No truth to the rumor….

That Darragh is auditioning for a role in Killinscully.

NFL.com shows the way forward

Whilst wallowing in the New York Giants’ 4-0 start to the regular season, I drifted onto NFL.com this morning, and received a pleasant surprise.

The NFL.com site really fills a PC screen with images, flash and automatic Ajax calls to update content -not usually a good site for the iPhone.

However, the site detected my iphonne safari browser and through their wap.NFL.com URL, provided an excellent stripped down version of the site that felt like the MLB’s superior ‘At-Bat’ iPhone app (highly recommended for baseball fans).

A lesson in simple yet extremely effective design for all us web developers!

And the Giants give a lesson to the crowd-noise-piping Seahawks!

iNotes on iPhone – after a few hours….

iNotes on the iPhone

 OK, I spent a few hours last night looking at iNotes Ultralite on the iPhone, so a few initial thoughts….

The Good Things…

1) It’s fast! Over broadband it’s as fast as my native Gmail account on the iPhone. 3G is not far behind – if you can get O2 3G in Ireland (that’s for another blog entry).

2) It’s a LOT better presented than native Gmail, where the folders are all listed with no icons – I prefer icon views! The presentation of the mail views and the mai form itself blows the native email apps away.

3) It’s more secure than native Gmail on the iPhone as the username and password are not stored on the phone itself. No mails are stored on it either!

4) I like the refresh icon on the mail views.

5) The badge on the Inbox showing how many unread mails I have is very iPhone!

6) Attachments icon is present and attachments do open – though in a new Safari window! This means that you can flick from one to the other (which is really nice) but there is a limit of 8 safari windows on the iPhone AND the attachments cannot be edited. Mind you they can’t be edited on native Gmail either.
What it doesn’t do…

1) Allow you to attach a file to a new mail. Native Gmail on the iPhone doesn’t allow this either (images can be emailed, but only via the photo app on the phone). It’s time for the iPhone to have a finder application on it – I have file storing apps on the iPhone but they’re limited.

2) Allow you to move emails to folders. It does allow the deleting of emails – but not more than 1 at a time. Native Gmail allows this.

3) None of the iNotes preferences are supported. I only really use ‘Out-of-office’ and password change on my iNotes – it would be nice to have these on it especially as gmail does not have this functionality.

4) Can’t add or edit or delete a calendar entry.

5) The address fields don’t automatically pick up contacts in that nice ajax way that the Notes Client does. The little address refresh icon in full iNotes is not present either. There is a ‘Contacts’ list available seperately – but you get the feeling that an ajax-like pop-up would be much better. However I did send a test email to ‘Barry Hughes’ and it got to me no problem.

INITIAL VERDICT

Overall, It’s a very impressive way to access, send and view Notes mail and though it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, it has enough to make it essential for any iPhone-Lotus Notes users out there – and gives Lotus Notes mail a LOT more business appeal.