Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 18 June 2008 14:58
Opinion and Analysis
Page 5 of 7
I asked Stocky if apps written to run within the Google App Engine would run on the iPhone, seeing as a) I have one and b) it’s not just the flavour of the month but seemingly the flavour of the 21st century from 2007 onwards so far.
Stocky said that he had one, too, and that the iPhone uses Safari, a browser based on the Webkit open source rendering engine, something that the Android platform’s browser is also built around.
Stocky said that he was seeing momentum around Webkit, and that the tools Google has, the Google Web Toolkit lets you compile to highly optimised javascript, which will run across all major browsers – including mobile devices.
I also asked about a problem I was having with the web version of Gmail running on Safari, for which Google provides an iPhone optimised interface. The problem is that some emails come through with unchangeable text widths, which can’t be shrunken by using the ‘pinch’ multi-touch motion the iPhone is famous for.
I asked if this problem could be fixed, as changing Gmail to run in its ‘standard web interface’ on Safari actually did solve the problem, but that it was a pain to have to switch between interfaces – after all, I’d rather stay in the iPhone optimised interface rather than switch into and out of it all the time.
On top of that, I mentioned that I simply didn’t want to use the inbuilt iPhone mail application, much preferring the Gmail web app instead for a whole host of reasons.
Stocky said that he’d experienced the exact same problem, and had spoken to the Gmail developer team about it, and that they were working on it, but didn’t have a fix as yet. Stocky promised he’d follow them up on it as it was bugging him, too. Personally, I guess we’ll just have to wait for the Gmail dev team to deliver!
Anyway it was nice to be able to relay this issue to someone at Google who is in contact with that dev team, so hopefully something will happen on that front sooner rather than later!
I also asked for an update on Google Gears, and whether we’d ever see it applied to something like Gmail. The short answer was that we should in the future, but that Gears didn’t work with Gmail as yet.
Stocky did say that Google Gears does work with Google Docs, letting you have offline access to your documents and spreadsheets, and do things like edit them offline, like when you’re on a plane or simply don’t have a connection, although online-only features such as sharing were obviously not available in an offline environment.
I also asked if Google Gears would work with Safari on the iPhone. Stocky said that there was a test version that had worked with Safari on the PC, but there wasn’t an official Gears plug-in for the Safari platform on the PC, however there was one for Windows Mobile smartphones. Stocky said that he had nothing to announce at this point, but that Google would take Gears further into mobile platforms.
So, what might Stocky predict for Google Developer Day in 2009? Please read on to page 6.
