Safari Upload Enabler finally updated with support for iOS 6

Folks who have been around the jailbreak community for a while will likely remember a popular tweak called Safari Upload Enabler. Before Apple added the ability in Safari to upload photos and videos in iOS 6, it was one of the only ways you could natively upload files from within the mobile browser.

Well we have some good news today for all of you jailbreakers, Safari Upload Enabler has finally been updated with support for iOS 6. Developed by H. Samara and N. Bassen, the new version of the tweak is out in Cydia now with a number of improvements, including a new Dropbox API and more…

Here’s the full change log for version 1.2.1:

• Support for iOS 6.x extending the iOS 6 upload capabilities
• New Dropbox API
• Photo picker: new option to show preview before selection
• Photo picker improvements/bug fixes
• New localizations: Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal & Brazil), Romanian, Slovak, and Swedish

As before, the tweak installs itself into mobile Safari and removes the block that Apple put in place to keep the browser from uploading certain things. Once installed, a file browser will pop up upon you tapping ‘upload’ web links. And also as before, you can configure all of the options from your Settings app.

Obviously, there are tons of third party applications that allow you to upload pictures and videos (like Facebook and Twitter) to the web, and with iOS 6 you can even do it within Safari. But using Safari Upload Enabler, you can upload all kinds of different files—like a resume to CareerBuilder or a recipe to Barista.

To be honest, I don’t ever really need to upload anything in mobile Safari—I rarely use it. But I can see how using this tweak, and maybe Safari Download Manager and iFile, could really expand the abilities of your iOS device. If you’re interested, you can find Safari Upload Enabler in the BigBoss repo for $2.99.

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iOS 7 concepts: actionable Notification Center, better Safari

What better way to sign off as my weekend starts than a fresh batch of iOS concepts which imagine the capabilities Apple should have long implemented? Above is Shaik Imaduddin’s mockup of a more interactive iOS Notification Center with actionable alerts where you could, say, delete email messages, mark them as read and send new ones, all without ever leaving your iPhone’s Notification Center.

Very doable and frankly, even Android isn’t currently doing that. He’s also envisioning making phone calls, responding to text messages (existing tweaks address this) and setting alerts in Reminders to call back a person. The latter makes me wonder how on Earth Apple missed combining Reminders with the Phone app. I’ve also included a nice iOS 7 Safari mockup right past the fold…

Shaik’s concept evidently makes the Notification Center more powerful by taking usual actions right from it, without having to open apps.

Here’s how it works:

Swiping left on a notification brings up a set of options that would usually have to be done by opening relevant apps and could take 2-3 steps. This works with all notifications.

Apps from the App Store can take advantage of this too. For example: a Facebook notification can be commented on, liked, or shared right from the Notification Center.

I sincerely hope Apple will make Notification Center in iOS 7 lots more actionable because, frankly, it’s of little use to me as it is now: a bunch of endless alerts that cannot be interacted with without being yanked out of the Notification Center.

Meanwhile, designer Brent Caswell went about juicing up Apple’s mobile Safari browser and he’s come up with some noteworthy, if not obvious, solutions. First up, Caswell is calling for a Chrome-like Omnibar, basically a single bar at the top which acts as both the address and search bar.

 

 

It should be a no-brainer: OS X Mountain Lion already unifies Safari’s two bars into one.

 

 

He’s also thinking about improving Safari’s handling of bookmarks, with the ability to share bookmarks with others through iCloud (agreed). He proposes a revamped UI to file your URLs, which kinda reminds me of the nice to-do app, Clear.

Last, but not the least, a new grid view when browsing open tabs puts more page thumbnails on your screen so you could pick a desired tab with less swiping. Note the two buttons alongside the bottom that let you pick between browsing your local or iCloud tabs, another nice touch which would definitely make Safari’s tabbed browsing better and less cumbersome.

I’m also liking his enhanced iBooks style layout controls for Safari’s Reader feature.

Some handy keyboard shortcuts here to access Safari tabs and bookmarks.

I like how this guy’s brain work. It’s a high time Apple enhanced Safari with new gestures, like swiping left and right from the edges of the screen to quickly navigate between tabs, Google Chrome style (at least on the iPhone).

Speaking of which, Apple should re-think the whole multitouch thing in iOS 7.

How?

For starters, get rid of the inconsistencies. For example, swiping from left to right deletes email and text messages, but not Calendar or Contacts entries.

More importantly, refine your multitouch language and deploy a set of easily remembered gestures across all stock apps, uniformly.

Mockups of what Apple should have done, but isn’t is why we jailbreak.

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Firefox is not coming to iOS until Apple changes its ways, company exec says

 

 

Fans of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser may be hoping to use their browser of choice on iOS, but according to Mozilla, that may not be possible anytime soon.

Mozilla has lifted the lid on the reason that it has yet to port the popular Firefox to Apple’s mobile platform and, unsurprisingly, it’s all down to Apple’s tight control over how things are done on its devices according to Jay Sullivan, the company’s Vice President.

Currently, all third-party web browsers that run on the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch have to use Apple’s UIWebView component which is inherently slower than the Nitro used by the company’s own Safari browser. Mozilla says that it will only bring Firefox to iOS when that limitation is removed, and Apple seems in no rush to do that…

Mozilla has demoed Firefox running on an iPad before, but has not made the release public. With the company apparently reluctant to make its browser work just the same as all the others, including Google’s Chrome, the ball is now in Apple’s court. That said, Mozilla understands that it may be harming itself by not being on a platform as popular as iOS, regardless of the politics.

It’s not just iOS that poses such problems either, with Microsoft’s Windows RT also making life difficult for Mozilla thanks to the way it withholds access to Win32 APIs. We suspect Mozilla will be more keen to get Firefox onto iOS than Windows RT though, but we may be a little biased there!

We’re big fans of Google’s Chrome ourselves, bastardized browsing engine or not, especially when combined with the jailbreak tweak BrowserChooser.

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