Josh Schumacher: A PHP Developer » Web 2.0

Advanced iPhone Web Development

Josh Schumacher — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:06:06 +0000

Yesterday (May 5th, 2009), I gave a presentation at the Seattle iPhone App Developers and Designers Meetup titled, “Advanced iPhone Web Development.” This presentation focused on the unique capabilities available in WebKit on the iPhone and on possibilities for utilizing UIWebViews inside of your native applications.

You can download a pdf version of the presentation here: Advanced iPhone Web Development

Advanced iPhone Web Development Slideshow (Best Viewed In Fullscreen)

View more presentations from Josh Schumacher.

The future of mobile web applications

Josh Schumacher — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:07:26 +0000

Thinking back three years ago, I was starting to play around with developing web applications for mobile devices. The hot device of the time was the Palm Treo. The default browser that came with the Treo, Blazer, really sucks. It was rough trying to write pages that worked perfectly in Blazer. Sure, simple, basic HTML rendered just fine but I had a background in developing for the traditional desktop web experience and I wanted to write awesome sites utilizing CSS and Javascript. I wanted to write an AJAX application for mobile devices. It would be icing on the cake if I could get it to work on lower end devices as well, but that seemed pretty pie in the sky at the time.

Webkit will be the future rendering engine of the mobile web (at least I hope it is). It’s an amazing, full featured engine with bleeding edge web standards implementations of HTML 5 and CSS 3. Webkit has been getting some great traction lately with some amazing devices implementing it as their default browser engine, Android, Palm Pre and of course the iPhone (and iPod Touch) have all fully embraced Webkit. I want to see that list get a lot longer; I hope to start seeing Webkit on lower end mobile devices.

What makes Webkit so awesome? How about CSS effects, blazing fast javascript execution (especially in their new Nitro engine in Safari 4), HTML offline support – including offline data storage and support for offline cache manifests, CSS gradients, CSS border radius and border images, CSS transforms, and a lot more. On the iPhone, it now even has custom events to pass down gesture events to the DOM. You can now do most things you could once only dream of doing in flash in straight HTML, CSS and Javascript on small devices stored in someone’s pocket.

The future of mobile web applications are social, location aware, providing a tailored experience based on user preferences. Future mobile web applications will morph based on user behavior. The will provide a graphically rich experience with beautiful design elements enhancing every aspect of the application.

Strategic Analysis: Google Presentation

Josh Schumacher — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:39:27 +0000

Important: This presentation was created in December of 2006, the information most likely is out of date. I am posting this in response to the demand from slideshare.

During my senior year at Western Washington University, for a final project in my Management 495 class, I did group presentation, performing a strategic analysis of Google and the positioning in the search engine market. I posted this slideshow to slideshare and received an incredible amount of comments and messages asking for the presentation. The presentation currently has over 25,000 views and over 100 favorites.

Like I said in the disclaimer, this slideshow is a year and a half old so a lot of the information is out dated. Also, looking back at the slideshow, there are some formatting issues that I would resolve if I had to go back and do it again. The presentation, was put together using Apple’s Keynote software. This was a group presentation so I was not the only contributer. The other contributers were: Charity Thomas, Frieder Mack and Jennifer Bell.

You can download a pdf version of the presentation here: Google Strategic Analysis Presentation (December 2006)

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Facebook, meet iPhoto – iPhoto, meet Facebook

Josh Schumacher — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 01:16:26 +0000

Update: iPhoto ’09 now has native support for uploading to Facebook so you don’t even need to download a plugin. You can read about it on the Apple iPhoto Site. They also have a quick video tutorial on how to upload to facebook from within iPhoto.

I am impressed. Facebook announced their long awaited iPhoto exporter today. What does this mean? I can finally quickly load my pictures that I already store in iPhoto into Facebook pain free. I have been waiting for this for months, I was excited when the mentioned this was going to become a reality and then they released the ability to upload pictures using the API. I was ready to go and start making this app myself but we were told they were going to be releasing this feature soon.

Facebook delivered on this plugin and they delivered well. I am impressed, you can even tag your photos from within iPhoto! I hope all OSX wielding, facebook dwelling, photo taking folks enjoy this as much as I do.

Download the iPhoto exporter, you won’t be disappointed.