Journal tags: phone

I documented a weird bug with web audio on iOS a while back:

On some pages of The Session, as well as the audio player for tunes (using the Web Audio API) there are also embedded YouTube videos (using the video element). Press play on the audio player; no sound. Press play on the YouTube video; you get sound. Now go back to the audio player and suddenly you do get sound!

It’s almost like playing a video or audio element “kicks” the browser into realising it should be playing the sound from the Web Audio API too.

This was happening on iOS devices set to mute, but I was also getting reports of it happening on devices with the sound on. But it’s that annoyingly intermittent kind of bug that’s really hard to reproduce consistently. Sometimes the sound doesn’t play. Sometimes it does.

I found a workaround but it was really hacky. By playing a one-second long silent mp3 file using audio, you could “kick” the sound into behaving. Then you can use the Web Audio API and it would play consistently.

Well, that’s all changed with the latest release of Mobile Safari. Now what happens is that the Web Audio stuff plays …for one second. And then stops.

I removed the hacky workaround and the Web Audio API started behaving itself again …but your device can’t be set to silent.

The good news is that the Web Audio behaviour seems to be consistent now. It only plays if the device isn’t muted. This restriction doesn’t apply to video and audio elements; they will still play even if your device is set to silent.

This descrepancy between the two different ways of playing audio is kind of odd, but at least now the Web Audio behaviour is predictable.

You can hear the Web Audio API in action by going to any tune on The Session and pressing the “play audio” button.

Two-factor authentication is generally considered A Good Thing™️ when you’re logging in to some online service.

The word “factor” here basically means “kind” so you’re doing two kinds of authentication. Typical factors are:

• Something you know (like a password),
• Something you have (like a phone or a USB key),
• Something you are (biometric Black Mirror shit).

Asking for a password and an email address isn’t two-factor authentication. They’re two pieces of identification, but they’re the same kind (something you know). Same goes for supplying your fingerprint and your face: two pieces of information, but of the same kind (something you are).

None of these kinds of authentication are foolproof. All of them can change. All of them can be spoofed. But when you combine factors, it gets a lot harder for an attacker to breach both kinds of authentication.

The most common kind of authentication on the web is password-based (something you know). When a second factor is added, it’s often connected to your phone (something you have).

Every security bod I’ve talked to recommends using an authenticator app for this if that option is available. Otherwise there’s SMS—short message service, or text message to most folks—but SMS has a weakness. Because it’s tied to a phone number, technically you’re only proving that you have access to a SIM (subscriber identity module), not a specific phone. In the US in particular, it’s all too easy for an attacker to use social engineering to get a number transferred to a different SIM card.

Still, authenticating with SMS is an option as a second factor of authentication. When you first sign up to a service, as well as providing the first-factor details (a password and a username or email address), you also verify your phone number. Then when you subsequently attempt to log in, you input your password and on the next screen you’re told to input a string that’s been sent by text message to your phone number (I say “string” but it’s usually a string of numbers).

There’s an inevitable friction for the user here. But then, there’s a fundamental tension between security and user experience.

In the world of security, vigilance is the watchword. Users need to be aware of their surroundings. Is this web page being served from the right domain? Is this email coming from the right address? Friction is an ally.

But in the world of user experience, the opposite is true. “Don’t make me think” is the rallying cry. Friction is an enemy.

With SMS authentication, the user has to manually copy the numbers from the text message (received in a messaging app) into a form on a website (in a different app—a web browser). But if the messaging app and the browser are on the same device, it’s possible to improve the user experience without sacrificing security.

If you’re building a form that accepts a passcode sent via SMS, you can use the autocomplete attribute with a value of “one-time-code”. For a six-digit passcode, your input element might look something like this:

<input type="text" maxlength="6" inputmode="numeric" autocomplete="one-time-code">

With one small addition to one HTML element, you’ve saved users some tedious drudgery.

There’s one more thing you can do to improve security, but it’s not something you add to the HTML. It’s something you add to the text message itself.

Let’s say your website is example.com and the text message you send reads:

Your one-time passcode is 123456.

Add this to the end of the text message:

@example.com #123456

So the full message reads:

Your one-time passcode is 123456.

@example.com #123456

The first line is for humans. The second line is for machines. Using the @ symbol, you’re telling the device to only pre-fill the passcode for URLs on the domain example.com. Using the # symbol, you’re telling the device the value of the passcode. Combine this with autocomplete="one-time-code" in your form and the user shouldn’t have to lift a finger.

I’m fascinated by these kind of emergent conventions in text messages. Remember that the @ symbol and # symbol in Twitter messages weren’t ideas from Twitter—they were conventions that users started and the service then adopted.

It’s a bit different with the one-time code convention as there is a specification brewing from representatives of both Google and Apple.

Tess is leading from the Apple side and she’s got another iron in the fire to make security and user experience play nicely together using the convention of the /.well-known directory on web servers.

You can add a URL for /.well-known/change-password which redirects to the form a user would use to update their password. Browsers and password managers can then use this information if they need to prompt a user to update their password after a breach. I’ve added this to The Session.

Oh, and on that page where users can update their password, the autocomplete attribute is your friend again:

<input type="password" autocomplete="new-password">

If you want them to enter their current password first, use this:

<input type="password" autocomplete="current-password">

All of the things I’ve mentioned—the autocomplete attribute, origin-bound one-time codes in text messages, and a well-known URL for changing passwords—have good browser support. But even if they were only supported in one browser, they’d still be worth adding. These additions do absolutely no harm to browsers that don’t yet support them. That’s progressive enhancement.

I told you about how I’m using the Web Audio API on The Session to generate synthesised audio of each tune setting. I also said:

Except for some weirdness on iOS that I had to fix.

Here’s that weirdness…

Let me start by saying that this isn’t anything to do with requiring a user interaction (the Web Audio API insists on some kind of user interaction to prevent developers from having auto-playing sound on websites). All of my code related to the Web Audio API is inside a click event handler. This is a different kind of weirdness.

First of all, I noticed that if you pressed play on the audio player when your iOS device is on mute, then you don’t hear any audio. Seems logical, right? Except if using the same device, still set to mute, you press play on a video or audio element, the sound plays just fine. You can confirm this by going to Huffduffer and pressing play on any of the audio elements there, even when your iOS device is set on mute.

So it seems that iOS has different criteria for the Web Audio API than it does for audio or video. Except it isn’t quite that straightforward.

On some pages of The Session, as well as the audio player for tunes (using the Web Audio API) there are also embedded YouTube videos (using the video element). Press play on the audio player; no sound. Press play on the YouTube video; you get sound. Now go back to the audio player and suddenly you do get sound!

It’s almost like playing a video or audio element “kicks” the browser into realising it should be playing the sound from the Web Audio API too.

This was happening on iOS devices set to mute, but I was also getting reports of it happening on devices with the sound on. But it’s that annoyingly intermittent kind of bug that’s really hard to reproduce consistently. Sometimes the sound doesn’t play. Sometimes it does.

Following my theory that the browser needs a “kick” to get into the right frame of mind for the Web Audio API, I resorted to a messy little hack.

In the event handler for the audio player, I generate the “kick” by playing a second of silence using the JavaScript equivalent of the audio element:

var audio = new Audio('1-second-of-silence.mp3');
audio.play();

I’m not proud of that. It’s so hacky that I’ve even wrapped the code in some user-agent sniffing on the server, and I never do user-agent sniffing!

Still, if you ever find yourself getting weird but inconsistent behaviour on iOS using the Web Audio API, this nasty little hack could help.

Update: Time to remove this workaround. Mobile Safari has been updated.

In May 2012, Brian LeRoux, the creator of PhoneGap, wrote a post setting out the beliefs, goals and philosophy of the project.

The beliefs are the assumptions that inform everything else. Brian stated two core tenets:

1. The web solved cross platform.
2. All technology deprecates with time.

That second belief then informed one of the goals of the PhoneGap project:

The ultimate purpose of PhoneGap is to cease to exist.

Last week, PhoneGap succeeded in its goal:

Since the project’s beginning in 2008, the market has evolved and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) now bring the power of native apps to web applications.

Today, we are announcing the end of development for PhoneGap.

I think Brian was spot-on with his belief that all technology deprecates with time. I also think it was very astute of him to tie the goals of PhoneGap to that belief. Heck, it’s even in the project name: PhoneGap!

I recently wrote this about Sass and clamp:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the goal of any good library should be to get so successful as to make itself redundant. That is, the ideas and functionality provided by the tool are so useful and widely adopted that the native technologies—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—take their cue from those tools.

jQuery is the perfect example of this. jQuery is no longer needed because cross-browser DOM Scripting is now much easier …thanks to jQuery.

Successful libraries and frameworks point the way. They show what developers are yearning for, and that’s where web standards efforts can then focus. When a library or framework is no longer needed, that’s not something to mourn; it’s something to celebrate.

That’s particularly true if the library of code needs to be run by a web browser. The user pays a tax with that extra download so that the developer gets the benefit of the library. When web browsers no longer need the library in order to provide the same functionality, it’s a win for users.

In fact, if you’re providing a front-end library or framework, I believe you should be actively working towards making it obselete. Think of your project as a polyfill. If it’s solving a genuine need, then you should be looking forward to the day when your code is made redundant by web browsers.

One more thing…

I think it was great that Brian documented PhoneGap’s beliefs, goals and philosophy. This is exactly why design principles can be so useful—to clearly set out the priorities of a project, so that there’s no misunderstanding or mixed signals.

If you’re working on a project, take the time to ask yourself what assumptions and beliefs are underpinning the work. Then figure out how those beliefs influence what you prioritise.

Ultimately, the code you produce is the output generated by your priorities. And your priorities are driven by your purpose.

You can make those priorities tangible in the form of design principles.

You can make those design principles visible by publishing them.

Chris has written about switching code editors. I’m a real stick-in-the-mud when it comes to switching editors. Partly that’s because I’m generally pretty happy with whatever I’m using (right now it’s Atom) but it’s also because I just don’t get that excited about software like this. I probably should care more; I spend plenty of time inside a code editor. And I should really take the time to get to grips with features like keyboard shortcuts—I’m sure I’m working very inefficiently. But, like I said, I find it hard to care enough, and on the whole, I’m content.

I was struck by this observation from Chris:

When moving, I have to take time to make sure it works pretty much like the old one.

That reminded me of a recent switch I made, not with code editors, but with browsers.

I’ve been using Chrome for years. One day it started crashing a lot. So I decided to make the switch to Firefox. Looking back, I’m glad to have had this prompt—I think it’s good to shake things up every now and then, so I don’t get too complacent (says the hypocrite who can’t be bothered to try a new code editor).

Just as Chris noticed with code editors, it was really important that I could move bookmarks (and bookmarklets!) over to my new browser. On the whole, it went pretty smoothly. I had to seek out a few browser extensions but that was pretty much it. And because I use a password manager, logging into all my usual services wasn’t a hassle.

Of all the pieces of software on my computer, the web browser is the one where I definitely spend the most time: reading, linking, publishing. At this point, I’m very used to life with Firefox as my main browser. It’s speedy and stable, and the dev tools are very similar to Chrome’s.

Maybe I’ll switch to Safari at some point. Like I said, I think it’s good to shake things up and get out of my comfort zone.

Now, if I really wanted to get out of my comfort zone, I’d switch operating systems like Dave did with his move to Windows. And I should really try using a different phone OS. Again, this is something that Dave tried with his switch to Android (although that turned out to be unacceptably creepy), and Paul did it ages ago using a Windows phone for a week.

There’s probably a balance to be struck here. I think it’s good to change code editors, browsers, even operating systems and phones every now and then, but I don’t want to feel like I’m constantly in learning mode. There’s something to be said for using tools that are comfortable and familiar, even if they’re outdated.

I’ve come to believe that the goal of any good framework should be to make itself unnecessary.

Brian said it explicitly of his PhoneGap project:

The ultimate purpose of PhoneGap is to cease to exist.

That makes total sense, especially if your code is a polyfill—those solutions are temporary by design. Autoprefixer is another good example of a piece of code that becomes less and less necessary over time.

But I think it’s equally true of any successful framework or library. If the framework becomes popular enough, it will inevitably end up influencing the standards process, thereby becoming dispensible.

jQuery is the classic example of this. There’s very little reason to use jQuery these days because you can accomplish so much with browser-native JavaScript. But the reason why you can accomplish so much without jQuery is because of jQuery. I don’t think we would have querySelector without jQuery. The library proved the need for the feature. The same is true for a whole load of DOM scripting features.

The same process is almost certain to occur with React—it’s a good bet there will be a standardised equivalent to the virtual DOM at some point.

When Google first unveiled AMP, its intentions weren’t clear to me. I hoped that it existed purely to make itself redundant:

As well as publishers creating AMP versions of their pages in order to appease Google, perhaps they will start to ask “Why can’t our regular pages be this fast?” By showing that there is life beyond big bloated invasive web pages, perhaps the AMP project will work as a demo of what the whole web could be.

Alas, as time has passed, that hope shows no signs of being fulfilled. If anything, I’ve noticed publishers using the existence of their AMP pages as a justification for just letting their “regular” pages put on weight.

Worse yet, the messaging from Google around AMP has shifted. Instead of pitching it as a format for creating parallel versions of your web pages, they’re now also extolling the virtues of having your AMP pages be the only version you publish:

In fact, AMP’s evolution has made it a viable solution to build entire websites.

On an episode of the Dev Mode podcast a while back, AMP was a hotly-debated topic. But even those defending AMP were doing so on the understanding that it was more a proof-of-concept than a long-term solution (and also that AMP is just for news stories—something else that Google are keen to change).

But now it’s clear that the Google AMP Project is being marketed more like a framework for the future: a collection of web components that prioritise performance …which is kind of odd, because that’s also what Google’s Polymer project is. The difference being that pages made with Polymer don’t get preferential treatment in Google’s search results. I can’t help but wonder how the Polymer team feels about AMP’s gradual pivot onto their territory.

If the AMP project existed in order to create a web where AMP was no longer needed, I think I could get behind it. But the more it’s positioned as the only viable solution to solving performance, the more uncomfortable I am with it.

Which, by the way, brings me to one of the most pernicious ideas around Google AMP—positioning anyone opposed to it as not caring about web performance. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s precisely because performance on the web is so important that it deserves a long-term solution, co-created by all of us: not some commandents delivered to us from on-high by one organisation, enforced by preferential treatment by that organisation’s monopoly in search.

It’s the classic logical fallacy:

1. Performance! Something must be done!
2. AMP is something.
3. Now something has been done.

By marketing itself as the only viable solution to the web performance problem, I think the AMP project is doing itself a great disservice. If it positioned itself as an example to be emulated, I would welcome it.

I wish that AMP were being marketed more like a temporary polyfill. And as with any polyfill, I look forward to the day when AMP is no longer necesssary.

I want AMP to become extinct. I genuinely think that the Google AMP team should share that wish.

I can’t recall the last time I was so creeped out by a technology as I am by Google Duplex—the AI that can make reservations over the phone by pretending to be a human.

I’m not sure what’s disturbing me more: the technology itself, or the excited reaction of tech bros who can’t wait to try it.

Thing is …when these people talk about being excited to try it, I’m pretty sure they are only thinking of trying it as a caller, not a callee. They aren’t imagining that they could possibly be one of the people on the other end of one of those calls.

The visionaries of technology—Douglas Engelbart, J.C.R Licklider—have always recognised the potential for computers to augment humanity, to be bicycles for the mind. I think they would be horrified to see the increasing trend of using humans to augment computers.

What hath God wrought?

Mr. Watson, come here—I want to see you.

lo

Larry, can you get my razor?

The iPhone—and by extension, the smartphone—is a decade old. Ian Bogost has written an interesting piece in The Atlantic charting our changing relationship with the technology.

First, it was like a toy dog:

A device that could be cared for, and conspicuously so.

Then, it was like a cigarette:

A nervous tic, facilitated by a handheld apparatus that releases relief when operated.

Later, it was like a rosary:

Its toy-dog quirks having been tamed, its compulsive nature having been accepted, the iPhone became the magic wand by which all worldly actions could be performed, all possible information acquired.

Finally, it simply becomes …a rectangle.

Abstract, as a shape. Flat, as a surface. But suggestive of so much. A table for community. A door for entry, or for exit. A window for looking out of, or a picture for looking into. A movie screen for distraction, or a cradle for comfort, or a bed for seduction.

Design dissolves in behaviour. This is something that Ben wrote about recently in his excellent Slapdashery series: “Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.”

Technology tweaks our desire for novelty; but as soon as we get it we’re usually bored. There are no technologies that I can think of that haven’t become mundane.

This is something I touched on in my talk last year at An Event Apart. There’s a thread throughout the talk about Arthur C. Clarke, and of course I quote his third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I propose an addendum to that:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic at first.

The magical quickly becomes the mundane. That’s exactly the point that Louis CK is making in the piece that Ben references.

Seven years ago Frank wrote his wonderful essay There Is A Horse In The Apple Store:

I have a term called a “tiny pony.” It is a thing that is exceptional that no one, for whatever reason, notices. Or, conversely, it is an exceptional thing that everyone notices, but quickly grows acclimated to despite the brilliance of it all.

We are surrounded by magical tiny ponies. I mean, just think: right now you are reading some words at a URL on the World Wide Web. Even more magically, I just published some words at my own URL on the World Wide Web. That still blows my mind! I hope I never lose that feeling.

In the latest issue of Justin’s excellent Responsive Web Design weekly newsletter, he includes a segment called “The Snippet Show”:

This is what tells all our browsers on all our devices to set the viewport to be the same width of the current device, and to also set the initial scale to 1 (not scaled at all). This essentially allows us to have responsive design consistently.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

The viewport value for the meta element was invented by Apple when the iPhone was released. Back then, it was a safe bet that most websites were wider than the iPhone’s 320 pixel wide display—most of them were 960 pixels wide …because reasons. So mobile Safari would automatically shrink those sites down to fit within the display. If you wanted to over-ride that behaviour, you had to use the meta viewport gubbins that they made up.

That was nine years ago. These days, if you’re building a responsive website, you still need to include that meta element.

That seems like a shame to me. I’m not suggesting that the default behaviour should switch to assuming a fluid layout, but maybe the browser could just figure it out. After all, the CSS will already be parsed by the time the HTML is rendering. Perhaps a quick test for the presence of a crawlbar could be used to trigger the shrinking behaviour. No crawlbar, no shrinking.

Maybe someday the assumption behind the current behaviour could be flipped—assume a website is responsive unless the author explicitly requests the shrinking behaviour. I’d like to think that could happen soon, but I suspect that a depressingly large number of sites are still fixed-width (I don’t even want to know—don’t tell me).

There are other browser default behaviours that might someday change. Right now, if I type example.com into a browser, it will first attempt to contact http://example.com rather than https://example.com. That means the example.com server has to do a redirect, costing the user valuable time.

You can mitigate this by putting your site on the HSTS preload list but wouldn’t it be nice if browsers first checked for HTTPS instead of HTTP? I don’t think that will happen anytime soon, but someday …someday.

An article in Wired highlights a key feature of the new Apple watch—to free us from the tyranny of the smartphone screen.

I’ve never set up email on my phone.

If I install an app on my phone, the first thing I do is switch off all notifications. That saves battery life and sanity.

The only time my phone is allowed to ask for my attention is for phone calls, SMS, or FaceTime (all rare occurrences). I initiate every other interaction—Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, the web. My phone is a tool that I control, not the other way around.

I had a very early start yesterday. It was Anna and Cennydd’s big (and yet little) day. I needed to get to the registry office in Walthamstow by 10am which meant leaving Brighton before dawn. In my befuddled state, I forgot my phone.

I realised when I was in the taxi to the station. I readily admit that for a brief moment, I thought about asking the taxi driver to turn around so I could retrieve my camera, address book, city map, music collection, and web browser.

But I didn’t. And it was fine. I had a book to read.

Someone sent an email to Clearleft recently pointing out what they thought was a certain similarity between our website and the website for a company called Kent Web Host.

I can’t see it myself. But I can’t guarantee that we weren’t somehow unconsciously influenced by these guys.

Just to set the record straight, I gave them a call.

Update: a few points of clarification:

• Garry from Kent Web Host is totally cool with me publishing our conversation.
• I’m not publishing this out of any spirit of schadenfreude. I’m publishing it because it was a fun conversation and Garry handled the situation like a true gent.
• Garry is a really nice guy. If you want to say unkind things about him on Twitter when you’re linking to this, don’t: you don’t know what you’re talking about.

On our way back from New Zealand, Jessica and I stopped off in Sydney for a day. That same evening, the “What Do You Know?” event was going on—a series of five minute lightning talks from Sydney’s finest web geeks.

Maxine asked me if I could do a turn so I put together a quick spiel called Five Things I Learned from the Internet. Those five things are:

1. How to wrap headphone cables in a tangle-free way.
2. How to fold a T-shirt in seconds.
3. How to tie shoelaces correctly (thanks, Adam).
4. How to eat a cupcake (thanks, Tara).
5. How to peel a banana (thanks, Kyle) with a bonus lesson on the bananus.

At least one of those things will blow your mind. Pwshoo!

Creating telephone answering systems can be fun as I discovered at History Hack Day when I put together the Huffduffer hotline using the Tropo API. There’s something thrilling about using the human voice as an interface on your loosely joined small pieces. Navigating by literally talking to a machine feels simultaneously retro and sci-fi.

I think there’s a lot of potential for some fun services in this area. What a shame then that the technology has mostly been used for dreary customer service narratives:

Horrific glimpse of a broken future. I sniffed while a voice activated phone menu was being read out and it started from the beginning again.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about injecting personality into web design, often through the tone of voice in the microcopy. When personality is conveyed in the spoken as well as the written word, the effect is even more striking.

Have a listen for yourself by calling:

• 206-504-2025 from within the States or
• +990009369996101162 on Skype.

That’s the number for Customer Service Romance:

What happens when Customer Service bots start getting too smart? What if they start needing help too? How would they use the tools at their disposal to reach out to those they care about? What if they start caring about us a little too much?

It’s using the Voxeo service, which looks similar to Tropo.

The end result is amusing …but also slightly disconcerting. You may find yourself chuckling, but your laughter will be tinged with nervousness.

On the face of it, it’s an amusing little art project. But it’s might also be a glimpse of an impending bot-driven algorithmpocalypse.

Paul Irish, Divya Manian and Shi Chuan launched Mobile Boilerplate recently—a mobile companion site to HTML5 Boilerplate.

There’s some good stuff in there but I was a little surprised to see that the meta viewport element included values for minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, target-densitydpi=160dpi, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no">

Setting user-scalable=no is pretty much the same as setting minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0. In any case, I’m not keen on it. Like Roger, I don’t think we should take away the user’s right to pinch and zoom to make content larger. That’s why my usual viewport declaration is:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Yes, I know that most native apps don’t allow you to zoom but I see no reason to replicate that failing on the web.

But there’s a problem. Allowing users to scale content for comfort would be fine if it weren’t for a bug in Mobile Safari:

When the meta viewport tag is set to content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1", or any value that allows user-scaling, changing the device to landscape orientation causes the page to scale larger than 1.0. As a result, a portion of the page is cropped off the right, and the user must double-tap (sometimes more than once) to get the page to zoom properly into view.

This is really annoying so Shi Chuan set about fixing the problem.

His initial solution was to keep minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0 in the meta viewport element but then to change it using JavaScript once the user initiates a gesture (the gesturestart event is triggered as soon as two fingers are on the screen). At the point, the content attribute of the meta viewport element gets updated to read minimum-scale=0.25, maximum-scale=1.6, the default values:

var metas = document.getElementsByTagName('meta');
var i;
if (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i)) {
  document.addEventListener("gesturestart", gestureStart, false);
  function gestureStart() {
    for (i=0; i<metas.length; i++) {
      if (metas[i].name == "viewport") {
        metas[i].content = "width=device-width, minimum-scale=0.25, maximum-scale=1.6";
      }
    }
  }
}

That works nicely but I wasn’t too keen on the dependency between the markup and the script. If, for whatever reason, the script doesn’t get executed, users are stuck with an unzoomable page.

I suggested that the script should also set the initial value to minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0:

var metas = document.getElementsByTagName('meta');
var i;
if (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i)) {
  for (i=0; i<metas.length; i++) {
    if (metas[i].name == "viewport") {
      metas[i].content = "width=device-width, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0";
    }
  }
  document.addEventListener("gesturestart", gestureStart, false);
}
function gestureStart() {
  for (i=0; i<metas.length; i++) {
    if (metas[i].name == "viewport") {
      metas[i].content = "width=device-width, minimum-scale=0.25, maximum-scale=1.6";
    }
  }
}

Now the markup still contains the robust accessible default:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

…while the script takes care of initially setting the scale values and also updating them when a gesture is detected. Here’s what’s happening:

1. By default, the page is scaleable because the initial meta viewport declaration doesn’t set a minimum-scale or maximum-scale.
2. Once the script loads, the page is no longer scalable because both minimum-scale and maximum-scale have been set to 1.0. If the device is switched from portrait to landscape, the resizing bug won’t be triggered because scaling is disabled.
3. When the gesturestart event is detected—indicating that the user might be trying to scale the page—the minimum-scale and maximum-scale values are updated to allow scaling. At this point, if the device is switched from portrait to landscape, the resizing bug will occur because the page is now scaleable.

Jason Weaver points out that you should probably detect for iPad too. That’s a pretty straightforward update:

if (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i) || navigator.userAgent.match(/iPad/i))

Mathias Bynens updated the code to use querySelectorAll which is supported in Mobile Safari. Here’s the code I’m currently using:

if (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i) || navigator.userAgent.match(/iPad/i)) {
  var viewportmeta = document.querySelector('meta[name="viewport"]');
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You can try it out on Huffduffer, Salter Cane, Principia Gastronomica and right here on Adactio.

Right now there’s still a little sluggishness between the initial pinch-zoom gesture and the scaling; the scale values (0.25 - 1.6) don’t seem to take effect immediately. A second pinch-zoom gesture is often required. If you have any ideas for improving the event capturing and propagation, dive in there.

Update: the bug has been fixed in iOS 6.

After seeing (and hearing) what Brian was doing at History Hack Day, I decided I’d have to have a play with Tropo. Like Twilio, it’s a service that allows you to build voice-activated apps that you call up and talk to.

The API is pretty straightforward and it seems like there’s quite a lot that you can do as a developer before upgrading to a paid account. They’ll also host your code for you, and you have a choice of scripting languages.

At the most basic level, you can send text-to-voice messages:

say("Hello world")

But you can also give it audio files to play:

say(http://example.com/helloworld.mp3)

Huffduffer has the locations of thousands of audio files, so I thought a voice interface onto Huffduffer’s collection would be fun.

Call +1 202 600 8751 in the US, +44 2035 142722 in the UK, or use Skype. When the nice digital man on the other end picks up the phone and asks you want you want to hear, you can respond with “what’s new”, “what’s popular”, or say a tag like music, science, history, politics, technology, etc.

The script then fetches the latest files with that tag and will go through them with you one by one, asking “Would you like to hear… ?” followed by the title. If you don’t like the sound of it, just say no. When you find something you do want to hear, say yes. It will then start playing and you will be listening to a podcast down a telephone line.

I call it the Huffduffer Hotline. The code is on Github. If you fancy playing around with the Tropo API and want to use Huffduffer’s links to audio files, go ahead. You should find everything you need through the Huffduffer API.

If people find the Huffduffer Hotline useful or just plain fun, I’ll upgrade from the developer account to get better performance. Let me know your thoughts on Get Satisfaction.

When the original iPhone came out, it was pretty impressive. Every subsequent iteration has featured improvements of varying levels of impressiveness. The latest version, though, has bowled me over.

I’m not talking about faster speeds, bigger storage, or any new fangled gizmos or geegaws. I’m talking about VoiceOver in the iPhone.

Watch the video to get the low-down. Then read this first-hand account of using an accessible touch-screen device.

That’s quite a design challenge: an accessible touch-screen device! I doff my hat in the general direction of the Apple engineers who rose to this challenge.

Speaking of exciting developments in the world of accessibility…

The second Accessibility 2.0 conference will be taking place in London on the 22nd of this month. It was a cracking event last year and, judging by the line-up, this year is going to be a winner too. Grab a ticket now.

I’m such a blogwhore.

I was contacted a while back by the people who make Sumo chairs asking if I wanted an Omni. All I had to do in return was blog about it—just like Cameron did.

This is just the sort of slightly sleazy marketing ploy that gets Tom so upset. And I agree with him. But, the thing is, Jessica and I were talking about getting a beanbag anyway. With that in mind, this Faustian bargain was just too hard to resist.

So here goes…

It’s a nice chair; quite comfy. But the outside material, though easy to clean, is a bit synthetic for my taste. I prefer more organic, cosy materials in my home. Still, the Omni would be perfect for the office. If you’re planning to get one for your home, think about getting the Omni Plus which has a microsuede covering.

Okay, that’s that taken care of. If you don’t respect me in the morning, I’ll understand.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been sent goodies in the post. Nokia lent me a pre-sale trial version of their N78 phone but they didn’t demand a blog post in return. That’s just as well because the phone turned out to be a piece of unintuitive crap. It doesn’t matter how many features you pack into a device—WiFi, GPS, what have you—if the hardware and software interface requires a degree in puzzle-solving, it’s a useless lump of plastic. The iPhone has shown us that we don’t have to put up with crappy mobiles any more …and I don’t even have an iPhone.

I feel slightly guilty badmouthing a freebie. Not only did Nokia send me a shiny toy, they also offered to fly me over to Helsinki for last week’s workshops. I couldn’t afford to take the time off work and anyway, far more capable people than I were in attendance: Ms. Jen, Rebecca and Micki to name just three.

Judging from the evidence on Flickr, an enjoyable and productive time was had by all. And, if my eyes don’t deceive me, I do believe …yes, I think those are Sumo chairs that everyone was lounging around on.

Update: Nope, Rebecca says those beanbags are Fatboys.

Like everyone else in the geekosphere, I was vicariously attending MacWorld through all those Mac rumour sites as well as Twitter. Unsurprisingly, the iPhone has a lot of people excited.

Jason Kottke got so excited, he immediately whipped up a cardboard scale model of the iPhone. Jeff Croft is really excited that the iPhone is running Leopard.

A lot of people are talking about how to get their heads around this thing. Is it a phone or is it a PDA? John Allsopp wouldn’t mind losing the phone functionality altogether.

Mike Davidson thinks that the iPhone is worthy of the moniker Steve’s Amazing New Device. He must be pretty pleased that his prediction that Apple would no longer be just a computer company became reality with the official change of the company’s name. Khoi Vinh, on the other hand, will be disappointed to hear that the iPhone does indeed use iTunes to do its syncing.

I spent part of the keynote chanting Get to the web browsing! Get to the web browsing! Then Steve Jobs got to the web browsing… with expando-Safari.

Dave Hyatt may be slightly biased but he thinks that this may spell the beginning of the end for a separate mobile web. Dan Cederholm is pretty impressed too. Cameron Moll, on the other hand, believes that the iPhone won’t revolutionise the mobile web landscape for most people. Brian Fling disagrees. He thinks the impact of the iPhone will be huge.

Bursting Apple’s reality distortion field with Photoshop, Jon Hicks demonstrates the problem with the iPhone’s screen. Roger Johansson also throws a cold bucket of reality on proceedings when he asks where the tactile feedback is supposed to come from when there’s no keyboard. That’s a valid concern according to David Pogue’s hands-on experience.

The biggest downer probably won’t be anything to do with the device itself but the lock-in with some crappy provider, as Dave Shea explains. That’s still not enough to dissuade Jason Santa Maria from wanting an Apple mobile device.

I met up with Brighton’s own mobile guru, Tom Hume, for lunch today. He’s taking a pragmatic and somewhat pessimistic approach with his thoughts on the iPhone.

Only time will tell how Apple’s baby will fare once its released into the wild. For some historical perspective, I invite you to cast your mind back to a Slashdot article from 2001 announcing the iPod.