Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

Big buzz today around the revamped Flickr mobile site (see TC, RWW, Mashable), their “universal access point for all device types.”, but a simple test that I did on my iPhone shows that the folks at Sunnyvale have missed one important and frustrating issue that mobile users experience daily when accessing Flickr urls.

This is not the first time I write about the fact that a direct link to an image does not load in its mobile version. The solution is so simple, that I am amazed no one at Flickr caught this while building the new version. All they have to do is detect the UserAgent and in the case it is of a mobile browser, change “www.flickr.com” to “m.flickr.com”. A simple manual test proves it is working.

So from now and until it gets fixed by the Flickr folks, you can use this manual hack and edit the url in safari’s address bar whenever you get a link (via email or twitter) to a Flickr image.

flickr-on-iphone-manual-hack

Last night I decided to extend my iPhone’s functionality with a few goodies.

The first thing was to hack the iPhone.

Then I added Hebrew fonts to Safari & the built in RSS reader. The lack of Hebrew support was one of my biggest pains with the iPhone and with the ability to read a few Hebrew web sites (not all sites render properly) things are a little better, although I am still waiting for the full native Hebrew support.

The next thing was to add several applications and personalize the device with a custom ringtone. I installed iBrickr on my computer and use it to manage my iPhones apps, ringtones etc. 

Among the applications that are currently installed on my iPhone you can find:

• Communication applications: Apollo IM & Twitterrific
• Games: Light Off and a few Nintondo retro games running on the NES emulator
• Utilities: VoiceNotes & the text editor Scribe
• Configuration Utilities (launch and manage the iPhone applications): Launcher & recombinant SpringBoard arranger
• and my favorite utility, the Dock, which brought the famous Mac OS feature to the iPhone

Technorati Tags: iPhone hacking, iBrickr, Twitter