Posts Tagged ‘iPhone’

Useful bookmarklets for iPhone

Over the past few weeks, I’ve come across a few useful bookmarklets which work great in Mobile Safari on the iPhone.

I can’t take any credit for writing these, but hope to be helpful by listing them in one place.

How to install

Open this page with mobile Safari and tap-and-hold on the bookmarklet hyperlinks below. Select “Copy” when the menu appears. Then bookmark a page (any page will do), giving it a name like “Scroll to bottom”. After storing the bookmark, edit it – the URL will now be editable where it wasn’t previously. Delete the original URL and paste in the bookmarklet code. Finally, remove the “http://” from the front. Save!

Scroll to bottom

How many times have you been reading a long webpage and accidentally hit the top bar in mobile Safari? Yes, it takes you to the top, but there’s no “go to bottom” shortcut. This will do just that. Copy me

Find in page

This provides a “find text in this webpage” feature. Copy me

View source

Yeah baby! Copy me

Tags: , , ,
Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Oct 28th, 2009

Opening Google Earth files (kml, kmz) on an iPhone

Yes you can! But the kml/kmz file needs to be hosted online somewhere.

  1. find the URL of a kml/kmz file hosted somewhere on the internets. (I used this one hosted at dropzone.com)
  2. open the iPhone “Maps” application
  3. type the URL into the search bar and press [Search]

… and you’ll get something like this:

iPhone viewing kmz file

iPhone viewing kmz file

The Search autocomplete feature should help the next time you open the file – because it’ll remember the URL. Just type “http” and the URL should pop up underneath.

Tags: , , ,
Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Oct 9th, 2009

“MyRail Lite” iPhone app – dead!

Although I didn’t think to mention the app in my recent Essential iPhone Apps post, the “MyRail Lite” app is (was) first-rate. But they today tweeted that the service is to close because their license to distribute real-time data from National Rail Enquiries isn’t to be renewed.

Several words spring to mind, the cleanest of which would be “boo”, “hiss” and “arse”.

There is another app , very recently released, called “National Rail Enquiries”… but at £4.99 it’s a bit feckin’ steep. It looks to be officially sanctioned by NRE and – while I obviously don’t know the details – I wonder if NRE licensed the data to MyRail, watched them prove the concept, saw it was popular, and then saw an opportunity to screw them over.

(Only guessing, like!)

Tags: , ,
Filed under tech, transport : Comments (0) : Mar 23rd, 2009

Essential iPhone apps (if you happen to be me)

Well I was sorely tempted by the Blackberry Storm, but Vodafone are making a fundamental error in their sales tactics: they let people play with the thing before they buy it. Usually that’d be a good thing, but I very quickly concluded that it’s a bloody awful device. (Stephen Fry was right, and I so wanted to like it too!)

So out went the Storm, and in came a shiny new iPhone.

But even the iPhone itself as its problems, and I was all ready to jailbreak the thing in order to get the functionality I wanted… but found it wasn’t necessary. So here’s some essential iPhone applications, if you just happen to be identical to me… Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ,
Filed under tech : Comments (2) : Jan 26th, 2009