Britannica offers online encyclopedia for iPhone

Britannica offers online encyclopedia for iPhone


Britannica has launched its Britannica Mobile iPhone Edition online
encyclopedia for the iPhone. The web application features "tens of
thousands of articles" covering all subjects, accessible through an
iPhone- and iPod touch-friendly interface. It also offers full-text
searching, thousands of high-resolution thumbnails that expand to full-
size images, and page layouts optimized for cell phone bandwidth.
"People today want information wherever they go," said Dan Smith,
senior vice president at Encyclopaedia Britannica. "They want to
satisfy their curiosity the moment it's aroused, whether they're on a
train, in a restaurant talking to friends, or watching a sunset on the
beach. Now we can get answers to them in ways that weren't possible
before." Britannica Mobile iPhone Edition can be accessed by visiting
i.eb.com from an iPhone or iPod touch.

That is HTTP://I.EB.COM/ for your live iPhone Encyclopedia

I wonder how this page would react to someone accessing that url with
an older technology cell phone? Anyone want to try and see if it would
work as nice as the iPhone does?

If you can't access the iPhone version of Britiannica because you are
locked out then try the old non mobile edition of Britiannica at
http://www.britannica.com.

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4phun <[email protected]> wrote in news:f6dfe351-f439-422e-a8bc-
[email protected]:

> Britannica offers online encyclopedia for iPhone
>

I've been watching these continuous streams of iPhone web apps like this
coming online, identifying and responding to ONLY iPhones, which I find
quite curious indeed, and find myself asking, "How much of this stuff ONLY
for iPhone and iPod users is APPLE paying for and rolling into the high
price of the iPhone/pods?"

There are quite a few of them out there, now. Someone is paying them to
put these exclusive webapps-for-iPhone widgets online....

Most curious.

All part of the WebTV experience....

On Mar 1, 10:17*pm, Larry <[email protected]> wrote:
> 4phun <[email protected]> wrote in news:f6dfe351-f439-422e-a8bc-
> [email protected]:
>
> > Britannica offers online encyclopedia for iPhone
>
> I've been watching these continuous streams of iPhone web apps like this
> coming online, identifying and responding to ONLY iPhones, which I find
> quite curious indeed, and find myself asking, "How much of this stuff ONLY
> for iPhone and iPod users is APPLE paying for and rolling into the high
> price of the iPhone/pods?"
>
> There are quite a few of them out there, now. *Someone is paying them to
> put these exclusive webapps-for-iPhone widgets online....
>
> Most curious.
>
> All part of the WebTV experience....

Yeah but at least it is a neat experience! I visited both sites and it
is way cooler in the new iPhone only version which I can view since I
have both the iPod Touch and a 16GB iPhone.

Another neat featue of the new iPhone only web apps is that they can
be saved as a local applications on the iPhone if coded correctly.
They even come with a colorful new icon which idenitifies them on the
home screen which can be nine pages long.
I had the iPod touch five months before I realized this!

Don't you just hate having a Nokia that can't do any of that stuff?
Nobody cares out there on the world wide web to specifically make
useful stuff for that old technology.
You have to cram ordinary web pages in that little tablet which look
like cow paddies compared to the iPhone's gorgious display which is
highly readable. You can't even comfortably drop that old stuff into a
shirt pocket like the Apple tech can.

BTW I thought the Apple Speaker phone sucked until I realized people
were hold ing it wrong. It is meant to be held edge on with the
speaker facing towards your ear while the bottom mic faces your chin -
duh. Completely different from how it is to be held for a private
phone call. That way not can others hear what you hear but they can
see a huge picture of who you are talking to. And people sure look
good on this screen unless you have a lot of friends into Goth.


I'll observe another moment of silence out of respect for your angst
before LOL.

Vic

4phun wrote:

> I had the iPod touch five months before I realized this!


Really effin "intuitive", eh, oxy-moron?

4phun <[email protected]> wrote in news:2fbb781f-4427-4dc7-85a1-
[email protected]:

> Don't you just hate having a Nokia that can't do any of that stuff?
> Nobody cares out there on the world wide web to specifically make
> useful stuff for that old technology.
> You have to cram ordinary web pages in that little tablet which look
> like cow paddies compared to the iPhone's gorgious display which is
> highly readable. You can't even comfortably drop that old stuff into a
> shirt pocket like the Apple tech can.
>

Not at all. I don't pay per month to use my software like WebTV
subscribers do. My old nasty RESIDENT software works fine, even if
there is no net to connect it to, such as the
GPS navigation software. All its data and software is resident on the
nasty old removable 8GB SDHC cards so, instead of going dead when
there's no ATT in the mountains, it continues to lead the way just like
those nasty GPS navigators.

Nobody cares? You need to tour maemo.org and meet the worldwide
community of genius Linux coders working on hundreds of projects for the
tablets.

iPhone's display? Every Iphone owner I show the tablet to is astonished
how an 800 pixel wide display can display the REAL webpage, not some
cluged up clone of it on the limited number of websites it supports.
iPhone can't support most websites because the capacitive finger pads
are WAY too big and cover several clickable points on the webpages at
once. You get lucky if you can click the right one. On a REAL
touchscreen, with much better resolution, the stylus can select the
correct point, precisely...without having to zoom in and out to make it
have enough definition to click the right point. Too bad that thing
doesn't support FLASH, too. I wonder why??

Drop in a shirt pocket....huh? Both of them are too big to drop in a
shirt pocket, otherwise neither of us could see the pictures.

My Z6m is in my shirt pocket, however. I'm not forced to hold this huge
tablet up to my ear to use the phone. My phone is a phone...unless, of
course, I'm using Skype you'll never see.

Well, I'm off to lunch. Today's in-flight N800 movie is "Lions for
Lambs" from alt.binaries.movies.divx. I don't need to convert it to
watch it with mplayer on the N800 in high definition.....800 pixels
wide, remember?

by the way, did you try the movie converter from Maemo to see if the
MP4s it creates will run on the iPhone? I was hoping it would save you
from having to buy software from the newsgroup spammers. Did it work??

At 01 Mar 2008 17:38:16 -0800 4phun wrote:
> Britannica offers online encyclopedia for iPhone

Yet another "optimised" site for the phone with the "real internet" on it?

> Britannica Mobile iPhone Edition can be accessed by visiting
> i.eb.com from an iPhone or iPod touch.
>
> That is HTTP://I.EB.COM/ for your live iPhone Encyclopedia
>
> I wonder how this page would react to someone accessing that url with
> an older technology cell phone? Anyone want to try and see if it would
> work as nice as the iPhone does?


Ok, I tried it from my WinMo phone and got a page telling me I needed an
iPhone or iPod Touch.

Of course you don't REALLY need one, you just need a browser that TELLS the
website you have an iPhone, so I just changed the User Agent of my WinMo
phone to match the iPhone's UA and tried it.

I accessed the site without a problem- it looked like most iPhone optimized
pages I've ever looked- giant text so you don't mush the wrong link with
your fingers, which kind of defeats the purpose of the iPhone's beautiful
high-res display. Weird quirk- although IE Mobile supports a limited
amount of Java script, searches didn't parse properly. The search URL just
displayed in the browsr window and I had to copy and paste it (#7 of the
100 t ings... oh, never mind!) into the address bar to actually navigate to
the page.

I tried the i.eb.com URL in Netfront (an alternative WinMo browser) after
changing it's UA and the site mobile EB worked flawlessly, if unexcitingly.

At 02 Mar 2008 03:17:58 +0000 Larry wrote:

> I've been watching these continuous streams of iPhone web apps like this
> coming online, identifying and responding to ONLY iPhones, which I find
> quite curious indeed, and find myself asking, "How much of this stuff
ONLY
> for iPhone and iPod users is APPLE paying for and rolling into the high
> price of the iPhone/pods?"


Zero, I suspect. I assume companies like Britannica are targeting the
iPhone's desirable demographic to sell them other products. (IIRC, EB's
regular site is subscription-only, for example.)

> There are quite a few of them out there, now. Someone is paying them to
> put these exclusive webapps-for-iPhone widgets online....
>
> Most curious.
>
> All part of the WebTV experience....

Just marketing, I suspect.

At 02 Mar 2008 05:19:33 -0800 4phun wrote:

> Another neat featue of the new iPhone only web apps is that they can
> be saved as a local applications on the iPhone if coded correctly.


Now you're calling "favorites" a new technology?


> Don't you just hate having a Nokia that can't do any of that stuff?
> Nobody cares out there on the world wide web to specifically make
> useful stuff for that old technology.


It's a mobile-formatted web page, for crissakes! They've been around since
WAP was developed!


> BTW I thought the Apple Speaker phone sucked until I realized people
> were hold ing it wrong. It is meant to be held edge on with the
> speaker facing towards your ear while the bottom mic faces your chin -
> duh. Completely different from how it is to be held for a private
> phone call. That way not can others hear what you hear but they can
> see a huge picture of who you are talking to. And people sure look
> good on this screen unless you have a lot of friends into Goth.


Now that IS a new Apple technology- a speakerphone designed to be held up
to your ear!


> I'll observe another moment of silence out of respect for your angst
> before LOL.


That wasn't silence- it was your speakerphone.

Todd Allcock <[email protected]> wrote in news:fqfv1i$b8g$1
@aioe.org:

> giant text so you don't mush the wrong link with
> your fingers, which kind of defeats the purpose of the iPhone's beautiful
> high-res display.

The "hi res" display on the iPhone ISN'T matched with a high resolution
TOUCHSCREEN, so this stands logical. They have to put the clickers far
enough apart so the iPhone doesn't click two at a time with its capacitive
finger interface, the real reason it doesn't have a high-resolution stylus
like a proper PDA or the Nokia tablets.

The spread-finger-bois don't talk about why you have to zoom in so much on
a normal webpage before you can get the right clicker to click.

At 03 Mar 2008 06:17:36 +0000 Larry wrote:

> The "hi res" display on the iPhone ISN'T matched with a high resolution
> TOUCHSCREEN, so this stands logical. They have to put the clickers far
> enough apart so the iPhone doesn't click two at a time with its
capacitive
> finger interface, the real reason it doesn't have a high-resolution
stylus
> like a proper PDA or the Nokia tablets.


I'm not as cynical about it as you are. The screen's touchpanel seems hi-
res enough- the problem is user related. Unless we, as a species, develop
skinnier fingers, the big links are necessary for the limitations of our
fat fingers- not for any deficiency in the display, as far as I can see.


> The spread-finger-bois don't talk about why you have to zoom in so much
> on a normal webpage before you can get the right clicker to click.


I'm a bit envious though- I've often complained over the years that WinMo
needed a "fat finger-entry" mode in the OS. Many WinMo GPS apps, for
example, use oversized icons knowing that users will be fat-fingering the
screen rather than stylus tapping when driving.

I often use my phone without the stylus when quickly checking for e-mail.
A big fat-finger keyboard would be nice for quick (short) text entries,
like an URL, as well.

Todd Allcock <[email protected]> wrote in
news:[email protected]:

> I'm a bit envious though- I've often complained over the years that
> WinMo needed a "fat finger-entry" mode in the OS. Many WinMo GPS
> apps, for example, use oversized icons knowing that users will be
> fat-fingering the screen rather than stylus tapping when driving.
>
> I often use my phone without the stylus when quickly checking for
> e-mail. A big fat-finger keyboard would be nice for quick (short) text
> entries, like an URL, as well.
>
>

Nokia was listening. We have both. As a matter of fact the commercial
Navicore/Wayfinder GPS Nav program for the N800/810 tablets forces the
tablet into fat finger mode, by default, bypassing the tablet's own
selection criteria of figuring out whether you pointed to a data entry line
with your finger or the stylus. The finger keyboard on the N800 has LARGER
fat finger pads than the Iphone and more shift keys so you can enter many
more symbols in the various shift modes, all with one finger in mind. If
you touch the box, or wipe-to-mark what's in it with the stylus, the small
stylus screen comes up, with a full 10-key number pad, for more precise
stylus entry.

For the trendy, my N800 also supports just writing with the stylus in
script on the screen and, once trained for your handwriting in a simple
training session from the control panel, the stylus handwriting-to-text
algorithms convert your stylus penning into text when it detects it.
Unlike the PDA, however, you just write on the line as if you had a pen in
your hand, not one letter at a time in a box printing. It's cute and does
work quite well, but my handwriting is atrocious and I'm a fast, accurate
typist so I'd rather use the external BT Nokia keyboard I'm using to type
this message through remote desktop from the tablet to the WinXP box's
Xnews app.

Find an N800 and try the finger keyboard....

At 04 Mar 2008 01:42:20 +0000 Larry wrote:


> Unlike the PDA, however, you just write on the line as if you had a pen
in
> your hand, not one letter at a time in a box printing.

You've stuck with your old Palm too long. Most PDAs have a cursive writing
recognition system, with the older "box" system still there for those who
want/like it.

> Find an N800 and try the finger keyboard....

Sorry, I'm a "convergence" guy. Until Nok builds an N8xx with a cellular
radio, I'm not interested. I quit the separate PDA/phone game long ago and
haven't looked back.