Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"As the battle between HTML5 and Adobe Flash continues to heat up, Virgin America has chosen a side: its brand new web site design ditches Flash in favor of HTML."

I read in a story not long ago that the iPhone might be a driving force in this, and now it appears that is coming to pass. Virgin wants to make their site as compatible as possible with the mobile user, specifically the iPhone, so customers can access their site as well as do mobile check-ins. How many other companies are going to make this switch? What are your thoughts?

"Apple's Cupertino headquarters is now hiring for a new position, that of an iPhone advertising SDK manager."

If you are hired, expect to "manage a team working on the frameworks included in the iPhone SDK." Just what does this mean? Well it is in the realm of advertising so it is probably associated with the purchase of Quattro, the mobile advertiser, earlier this year. You will need to have experience not only in advertising but also Mac OS X, Cocoa, Unix and/or variants of C. Apple has posted the job here, so if interested check it out, oh, and good luck!

"For those who like to edit and show off their photos on the go, Adobe has released its Photoshop.com Mobile for the iPhone."

Don't let the name throw you, this is an app available now in the iTunes Store. Even though it is a standalone app, it is tied in with your Photoshop.com account so it adds that functionality, giving you access to all your photos stored at that site. It is just a basic photo editor so don't expect it to do everything that the regular photoshop program does, but it is a free app available now via iTunes.

"Score another one for the iPhone. Yahoo is abandoning its mobile app for the Blackberry and other smartphones in order to focus more on its recently relaunched iPhone app. For every other phone, it is concentrating development efforts around the mobile browser experience. People applying for the smartphone app, which is still in beta, are receiving a notice (reproduced below) stating that "Yahoo has decided to cease development" of the app on May 20th."

Awesome sauce! You have to wonder how disparate the numbers are that a company would stop making an application for one platform to focus on another in its entirety (image via TechCrunch)...

"Call it cosmic balance - earlier today I was griping about Google Tasks on mobile devices, and now I'm happy to see labels come to Gmail Mobile. The new function is only supported on Apple's iPhone and Google's own Android handsets. The recent addition of the new drop-down menu system to the Google web-based mobile client has clearly set the stage for desktop-like functionality, something mobile device owners will appreciate."

Great catch by Kevin at JK On The Run (the image above is theirs, also). I have to say the mobile G-Mail app for the iPhone is quite usable. I still prefer the integrated mail client over the mobile web version, but with each new feature addition, that becomes harder and harder to justify.

How do you access your G-Mail on the iPhone?

"Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web."

The two winners, and it's absolutely no surprise, are the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1. Both run variants of WebKit. Both have excellent speed, great usability, and a rendering engine that gets pages right consistently, and that's why they won. Having used a lot of the browsers listed in the test, I can say that Gizmodo nailed this one. In many ways, the mobile web has a long way to go, but it's getting way better. Honestly, the only part that surprised me was that the BlackBerry browser, as awful and horrible as it is, did as well as it did.