Sunday, April 19, 2009

Shark Browser iPhone App Submitted

Today I have submitted my first iPhone app, Shark Browser, to the App Store. With any luck it'll hit the store by the end of the month. Shark Browser is an alternative browser to Safari, with quick access to searches for many popular sites such as Amazon, IMDB, Flickr, Google and more. Plus it has full-screen features to take advantage of the full real estate of the iPhone. Here's the description from the App Store: SHARK is a full screen Web browser with a twist. Focus your keyword searches by tapping your favorite Web site including Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, ESPN, Amazon.com, IMDB and more! SHARK has many of the features you’ve come to expect from alternative iPhone browsers and some you haven’t seen before: - Show and Save Images: Tap to show all the images on the current Web page. Then tap any individual image to save it to your photo library. You can easily save any size image this way (this is difficult to do in Safari). - Find Text in Page: After you search a site, use this option to find and highlight the keyword for you. - Full screen mode: Hides the status bar and toolbars to use the full screen real estate of the iPhone. Jump automatically to full screen when you hit “GO.” - Privacy Browsing: When you close the application, your session is erased and there is no trace of your personal information or what you were searching for. - Shrinkster.com users will appreciate the shrinkster code search mode. Great for listeners of Mondays and other pwop.com podcasts.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

This is not what I would call an application "support page" for Shark as indicated in itunes. I'm having several issues:
1) Links will not open in web pages
2) even when application prompts to open the link, it doesn't
3)history does not delete upon closing application - one has to manually delete
4) absolutely no application support or FAQ anywhere to be found.

Ken Pespisa said...

Thank you for your feedback Patrick.

This page is certainly not a polished support site, however it does reach me, the developer, and allows me to read and respond to any feedback. I'll get a more professional app page built eventually and a FAQ and feedback page will be included.

Shark uses the APIs provided by Apple as a foundation for browsing. 99% of web links will open fine via that API, with the exception of certain links that pop-up a new page or links that take you to a secure site and require you to login. These issues are high on my list of priorities to fix in the next major release of Shark.

I can assure you no history is recorded or saved with the Shark browser, so it is always in a Private mode. However, I recently noticed that Google saves your search history between sessions, and you do have to manually clear that history between sessions. At the time Shark was first released, Google's mobile search did not behave this way.

I am about to submit a patch that includes a fix for that issue. It will be submitted next week (and might take a few weeks to pass through the infamous app store approval process). This patch will resolve the privacy problem for all Web sites, in case you experienced this problem somewhere else than Google.

If I haven't addressed your concerns, please post another comment and let me know more information about what pages are not opening for you or any other issues you're facing.

Ken Pespisa said...

Patrick, you'll be happy to know the issues you've reported have all been fixed with the recently released 1.1 version of Shark Browser. I had some trouble getting the app approved so this update took a while to be released.