Simon Willison's Weblog: iphone

Google AI Edge Gallery

2026-04-06T05:18:26+00:00

Terrible name, really great app: this is Google's official app for running their Gemma 4 models (the E2B and E4B sizes, plus some members of the Gemma 3 family) directly on your iPhone.

It works really well. The E2B model is a 2.54GB download and is both fast and genuinely useful.

The app also provides "ask questions about images" and audio transcription (up to 30s) with the two small Gemma 4 models, and has an interesting "skills" demo which demonstrates tool calling against eight different interactive widgets, each implemented as an HTML page (though sadly the source code is not visible): interactive-map, kitchen-adventure, calculate-hash, text-spinner, mood-tracker, mnemonic-password, query-wikipedia, and qr-code.

(That demo did freeze the app when I tried to add a follow-up prompt though.)

This is the first time I've seen a local model vendor release an official app for trying out their models on in iPhone. Sadly it's missing permanent logs - conversations with this app are ephemeral.

Via Hacker News

Tags: google, iphone, ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, gemini, llm-tool-use

MLC LLM

2023-04-29T17:43:32+00:00

MLC LLM

From MLC, the team that gave us Web LLM and Web Stable Diffusion. “MLC LLM is a universal solution that allows any language model to be deployed natively on a diverse set of hardware backends and native applications”. I installed their iPhone demo from TestFlight this morning and it does indeed provide an offline LLM that runs on my phone. It’s reasonably capable—the underlying model for the app is vicuna-v1-7b, a LLaMA derivative.

Via @simonw

Tags: iphone, ai, generative-ai, llama, local-llms, llms, mlc

Sheepy-T - an LLM running on an iPhone

2023-04-11T17:54:26+00:00

Sheepy-T - an LLM running on an iPhone

Kevin Kwok has a video on Twitter demonstrating Sheepy-T—his iPhone app which runs a full instruction-tuned large language model, based on EleutherAI’s GPT-J, entirely on an iPhone 14. I applied for the TestFlight beta and I have this running on my phone now: it works!

Tags: iphone, local-llms, llms

How to Temporarily Disable Face ID or Touch ID, and Require a Passcode to Unlock Your iPhone or iPad

2022-07-06T17:38:11+00:00

How to Temporarily Disable Face ID or Touch ID, and Require a Passcode to Unlock Your iPhone or iPad

Hold down the power and volume up buttons for a couple of seconds, and your iPhone will no longer allow you to use FaceID to unlock it without first entering your passcode.

Tags: iphone, security

Why did Facebook remove their hamburger navigation and go back to docked tabs in their mobile app?

2013-10-24T14:32:00+00:00

My answer to Why did Facebook remove their hamburger navigation and go back to docked tabs in their mobile app? on Quora

Probably because the swipe-to-see-menu gesture conflicts with the iOS 7 standard swipe-to-go-back gesture.

Tags: iphone, 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

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

Does the Quora iOS app allow one to give "Thanks?"

2013-01-31T12:21:00+00:00

My answer to Does the Quora iOS app allow one to give "Thanks?" on Quora

I'd really like to be able to do this - could there be room for it in the little cog menu, next to "promote"?

Tags: ipad, iphone, quora, ios

What is the best travelling iPhone application for a 9 day trip through Europe?

2012-02-28T16:27:00+00:00

My answer to What is the best travelling iPhone application for a 9 day trip through Europe? on Quora

Instapaper is essential - it will let you save any web page for offline access on your iPhone which is fantastic things like Wikipedia and Wikitravel.

OffMaps is another excellent offline tool that lets you save maps from OpenStreetMap, which has excellent coverage around Europe.

Tags: iphone, travel, quora

What is the optimal description length in the Apple App Store?

2012-02-09T17:14:00+00:00

My answer to What is the optimal description length in the Apple App Store? on Quora

Have you ever come across one if those ugly, long pages advertising an ebook - the ones that bang on for dozens of paragraphs with bullet points, pictures, testimonials, headings, more testimonials, more bullet points and so on?

Guess what: they work! The general format is called a "sales letter" - http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

We know they work because people have been split testing them for decades.

I imagine iPhone developers have discovered that the same trick (way too much information) works for 99 cent purchases on the App Store.

Tags: iphone, seo, quora, ios

My First Week with the iPhone

2010-10-03T12:20:00+00:00

My First Week with the iPhone

A blind user describes the experience of using VoiceOver on the iPhone, including the joy of discovering the Color Identifier app which speaks the names of colours picked up by the iPhone’s camera. “ I used color cues to find my pumpkin plants, by looking for the green among the brown and stone. I spent ten minutes looking at my pumpkin plants, with their leaves of green and lemon-ginger.”

Tags: accessibility, iphone, recovered

Quoting Rafe Colburn

2010-05-05T12:10:00+00:00

The crisis Flash now faces is that Apple has made it clear that Flash will no longer be ubiquitous, as it won’t exist on the iPhone platform, thus turning “runs everywhere” into “runs almost everywhere.” As Web developers know, “runs almost everywhere” is a recipe for doing everything at least twice.

— Rafe Colburn

Tags: adobe, apple, flash, ipad, iphone, iphoneos, rafe-colburn, recovered

Quoting Louis Gerbarg

2010-04-12T17:24:27+00:00

Imagine if 10% of the apps on iPhone came from Flash. If that was the case, then ensuring Flash didn’t break release to release would be a big deal, much bigger than any other compatibility issues. [...] Letting any of these secondary runtimes develop a significant base of applications in the store risks putting Apple in a position where the company that controls that runtime can cause delays in Apple’s release schedule, or worse, demand specific engineering decisions from Apple, under the threat of withholding the information necessary to keep their runtime working.

— Louis Gerbarg

Tags: apple, ipad, iphone, louisgerbarg, flash

Flash CS5 will export to HTML5 Canvas

2010-04-11T18:33:01+00:00

Flash CS5 will export to HTML5 Canvas

This looks pretty awesome—Illustrator CS5 and Flash CS5 can export to a new “FXG” format, and Adobe are providing a JavaScript library to load that format via Ajax and render the contents (including Flash animations) in a canvas element. Could be great for displaying newspaper infographics on the iPad.

Tags: adobe, canvas, flash, fxg, html5, illustrator, ipad, iphone

Quoting Rafe Colburn

2010-04-10T18:42:31+00:00

We all think of Java as a boring server-side language now, but the initial idea behind Java was that software developers could write applications in Java rather than writing them for Windows, and that those applications would work everywhere, thus defanging Microsoft’s desktop OS monopoly. Microsoft took various steps to prevent that from happening, but they lacked a tool like App Store that would enable them to just ban Java. Apple has that card to play, so they’re playing it.

— Rafe Colburn

Tags: microsoft, apple, java, iphone, appstore, rafe-colburn

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?

2010-01-31T12:05:23+00:00

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?

John Gruber makes the case for the fading significance of Flash, brought about by Apple’s point-blank refusal to support it on the iPhone or iPad. “Flash is no longer ubiquitous. There’s a big difference between “everywhere” and “almost everywhere”.”

Tags: adobe, apple, flash, ipad, iphone, john-gruber

owlsnearyou.com

2010-01-19T14:45:50+00:00

owlsnearyou.com

Nat and I built this over the weekend. It asks for your location, then tells you where your nearest Owl is (using sightings data people have entered on WildlifeNearYou.com). If you’re using Firefox 3.6 or an iPhone it grabs your location using the W3C geolocation API so you don’t have to type anything at all.

Tags: geolocation, iphone, owls, owlsnearyou, projects, wildlife, wildlifenearyou

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

Guardian iPhone app

2009-12-14T13:29:29+00:00

Guardian iPhone app

Released today, ad-free, £2.39 for the application, has an excellent offline mode. I helped build the backend web service, which is a Django app running on EC2.

Tags: django, ec2, guardian, iphone, python

Quoting Paul Graham

2009-11-19T22:13:15+00:00

Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would.

— Paul Graham

Tags: paul-graham, apple, iphone

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

Quoting John Gruber

2009-10-06T07:33:28+00:00

This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.

— John Gruber

Tags: john-gruber, flash, adobe, iphone, apple

Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash

2009-10-05T21:15:45+00:00

Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash

A brilliant feat of engineering: Adobe worked around Apple’s “no runtime allowed” rules by writing a compiler front end for LLVM that compiles ActionScript 3 to ARM assembly code, and apparently ported the regular Flash drawing APIs as well.

Tags: actionscript, adobe, compilers, flash, hacking, iphone, llvm

Gmail for Mobile: Reducing Startup Latency

2009-09-23T22:29:42+00:00

Gmail for Mobile: Reducing Startup Latency

Cheeky iPhone optimisation trick—parsing 200 KB of JavaScript takes an iPhone 2.2 device 2.6 seconds, so Gmail embeds code components in /* comments */ in a script tag and evals them on demand later on when the features are needed.

Tags: google, iphone, javascript, optimisation, performance

Quoting Tim Bray

2009-09-21T17:30:56+00:00

Developing for the iPhone at the moment is like picking up dimes in front of a bulldozer.

— Tim Bray

Tags: iphone, apple, tim-bray, sharecropping

Quoting Anthony Rose

2009-05-23T00:42:54+00:00

iPlayer usage, for streaming, peaks about 10pm - just a little later from TV. But interestingly, iPlayer on the iPhone peaks at about midnight. So people are clearly going to bed with their iPhone and watching in bed. And we also see on the weekends, there's a peak of Saturday and Sunday morning usage at about 8 to 10am in the morning on iPhone.

— Anthony Rose

Tags: iplayer, iphone, bbc

Fake Reviews. Now now kids, play nice...

2009-05-22T00:49:34+00:00

Fake Reviews. Now now kids, play nice...

Not at all surprised to hear this—nefarious iPhone app developers (in this case the team behind “London Tube”, an inferior version of Malcolm Barclay’s marvellous “Tube Deluxe”) have been caught leaving fake negative reviews on rival applications in the App Store. This is an excellent argument for adding friends/followers or importing an existing social graph—I’d much rather see reviews from people in my social network than strangers who may turn out to be sock puppets.

Tags: apple, appstore, iphone, londontube, malcolm-barclay, social-graph, social-networks, sockpuppets, tubedeluxe

Quoting Garrett Murray

2009-04-22T12:17:17+00:00

Perhaps it's just frustration speaking here, but when Apple ties my hands behind my back and lets users punch me publicly in the face without allowing me to at least respond back, it’s hard to get excited about building an app.

— Garrett Murray

Tags: garrett-murray, apple, appstore, iphone

Quoting Marc Hedlund

2009-04-12T13:49:44+00:00

The App Store has an inscrutable, time-consuming, whim-dependent approval process. The App Store newsgroup postings are full of angry claims that this is a bug, but I bet it's a feature. If you can't get an app approved until it's working perfectly, and you have to wait a week or two -- or more -- between approval rounds, you're much more likely to put a lot more effort in up front to get it right.

— Marc Hedlund

Tags: apple, appstore, iphone, marchedlund