Now we can get our hands on an iPhone, developers are testing out Safari to see what is actually available. How is the DOM? What events get fired? How does the keyboard send onkey* events? How is scrolling handled? How is the JavaScript support?

Abe Fettig has been jotting down his notes, which include:

• Poking around the DOM, I don’t see any special objects, with the possible exception of window.offscreenBuffering (set to true).
• Bookmarklets work, although you have to go through the bookmarks menu to get to them.
• Safari crashes are handled gracefully - the main screen fades back in, and you can jump right back into Safari. It will then load page you were visiting when it crashed.
• Drag and drop, and other behaviors based on picking up mousemove events, don’t work. CSS-based element drag and drop doesn’t work either. Dragging one finger around the iPhone’s version of Safari causes the window to scroll, and that’s it. I assume that scroll events do work. I’m sure somebody is already working on a version of drag and drop based on window scrolling.
• For documents with no width set, the iPhone uses a default width of 980px.

Joe Hewitt isn’t too happy with his experiments:

My first task has been exploring the DOM events that you can handle. You do not get “mousedown” when you touch the screen. You get “mousedown” and “mouseup” at the same time when you release your finger. The “mousemove” event does not seem to fire at all. There is no way to handle double-clicking because that is the action for zooming, and calling event.preventDefault() doesn’t seem to override that.

If Safari is the current SDK, we need help as developers to build, and debug, applications.

MySpace Likely To Open Platform To 3rd Party Developers

MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe has indicated that MySpace will likely open its platform to 3rd party developers, according to a report at FT.com

The move will see MySpace following in the footsteps of Facebook; Facebook’s wildly popular F8 release has seen in excess of 1000 additional applications made available to Facebook users and has driven enormous growth.

MySpace still maintains leadership in the social networking space based on user numbers and traffic, and has continued to grow; however there is little doubt today that the hearts and minds of the people who count have abandoned MySpace for Facebook. The moves to an open platform also comes after reports earlier this week claiming that DeWolfe was asking for a $12.5 million annual salary to stay on at MySpace. If DeWolfe can successfully play catch-up with Facebook he may end up being worth it.

Google Maps Now Does Interactive Re-Routing

An anonymous reader writes

"Remember how cool it was the first time you used MapQuest or Google Maps or Google Earth? You'll feel like it's the first time again, when you use interactive dragging of routes on Google Maps. Some of the folks from the development team have even whipped up a handy video to explain the concept."

Everyone’s Gunning For YouTube

The focus and experimentation on IPTV is switching away from watching short clips on YouTube to watching full length shows on downloadable TV applications like Joost, Babelgum, Veoh TV , Netflix (which now has a Silverlight application) and others. YouTube continues to grow, but people are not looking to find full length TV shows there.

That isn’t stopping the competitors from trying to get a piece of the action, though.

YouTube has a slew of direct competitors, but the network effect kicked in long ago for YouTube and its unlikely that loose copyright policies or higher quality videos are going to make any kind of dent in their market share. But the networks are still goggling that $1.65 billion price tag for YouTube, and they want their pound of flesh.

Competitors Running In Circles

Hitwise published some statistics earlier this week showing that YouTube has 60% market share of the U.S. video sharing sites - they have more visitors than all of their competitors combined. They continue to grow at a fast clip even after the networks started massive litigation against them.

Comscore worldwide data is nearly identical, showing YouTube with a 66% market share. See the chart to the left for the side-by-side numbers.

It’s clear that the market is probably big enough for a few competitors to be successful, but no one is knocking YouTube off the thrown any time soon.

A Report on Push versus Pull

Engin Bozdag, Ali Mesbah, and Arie van Deursen of the Delft University of Technology have compiled a technical report on various push versus pull techniques of building Ajax applications based on an example application that they built.

They concluded that:

In this paper we have compared pull and push solutions for achieving web-based real time event notification. The contributions of this paper include the experimental design, a reusable implementation of a sample application in push and pull style as well as a measurement framework, and the experimental results.

Our experiment shows that if we want high data coherence and high network performance, we should choose the push approach. However, push brings some scalability issues; the server application CPU usage is 7 times higher as in pull. According to our results, the server starts to saturate at 350-500 users. For larger number of users, load balancing and server clustering techniques are unavoidable.

http://swerl.tudelft.nl/twiki/pub/Main/TechnicalReports/TUD-SERG-2007-016.pdf

htsh: http shell

Adeel Khan has created another HTTP shell called htsh using PHP on the backend and jQuery for the front end. It currently supports most common commands, like cd, chmod, cp, edit, exit, ls, mkdir, mv, rm, rmdir, touch, unzip, and zip. It is also very easy to add your own commands. It even supports tab-completion.

There is a demo to play with that doesn’t have all of the commands enabled for security reasons.