There was some exciting news from Google last night which quite frankly perked my interest more than the Z-Man’s mea culpa that most of the A-Listers are opining on today. A new and improved interface for the iPhone was quietly rolled out by Google last night and if you’re an iPhone user and haven’t seen it yet I strongly recommend you point Safari to google.com/m and check it out. Actually if you just go to google.com it will automatically redirect you to the mobile version - in case you already have it bookmarked. The mobile version works on any device but it has been optimized for the iPhone. I’m assuming anyone accessing the site with an iPhone, the HTTP_USER_AGENT header variable that gets sent as part of the HTTP request is queried for the “iPhone” string and presented with the “iPhone only” interface.
I was really impressed to say the least as I tried it out this morning on my iPhone. It is pretty obvious that Ajax technology is utilized extensively as you navigate the menus and use the services. The whole experience is really swift and fluid even if you turn off WiFi and use EDGE - looks like resources are preloaded to enable the swift flow when you’re on a slower network. The first thing that struck me was on the Home page when typing the search text Google Suggest (see image above) pops up and dynamically fills in suggestions for your search so you can potentially save some clicks on the keyboard and directly select your search text from the list. Pretty nifty feature if you think about it for a mobile device - looks like Google stole a page from Apple’s play book in terms of usability! Google Reader was one of my favorite apps. My reading list was presented to me fitted nicely horizontally or vertically depending on my perspective. Some of the sites were slightly misaligned so I had to scroll right or switch over to the horizontal perspective. The only complain I have about the reader is I wish they had a “mark as read all” on the Feed Subscriptions page so you can go in and mark all thirty unread items instead of marking them page by page.
However for me the best app. was Picasa web album. I’ve been using Picasa for sometime now to share and maintain my photo albums and the iPhone version is really cool. The list with the album cover is loaded almost instantaneously (WiFi) and after selecting the album the thumbnails are also loaded pretty fast - I tried it with an album of hundred photos. It takes about 2-3 seconds for the large image to render once you select a thumbnail and you actually see the page come up first without the image - which is not so elegant but acceptable IMO.
I think in the future Google should add some customization features. For example I really don’t use Calendar at all so I don’t want it on the menu, however I want Picasa up on the menu. Allowing the user to customize the interface would add tremendous value in terms of usability for the user. In addition the user should be able to customize the mobile version from the desktop as well.
Good stuff indeed!
[digg=http://www.digg.com/apple/Google_Ajaxifies_iPhone_Interface/blog]
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
looks good, it was great when they updates the blacberry too, it makes a pretty big difference.
This was priceless and definitely done well.
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Yeah it is good stuff, or it probably would be good stuff if I knew what the heck you were on about!
check out my blog at http://www.extrapreneur.wordpress.com
The Republic of Internets website should be “iPhoneized” ASAP.
Blainiac - we’re working on it
- Stay tuned