Simon Willison's Weblog: mobile

Vibe scraping and vibe coding a schedule app for Open Sauce 2025 entirely on my phone

2025-07-17T19:38:50+00:00

This morning, working entirely on my phone, I scraped a conference website and vibe coded up an alternative UI for interacting with the schedule using a combination of OpenAI Codex and Claude Artifacts.

This weekend is Open Sauce 2025, the third edition of the Bay Area conference for YouTube creators in the science and engineering space. I have a couple of friends going and they were complaining that the official schedule was difficult to navigate on a phone - it's not even linked from the homepage on mobile, and once you do find the agenda it isn't particularly mobile-friendly.

We were out for coffee this morning so I only had my phone, but I decided to see if I could fix it anyway.

TLDR: Working entirely on my iPhone, using a combination of OpenAI Codex in the ChatGPT mobile app and Claude Artifacts via the Claude app, I was able to scrape the full schedule and then build and deploy this: tools.simonwillison.net/open-sauce-2025

The site offers a faster loading and more useful agenda view, but more importantly it includes an option to "Download Calendar (ICS)" which allows mobile phone users (Android and iOS) to easily import the schedule events directly into their calendar app of choice.

Here are some detailed notes on how I built it.

Scraping the schedule

Step one was to get that schedule in a structured format. I don't have good tools for viewing source on my iPhone, so I took a different approach to turning the schedule site into structured data.

My first thought was to screenshot the schedule on my phone and then dump the images into a vision LLM - but the schedule was long enough that I didn't feel like scrolling through several different pages and stitching together dozens of images.

If I was working on a laptop I'd turn to scraping: I'd dig around in the site itself and figure out where the data came from, then write code to extract it out.

How could I do the same thing working on my phone?

I decided to use OpenAI Codex - the hosted tool, not the confusingly named CLI utility.

Codex recently grew the ability to interact with the internet while attempting to resolve a task. I have a dedicated Codex "environment" configured against a GitHub repository that doesn't do anything else, purely so I can run internet-enabled sessions there that can execute arbitrary network-enabled commands.

I started a new task there (using the Codex interface inside the ChatGPT iPhone app) and prompted:

Install playwright and use it to visit https://opensauce.com/agenda/ and grab the full details of all three day schedules from the tabs - Friday and Saturday and Sunday - then save and on Data in as much detail as possible in a JSON file and submit that as a PR

Codex is frustrating in that you only get one shot: it can go away and work autonomously on a task for a long time, but while it's working you can't give it follow-up prompts. You can wait for it to finish entirely and then tell it to try again in a new session, but ideally the instructions you give it are enough for it to get to the finish state where it submits a pull request against your repo with the results.

I got lucky: my above prompt worked exactly as intended.

Codex churned for a 13 minutes! I was sat chatting in a coffee shop, occasionally checking the logs to see what it was up to.

It tried a whole bunch of approaches, all involving running the Playwright Python library to interact with the site. You can see the full transcript here. It includes notes like "Looks like xxd isn't installed. I'll grab "vim-common" or "xxd" to fix it.".

Eventually it downloaded an enormous obfuscated chunk of JavaScript called schedule-overview-main-1752724893152.js (316KB) and then ran a complex sequence of grep, grep, sed, strings, xxd and dd commands against it to figure out the location of the raw schedule data in order to extract it out.

Here's the eventual extract_schedule.py Python script it wrote, which uses Playwright to save that schedule-overview-main-1752724893152.js file and then extracts the raw data using the following code (which calls Node.js inside Python, just so it can use the JavaScript eval() function):

node_script = (
    "const fs=require('fs');"
    f"const d=fs.readFileSync('{tmp_path}','utf8');"
    "const m=d.match(/var oo=(\\{.*?\\});/s);"
    "if(!m){throw new Error('not found');}"
    "const obj=eval('(' + m[1] + ')');"
    f"fs.writeFileSync('{OUTPUT_FILE}', JSON.stringify(obj, null, 2));"
)
subprocess.run(['node', '-e', node_script], check=True)

As instructed, it then filed a PR against my repo. It included the Python Playwright script, but more importantly it also included that full extracted schedule.json file. That meant I now had the schedule data, with a raw.githubusercontent.com URL with open CORS headers that could be fetched by a web app!

Building the web app

Now that I had the data, the next step was to build a web application to preview it and serve it up in a more useful format.

I decided I wanted two things: a nice mobile friendly interface for browsing the schedule, and mechanism for importing that schedule into a calendar application, such as Apple or Google Calendar.

It took me several false starts to get this to work. The biggest challenge was getting that 63KB of schedule JSON data into the app. I tried a few approaches here, all on my iPhone while sitting in coffee shop and later while driving with a friend to drop them off at the closest BART station.

Using ChatGPT Canvas and o3, since unlike Claude Artifacts a Canvas can fetch data from remote URLs if you allow-list that domain. I later found out that this had worked when I viewed it on my laptop, but on my phone it threw errors so I gave up on it.
Uploading the JSON to Claude and telling it to build an artifact that read the file directly - this failed with an error "undefined is not an object (evaluating 'window.fs.readFile')". The Claude 4 system prompt had lead me to expect this to work, I'm not sure why it didn't.
Having Claude copy the full JSON into the artifact. This took too long - typing out 63KB of JSON is not a sensible use of LLM tokens, and it flaked out on me when my connection went intermittent driving through a tunnel.
Telling Claude to fetch from the URL to that schedule JSON instead. This was my last resort because the Claude Artifacts UI blocks access to external URLs, so you have to copy and paste the code out to a separate interface (on an iPhone, which still lacks a "select all" button) making for a frustrating process.

That final option worked! Here's the full sequence of prompts I used with Claude to get to a working implementation - full transcript here:

Use your analyst tool to read this JSON file and show me the top level keys

This was to prime Claude - I wanted to remind it about its window.fs.readFile function and have it read enough of the JSON to understand the structure.

Build an artifact with no react that turns the schedule into a nice mobile friendly webpage - there are three days Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which corresponded to the 25th and 26th and 27th of July 2025

Don’t copy the raw JSON over to the artifact - use your fs function to read it instead

Also include a button to download ICS at the top of the page which downloads a ICS version of the schedule

I had noticed that the schedule data had keys for "friday" and "saturday" and "sunday" but no indication of the dates, so I told it those. It turned out later I'd got these wrong!

This got me a version of the page that failed with an error, because that fs.readFile() couldn't load the data from the artifact for some reason. So I fixed that with:

Change it so instead of using the readFile thing it fetches the same JSON from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/.github/f671bf57f7c20a4a7a5b0642837811e37c557499/schedule.json

... then copied the HTML out to a Gist and previewed it with gistpreview.github.io - here's that preview.

Then we spot-checked it, since there are so many ways this could have gone wrong. Thankfully the schedule JSON itself never round-tripped through an LLM so we didn't need to worry about hallucinated session details, but this was almost pure vibe coding so there was a big risk of a mistake sneaking through.

I'd set myself a deadline of "by the time we drop my friend at the BART station" and I hit that deadline with just seconds to spare. I pasted the resulting HTML into my simonw/tools GitHub repo using the GitHub mobile web interface which deployed it to that final tools.simonwillison.net/open-sauce-2025 URL.

... then we noticed that we had missed a bug: I had given it the dates of "25th and 26th and 27th of July 2025" but actually that was a week too late, the correct dates were July 18th-20th.

Thankfully I have Codex configured against my simonw/tools repo as well, so fixing that was a case of prompting a new Codex session with:

The open sauce schedule got the dates wrong - Friday is 18 July 2025 and Saturday is 19 and Sunday is 20 - fix it

Here's that Codex transcript, which resulted in this PR which I landed and deployed, again using the GitHub mobile web interface.

What this all demonstrates

So, to recap: I was able to scrape a website (without even a view source too), turn the resulting JSON data into a mobile-friendly website, add an ICS export feature and deploy the results to a static hosting platform (GitHub Pages) working entirely on my phone.

If I'd had a laptop this project would have been faster, but honestly aside from a little bit more hands-on debugging I wouldn't have gone about it in a particularly different way.

I was able to do other stuff at the same time - the Codex scraping project ran entirely autonomously, and the app build itself was more involved only because I had to work around the limitations of the tools I was using in terms of fetching data from external sources.

As usual with this stuff, my 25+ years of previous web development experience was critical to being able to execute the project. I knew about Codex, and Artifacts, and GitHub, and Playwright, and CORS headers, and Artifacts sandbox limitations, and the capabilities of ICS files on mobile phones.

This whole thing was so much fun! Being able to spin up multiple coding agents directly from my phone and have them solve quite complex problems while only paying partial attention to the details is a solid demonstration of why I continue to enjoying exploring the edges of AI-assisted programming.

Update: I removed the speaker avatars

Here's a beautiful cautionary tale about the dangers of vibe-coding on a phone with no access to performance profiling tools. A commenter on Hacker News pointed out:

The web app makes 176 requests and downloads 130 megabytes.

And yeah, it did! Turns out those speaker avatar images weren't optimized, and there were over 170 of them.

I told a fresh Codex instance "Remove the speaker avatar images from open-sauce-2025.html" and now the page weighs 93.58 KB - about 1,400 times smaller!

Update 2: Improved accessibility

That same commenter on Hacker News:

It's also <div> soup and largely inaccessible.

Yeah, this HTML isn't great:

dayContainer.innerHTML = sessions.map(session => `
    <div class="session-card">
        <div class="session-header">
            <div>
                <span class="session-time">${session.time}</span>
                <span class="length-badge">${session.length} min</span>
            </div>
            <div class="session-location">${session.where}</div>
        </div>

I opened an issue and had both Claude Code and Codex look at it. Claude Code failed to submit a PR for some reason, but Codex opened one with a fix that sounded good to me when I tried it with VoiceOver on iOS (using a Cloudflare Pages preview) so I landed that. Here's the diff, which added a hidden "skip to content" link, some aria- attributes on buttons and upgraded the HTML to use <h3> for the session titles.

Next time I'll remember to specify accessibility as a requirement in the initial prompt. I'm disappointed that Claude didn't consider that without me having to ask.

Tags: definitions, github, icalendar, mobile, scraping, tools, ai, playwright, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, ai-assisted-programming, claude, claude-artifacts, ai-agents, vibe-coding, coding-agents, async-coding-agents, prompt-to-app

What's New In Python 3.13

2024-10-07T19:36:52+00:00

What's New In Python 3.13

It's Python 3.13 release day today. The big signature features are a better REPL with improved error messages, an option to run Python without the GIL and the beginnings of the new JIT. Here are some of the smaller highlights I spotted while perusing the release notes.

iOS and Android are both now Tier 3 supported platforms, thanks to the efforts of Russell Keith-Magee and the Beeware project. Tier 3 means "must have a reliable buildbot" but "failures on these platforms do not block a release". This is still a really big deal for Python as a mobile development platform.

There's a whole bunch of smaller stuff relevant to SQLite.

Python's dbm module has long provided a disk-backed key-value store against multiple different backends. 3.13 introduces a new backend based on SQLite, and makes it the default.

>>> import dbm
>>> db = dbm.open("/tmp/hi", "c")
>>> db["hi"] = 1

The "c" option means "Open database for reading and writing, creating it if it doesn’t exist".

After running the above, /tmp/hi was a SQLite database containing the following data:

sqlite3 /tmp/hi .dump
PRAGMA foreign_keys=OFF;
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
CREATE TABLE Dict (
    key BLOB UNIQUE NOT NULL,
    value BLOB NOT NULL
  );
INSERT INTO Dict VALUES(X'6869',X'31');
COMMIT;

The dbm.open() function can detect which type of storage is being referenced. I found the implementation for that in the whichdb(filename) function.

I was hopeful that this change would mean Python 3.13 deployments would be guaranteed to ship with a more recent SQLite... but it turns out 3.15.2 is from November 2016 so still quite old:

SQLite 3.15.2 or newer is required to build the sqlite3 extension module. (Contributed by Erlend Aasland in gh-105875.)

The conn.iterdump() SQLite method now accepts an optional filter= keyword argument taking a LIKE pattern for the tables that you want to dump. I found the implementation for that here.

And one last change which caught my eye because I could imagine having code that might need to be updated to reflect the new behaviour:

pathlib.Path.glob() and rglob() now return both files and directories if a pattern that ends with "**" is given, rather than directories only. Add a trailing slash to keep the previous behavior and only match directories.

With the release of Python 3.13, Python 3.8 is officially end-of-life. Łukasz Langa:

If you're still a user of Python 3.8, I don't blame you, it's a lovely version. But it's time to move on to newer, greater things. Whether it's typing generics in built-in collections, pattern matching, except*, low-impact monitoring, or a new pink REPL, I'm sure you'll find your favorite new feature in one of the versions we still support. So upgrade today!

Tags: android, mobile, python, russell-keith-magee, sqlite, ios, lukasz-langa, beeware

You can stop using user-scalable=no and maximum-scale=1 in viewport meta tags now

2023-08-04T23:41:55+00:00

You can stop using user-scalable=no and maximum-scale=1 in viewport meta tags now

Luke Plant points out that your meta viewport tag should stick to just “width=device-width, initial-scale=1” these days—the user-scalable=no and maximum-scale=1 attributes are no longer necessary, and have a negative impact on accessibility, especially for Android users.

Tags: accessibility, html, luke-plant, mobile, mobileweb

Quoting Steven Soderbergh

2023-06-12T18:13:08+00:00

Cellphones are the worst thing that’s ever happened to movies. It’s awful. [...] I think you could talk to a hundred storytellers and they would all tell you the same thing. It’s so hard to manufacture drama when everybody can get a hold of everybody all the time. It’s just not as fun as in the old days when the phone would ring and you didn’t know who was calling.

— Steven Soderbergh

Tags: screen-writing, mobile

viewport-preview

2022-07-26T00:00:58+00:00

viewport-preview

I built a tiny tool which lets you preview a URL in a bunch of different common browser viewport widths, using iframes.

Via @simonw

Tags: css, iframes, mobile, projects, testing

Learning from Mini Apps

2020-11-05T17:21:14+00:00

Learning from Mini Apps

WeChat, Baidu, Alipay and Douyin in China are all examples of “Super apps” that can host “Mini apps” written in HTML and JavaScript by other developers and installed via in-app search or through scanning a QR code. Mini apps are granted (permission-gated) access to further system APIs via a JavaScript bridge. It’s a fascinating developer ecosystem, explored in detail here by Thomas Steiner.

Via @thomaswilburn

Tags: javascript, mobile

Machine Learning on Mobile and at the Edge: 2019 industry year-in-review

2019-12-30T22:17:39+00:00

Machine Learning on Mobile and at the Edge: 2019 industry year-in-review

This is a fantastic detailed overview of advances made in the field of machine learning on the edge (primarily on mobile devices) over 2019. I’m really excited about this trend: I love the improved privacy implications of running models on my phone without uploading data to a server, and it’s great to see techniques like Federated Learning (from Google Labs) which enable devices to privately train models in a distributed way without having to upload their training data.

Via @fritzlabs

Tags: machine-learning, mobile

Announcing Envoy Mobile

2019-06-18T18:42:25+00:00

Announcing Envoy Mobile

This is a fascinating development: Lyft’s Envoy proxy / service mesh has been widely adopted across the industry as a server-side component for adding smart routing and observability to the network calls made between services in microservice architectures. “The reality is that three 9s at the server-side edge is meaningless if the user of a mobile application is only able to complete the desired product flows a fraction of the time”—so Lyft are building a C++ embedded library companion to Envoy which is designed to be shipped as part of iOS and Android client applications. “Envoy Mobile in conjunction with Envoy in the data center will provide the ability to reason about the entire distributed system network, not just the server-side portion.” Their decision to release an early working prototype and then conduct ongoing development entirely in the open is interesting too.

Tags: mobile, microservices

When should you be using Web Workers?

2019-06-15T04:31:34+00:00

When should you be using Web Workers?

85% of worldwide mobile devices are massively less performant than high end iPhones. Surma argues that we should be making aggressive use of Web Workers to keep as much of our JavaScript as possible off the main UI thread, to avoid freezing up the entire interface.

Tags: javascript, mobile, webworkers, web-performance

Sunsetting React Native at Airbnb

2018-06-19T21:03:14+00:00

Sunsetting React Native at Airbnb

“Due to a variety of technical and organizational issues, we will be sunsetting React Native and putting all of our efforts into making native amazing.” Fascinating write-up from Airbnb (part of a series) based on two years of working with React Native. It’s worth reading this in full: 63% of their engineers they surveyed would have chosen React Native again given the chance and 74% would consider it for a new project—but the larger technical and organizational challenges (in particular the fact that React Native remains a polarizing choice in the mobile world, making it harder to hire great native engineers) mean that Airbnb are migrating back to pure-native for their iOS and Android apps.

Tags: mobile, react

Are there any good bootcamps, such as Code Fellows, DevBootCamp for mobile (iOS/Android)?

2013-11-25T10:52:00+00:00

My answer to Are there any good bootcamps, such as Code Fellows, DevBootCamp for mobile (iOS/Android)? on Quora

Big Nerd Ranch have been offering iOS and Android for several years now. A friend of mine went in the iOS course a while ago and spoke highly of it - he has since released an app to the App Store.

http://www.bignerdranch.com/classes

Tags: mobile, software-engineering, startups, quora

Do you need the feature in Dropbox mobile app that allows using the chosen files in offline mode? Why?

2013-10-29T10:53:00+00:00

My answer to Do you need the feature in Dropbox mobile app that allows using the chosen files in offline mode? Why? on Quora

I use this all the time. It's especially useful for travelling (when you're abroad you often don't have inexpensive cellular data or access to WiFi). I use it for:

Storing PDFs of my flight details and hotel reservations (using OS X's print-to-PDF feature)
Sometimes storing downloaded maps of the local area
Storing details of my travel insurance
Scanned copies of my passport

I usually combine it with Instapaper - I save Wikipedia pages about the places I am visiting offline on my phone with Instapaper so I can refer to them when I'm actually there.

Tags: mobile, quora, dropbox, ux

Is it possible for anybody to be expert in all areas of software development, that includes database, backend, web frontend, mobile apps, and graphic design?

2013-10-20T12:44:00+00:00

My answer to Is it possible for anybody to be expert in all areas of software development, that includes database, backend, web frontend, mobile apps, and graphic design? on Quora

It isn't possible for someone to be expert in "all" aspects of software development - that would include everything from writing safety critical control systems for nuclear power plants in Fortran to high frequency trading algorithms on Wall Street. The world of software development is simply too big for that now.

It is possible for someone to become an expert on "database, backend, web frontend, mobile apps, and graphic design". Programmers who excel at all of those with the exception of graphic design are sometimes known as "full stack" developers, although mobile apps are usually a seperate speciality.

People who also excel at graphic design do exist but are very rare. I've known a few and I'm always pretty jealous of them!

This answer does of course vary depending on how you define the word "expert".

Tags: mobile, web-development, quora

What are the best ways to find online serious partners ready to outsource mobile app development company?

2013-10-18T17:00:00+00:00

My answer to What are the best ways to find online serious partners ready to outsource mobile app development company? on Quora

If you want to do long-term outsourcing deals with "serious big companies", you need to get on a plane and meet them in person.

Tags: iphone, mobile, quora

How can I produce an animated prototype out of designs for an iOS app?

2013-10-13T10:31:00+00:00

My answer to How can I produce an animated prototype out of designs for an iOS app? on Quora

Keynote is a surprisingly good tool for this kind of things, especially since they added path based animations to it a few years ago.

I know a designer who uses PowerPoint to create interactive wireframes.

Tags: iphone, mobile, prototyping, quora, ios, ux

Getting the most out of technical conference as a services provider?

2013-09-11T16:36:00+00:00

My answer to Getting the most out of technical conference as a services provider? on Quora

Leaving flyers out if you are not a sponsor will annoy both the event organiser and the other sponsors, and may give a bad impression to other attendees as well.

I suggest just talking to as many people as possible, and building relationships that way. You should see a much higher conversion rate from that than from leaving fliers lying around.

Tags: conferences, mobile, quora, outsourcing

Can I pitch my app idea to google?

2013-08-11T16:27:00+00:00

My answer to Can I pitch my app idea to google? on Quora

You could pitch it to Google Ventures, but you'll need a lot more than just the idea.

Tags: google, mobile, web-development, quora

What new apps were used most at SXSW 2013, and why?

2013-02-28T11:19:00+00:00

My answer to What new apps were used most at SXSW 2013, and why? on Quora

Lanyrd will be at SXSW again this year, and we've continued to refine our unofficial schedule guide and session planner for SXSW Interactive. Here's our site for this year:

http://austin2013.lanyrd.com/

If you sign in with Twitter, we'll show you the people you follow who will be attending SXSW Interactive this year (we list over 2,000 Twitter attendees, increasing all the time) - we'll also show you the sessions they are presenting.

You can then build your own personal schedule by tracking or plan-to-attending sessions - and get suggestions based on the schedules built by your contacts.

We've added rich topic metadata to the schedule, so you can slice and dice it in different ways. For example, here are sessions about marketing on Sunday: http://bit.ly/13p8c0g or Workshops about HTML5: http://bit.ly/XmtHK7

We're also running a neat location-enabled now and next app - hit http://now.lanyrd.com/ during the conference and we'll geolocate your phone and show you what's on now and next at the venues closest to you - pretty handy at a conference taking place across most of Austin!

We've also built a snazzy grid view, so you can see the full schedule, your personal schedule or the results of a search as a grid (making it easier to spot sessions that clash). Here's a grid of the sessions I'm considering attending on Saturday: http://bit.ly/Y2gyTr

Your personal schedule will also be available in our iPhone and Android/Mobile Web apps, which both include offline support so you can still see the schedule even if you don't have a reliable data connection in Austin. More about these on our blog: Get more out of SXSW Interactive 2013 with Lanyrd

For us, SXSW is a great opportunity to showcase what our event platform can do. It's a particularly good stress test - if you can handle the 2,000+ speakers and 1,400+ sessions at SXSW, any other event should be a breeze!

Tags: android, iphone, mobile, sxsw, quora

What are the top Apps/Mobile conferences & events for 2013?

2012-11-06T18:08:00+00:00

My answer to What are the top Apps/Mobile conferences & events for 2013? on Quora

The biggest is still Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February - tens of thousands of attendees and representatives from pretty much every mobile company.

In terms of app developer conferences there are dozens taking place around the world, so the best fit for you really depends on where you are based.

Tags: conferences, mobile, quora, conference

How do you make an existing web application more mobile-friendly without rebuilding it?

2012-09-05T12:22:00+00:00

My answer to How do you make an existing web application more mobile-friendly without rebuilding it? on Quora

Learn about responsive web design. Provided your site is built reasonably well using CSS for layout there is a TON of stuff you can do with CSS media queries to make your site work better on small screen devices. For example, using media queries to detect small screen (mobile) devices you can...

- switch from two columns to a single column layout
- hide irrelevant content entirely
- use shorter labels on your site navigation
- serve up larger, more mobile friendly click regions
- switch to a font family and size that's easier to read on mobile

Here's the original article that coined the term: http://www.alistapart.com/articl... - there are plenty of excellent resources, tutorials and books around these days too if you want to learn more.

Tags: mobile, mobileweb, ui, quora, ux

Mobile World Congress: Is it worth going?

2012-01-10T16:52:00+00:00

My answer to Mobile World Congress: Is it worth going? on Quora

It depends on what you want to get out of it. I haven't been myself, but from what I've heard MWC is the Mobile world's equivalent of something like SXSW - huge (49,000+ people), sprawling, bewildering and full of everyone you could possibly want to meet from the mobile world.

Tim Bray has an interesting account of last year's event: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/Whe...

Tags: conferences, mobile, quora

US iPhone Data for International Visitors: A Guide

2011-01-13T03:51:00+00:00

US iPhone Data for International Visitors: A Guide

AT&T will swear blind that their pay-as-you-go data plan doesn’t work with iPhones or other smart phones. Here’s how to prove them wrong.

Tags: mobile, recovered

What makes mobile application backends different from Webapp backends?

2011-01-09T13:54:00+00:00

My answer to What makes mobile application backends different from Webapp backends? on Quora

Nothing at all.

Tags: mobile, web-development, quora

What are the most recommended upcoming mobile tech conferences in North America?

2010-12-05T09:21:00+00:00

My answer to What are the most recommended upcoming mobile tech conferences in North America? on Quora

Our site, Lanyrd.com, is relatively new but already has a pretty good list of mobile conferences in the USA. Try this page: http://lanyrd.com/topics/mobile/...

Tags: conferences, events, mobile, quora

Unlocking the Huawei E5830 aka 3 Mifi

2010-06-17T22:57:00+00:00

Unlocking the Huawei E5830 aka 3 Mifi

3 will post you an unlocked replacement for your MiFi for £15, if you can figure out how to ask them to do it. Reports on the internet are that it can take several weeks and they sometimes forget to unlock the one you send them, so I went the self-unlocking route. These instructions (involving Windows running in VMWare Fusion, Firmware updates, PayPal, some very dodgy looking software and a PDF file half-written in Japan) ended up working a treat.

Tags: mobile, vmware, recovered, 3g, mifi, unlocking

Quoting Steve Jobs

2010-04-29T15:22:06+00:00

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

— Steve Jobs

Tags: flash, adobe, apple, steve-jobs, mobile

Notes on designing the Guardian iPhone app

2009-12-20T12:55:48+00:00

Notes on designing the Guardian iPhone app

By John-Henry Barac, the principal designer of he iPhone application who also previously worked on the Guardian’s print transition to the Berliner format.

Tags: design, guardian, iphone, john-henry-barac, mobile

Quoting Joe Hewitt

2009-11-15T08:50:33+00:00

We're at a critical juncture in the evolution of software. The web is still here and it is still strong. Anyone can still put any information or applications on a web server without asking for permission, and anyone in the world can still access it just by typing a URL. I don't think I appreciated how important that is until recently. Nobody designs new systems like that anymore, or at least few of them succeed. What an incredible stroke of luck the web was, and what a shame it would be to let that freedom slip away.

— Joe Hewitt

Tags: iphone, joe-hewitt, mobile, gatekeepers, sharecropping

Correct way to handle mobile browsers

2009-11-10T08:57:10+00:00

Correct way to handle mobile browsers

If your site has an equivalent “mobile” version running on a different subdomain, how and when should you redirect mobile users to it and how should you let them opt in or opt out?

Tags: django, eric-holscher, mobile, redirect, usability

WebKit, Mobile, and Progress

2009-10-10T00:28:31+00:00

WebKit, Mobile, and Progress

Alex Russell responds to PPK’s analysis of the many different WebKit variants in today’s mobile phones, pointing out that the replacement cycle and increasing quality of WebKit in more recent phones means the situation still looks pretty good.

Tags: alex-russell, browsers, mobile, ppk, webkit