‘Send to a friend’ SMS gotchas

UPDATE: The developers removed the send to a friend functionality!

There I was using a mobile site that allowed you to send the page you are on to a friend (by SMS).  Upon closer inspection it had a huge security hole, it was a hole that each time it was exploited cost approximately 15 to 20 cents. It was also easy to change the destination mobile number allowing it to be used as a denial of service attack on a single number or to spam a range of numbers.  It was repeatable and easily scriptable.  NOTE I disclosed this to the company responsible, I didn’t even get a response. 

iPhone double tap zoom – indistinguishable from magic

When I first saw Steve Jobs demo the iPhone’s double tap zoom feature on webpages I noticed something really neat – the zoom always seem to perfectly zoom to show a block of text.  There are 2 explanations

1. It’s a fixed zoom level (e.g. 50%) that happened to work well in the demo (New York Times)
2. It’s a smart zoom that knows what its zooming into and “does the right thing”

From Apples iPhone for Web Developers page: Design for Double Tap

“When the user double-taps a page, Safari on iPhone looks at the element that is double-tapped, and finds its closest block (as identified by elements like DIV, OL, UL, TABLE) or the image element (IMG) ancestor. If the found element is a block, Safari on iPhone zooms the content to fit the viewport width and then centers it. If it is an image, Safari on iPhone zooms to fit the image, and then centers it. If the block or image is already zoomed in, Safari on iPhone zooms out.”

That’s a beautiful fusion of technology and usability which to borrow a phrase from Arthur C. Clarke is sufficiently indistinguishable from magic.

Now I’m a cynic but I bet none of the iPhone contenders will manage to do this as well as Apple for several years – but expect the cheap, nasty and unsatisifying 50% zoom hack from competitors within months 

 

Wide open gate in Telstra’s Walled Garden

There I was perusing the Sensis WAP site from an Optus mobile phone when I seem to have clicked my way into the Telstra/Bigpond walled garden.