Todd Hamilton » iPhone

Joypad Portable Podcast Interview

toddham — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 04:15:54 +0000

My recent interview on the Portable Podcast. Host Carter Dotson talks with me about the past, present, and future of Joypad.

Home Button in Mobile Safari

toddham — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 03:42:56 +0000

One thing about Mobile Safari thats always bugged me is that there’s no home button. It’s a common feature of almost every web browser so why exclude it on the iPhone? Firefox recently did something similar with ver3 beta 3 and removed the home button from the top toolbar. This caused a minor stir and they promptly added it back in for the next release.

So why is the absence of a home button such a problem? If a user browses several pages deep there’s no quick way to get back to square one. When my mom gets lost on the interwebs it’s the one button she knows will always get her back to a comfortable starting point. Now I know what you’re thinking… just make a bookmark! Yes that would work… but that would require the user to actually add it to their bookmarks and shuffle through them every time they wanna use it. Seems like a lot of work for an action so common.

Here’s a quick idea for the possible placement of a home button. When the user taps the address bar at the top, the standard navigation bar expands down and a home button is positioned all the way to the left (see the concept below). Currently that space is reserved for page title which is important, however the page title gets displayed in full when the address bar is closed so you never really lose any information or functionality with this layout. With a home icon up on the left the user is two taps away from getting back to their homepage. As for setting a new homepage, this action could be added to the menu that appears when you tap the + symbol on the bottom bar. I’m sure there are other possibilities but this seemed like the most convenient.

iPhone Safari 2.2

toddham — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:58:11 +0000

Ever since the 2.2 software update for iPhone was released I’ve been reading a lot of disgruntled comments about the new Safari interface. In 2.2 Apple made the decision to combine the URL and Google fields on one row, as apposed to the Google bar only appearing when you tap the top bar (see screenshot below). So what had to change in order to make this happen? The zoom button was removed and the refresh button was placed inside the URL field. Many people seem confused as to why they would do such a thing so I thought I would explain how these changes improve the UI and UX.

1. The zoom button did the same exact thing as tapping the URL bar so removing it doesn’t affect any functionality. What it does do is free up space for something else.

2. In the previous Safari it took 2 taps to get to the Google bar which I found particularly annoying. With the new interface it takes 1 tap to get to either the URL or Google field. This is significant because it lets the user clearly choose how they want to navigate the web, rather than forcing them into the URL field by default.

iPhone GUI Goodness

toddham — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 05:50:50 +0000

The good people over at teehan+lax put together a magnificent Photoshop template for the iPhone GUI. I can see this coming in very handy since I’m about to mockup the Native iPhone Application for GoLark. The PSD is pretty comprehensive and will continue to be updated by the creators.