News tagged ‘JavaScript’

Winterboard is amazing. Saurik, the developer of Winterboard, has just added dynamic backgrounds. Your background can now be an HTML web page using webkit. The possibilities are endless. He threw together a small theme called “Saurik” that fades in and out between two images as an example. But so much more can be done with this.

Comments from Saurik:

So, while staring at the desktop, I realized “wait, why don’t I make that a website? then you could do all kinds of neat things with it!”. This dream has been made a reality with the latest version of WinterBoard. There is a new file you can add called Wallpaper.html which puts a UIWebDocumentView behind SpringBoard.

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AT&T has developed a software trick that will recognize voice commands without the need for specialized voice recognition software. It is based on a new version of AT&T's WATSON speech recognition engine.

As long as the software used to access Speech Mashups obeys certain web standards, particularly an AJAX framework and JavaScript, the technology can capture voice commands, interpret them at a remote server, and send them back to the device in a language a website or program can understand -- all without installing a dedicated app or plugin.

In a prototype mobile version of the YellowPages website, AT&T in a research video shows an iPhone user entering the business name and location into text fields on the page just by speaking them at the appropriate times. While typing would work in such a case, the company claims that voicing the information is faster and more convenient.

via appleinsider

There is not much defference between Safari 1.1.4 and 2.0. But Under the hood, MobileSafari 2.0's performance is hugely improved over 1.1.4. Everything related to web surfing feels faster, web pages consistently load faster on 2.0, both via Wi-Fi and EDGE. This has nothing to do with the new iPhone 3G hardware — this is about dramatic performance improvements on original iPhones upgraded to the 2.0 OS.

Using MobileSafari simply feels faster, especially with web applications. Feel is by nature subjective, but JavaScript benchmarks back this up.

In August last year, Craig Hockenberry posted a few simple benchmarks to compare the iPhone's processing power and JavaScript interpreter against Safari 3 running on a Mac with a 1.83 GHz Core Duo. At that time, the current version of the iPhone OS was 1.0.1. Here are the results of those same benchmarks on original iPhones running the 1.1.4 and new 2.0 OS versions, with Hockenberry’s 1.0.1 results included for comparison:

The last column shows how many times faster the 2.0 version of MobileSafari was versus 1.0.1 and 1.1.4. The same results, charted (smaller bars are faster) can be viewed above.

The results are obvious. WebKit JavaScript performance has improved steadily and significantly in just one year, with a huge jump between 1.1.4 and the new 2.0.0. In side-by-side page loading tests between two original iPhones running 1.1.4 and 2.0.0, the new version consistently finished at least a few seconds faster.

For all the hubbub regarding the new App Store, most “iPhone software” runs in the web browser. But improvements in WebKit performance often help native iPhone app performance, too — a slew of my favorite native iPhone apps have built-in WebKit browsers (e.g., NetNewsWire, Twitterrific, Instapaper, and Cocktails). When WebKit performance improves, any app that uses WebKit improves, and WebKit improved a lot between iPhone 1.1.4 and 2.0.0.

via daringfireball.net