Extra Pepperoni

The iPhone doesn’t support a start/home page. Every time you open a new Safari page (equivalent to a tab) it opens to a new page, unless you open it from another page with a "target" attribute. Fortunately, its MobileSafari browser is very smart about suggesting recently visited sites; typing one or two letters typically brings up the site I want as a suggestion. Email addressing works the same way — it appears to prioritize recently used addresses, so if you visit the same sites (or email the same correspondents) repeatedly, it’s usually right.

On the other hand, sometimes you want a “link farm” (bookmarks page). I keep one with a bunch of links, both for use on the iPhone itself and also for visiting on Macs for working with the iPhone: http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/iphone/. I’m a big fan of tabbed browsing on desktop computers (ever notice how, in relation to iPhones and other handheld computers, laptops become “desktops”?). On the iPhone, I prefer to keep my bookmark page open, and open new tabs off it. There’s a JavaScript bookmarklet to make every link open a new window, but it doesn’t do the trick for me.

Instead I keep my iPhone bookmarks on a simple page containing a few lists of links. Since this page changes frequently, I have a BBEdit GREP Pattern to do the necessary. It converts a plain URL, into a proper <a> tag with a unique target attribute (the hostname), and wraps the whole thing in a <li>/</li> pair; this gives me a readable and clickable link that opens in a new window. I tried target="_new" and target="_blank", but no joy. Here’s the pattern, to save time for future link farmers…

Search for: ^(https?://)([^/\r]+)(.*)$

Replace with: \t<li><a href="\1\2\3" target="\2">\1\2\3</a></li>

It’s worth pointing out that iPhones are not designed to be highly secure. Apple has quite deliberately designed and marketed them as consumer devices, declining to officially enter the “enterprise” market. This lets Apple ignore several of the thornier security features of devices like BlackBerries, such as remote erasure of data. A 4-digit PIN is obviously not intended for high security, and even that is awkward if you use the iPhone many times a day (as I do).

Unfortunately, it also means Apple sees no need to provide strong security on the iPhone. At this point, the thing I miss most from my Treo is the Palm version of Web Confidential. One possibility is to create a web page of passwords, protecting it with SSL/TLS and a strong password (and likely IP restrictions to my home and work networks as well). For ease of adding/updating passwords, it could be a private wiki. Hopefully Web Confidential or something else will be available for iPhone (and Apple won’t effectively block it) before I find myself installing a wiki on www.reppep.com.

Since there’s no cryptographically protected keychain, I seem to be stuck without IM. Apollo IM, at least, stores the password in its binary configuration file, so Apollo IM is no longer on my iPhone. In addition, hahlo.com, itweet.net, & ipheedr.com all stored my password in plaintext in ~/Library/Cookies/cookies.plist on the iPhone. I deleted the cookies and won’t be going back to them. Fortunately twitter.comand m.newsgator.com at least avoid plaintext passwords in cookies…