web apps

Google recently announced their latest foray into the world of social networking, Google Buzz. They now have a fully-functional web application tailored to Mobile Safari on the iPhone or iPod touch. The web app has all the features of the full web version, but scaled down enough to fit on the iPhone's screen. You can check it out by going to the Google Mobile website.

In December of last year, Riverturn launched Black Swan, a web version of VoiceCentral, their since-banned native Google Voice application. It was the first app of any kind to bring Google Voice back to the iPhone through legitimate means after Apple removed all traces of Google Voice functionality from the App Store. Now Google is following suit, offering their own official Google Voice web app for the iPhone.

Earlier this summer, Apple turned a lot of heads (including the FCC's) when they unabashedly killed Google Voice on the iPhone, rejecting Google's official app and removing all third party ones. Now an alternative has shown up that Apple can't reject; a web app. Riverturn, the developers of the removed app VoiceCentral, has created their own web interface to the service that acts exactly the same as a native app. Video after the break!

The Gmail team at Google announced recently that they have updated the mobile-optomized version of Gmail that shows up on smartphones like the iPhone to be between 2 and 3 times faster than the previous version. The speed increase is the result of several optimizations implemented to boost performance of Gmail's mobile site.

Twitter has announced a new mobile interface for accessing the Twitter website on the iPhone and other similarly large-screened smartphones. The new interface sports a look closer to that of Twitter on the PC. The developer team rebuilt the mobile site from scratch using Twitter's API's, and includes Reply, Retweet, and Favorite functions, as well as views for Mentions and Direct Messages. They're still working out some of the issues showing up on Blackberries, but they hope to replace m.Twitter.com with the new code soon.

Google announced recently that the Google home page will now be location-aware when accessed on an iPhone. Now, whenever you go to Google.com on your iPhone, Google will tap in to the device's GPS capabilities to determine your location and give you location-relevent results. The ability to search with My Location has also been added to the Google Mobile App [$0.00 | App Store].

Glyphboard, a small web app that's seemingly more than a web app, just might change the way web apps are looked at. Previously web apps could only be used while in Safari and connected to the Internet, but this application is much different. That's because Glyphboard can install itself as a webclip on your iPhone or iPod touch and launch just like a native application.

While web app development for the iPhone has been mortally wounded by the launch of the App Store, it still has a home at Apple. It was discovered recently that they have a web app for Apple employees to view what's on the menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner each day at the main fuel source of Apple employees, Caffè Macs. Not surprisingly, the app was removed from the URL it was located at shortly after it was leaked to the public.

Yahoo! has announced that they are dropping development of their Blackberry app to focus on native iPhone app development and web applications for other handsets. The move is an attempt to restructure in a way they think will be more effective.

Today Google rolled out a major update for both Gmail and Calendar for iPhone. The most obvious improvements lie in the new Gmail and Calendar interface. Labels are much more visible, search is easier to get to, and a new floating menu appears when performing batch tasks. All of the improvements stem from the updated engine which is significantly faster and more powerful. In addition to interface tweaks, the new engine also improves the speed of Gmail mobile and even allows you to compose a message even when cell service drops out.

Check out the video walkthrough below!