This year for the Atlantic Ocean has not been quiet, unless you base your opinion on storms striking land in the continental US. As always, the Caribbean Islands have had a fair share of storms, but not as many as previous years. The oddities have been Hurricane Bill and Tropical Storm Grace both making their way to the UK. While the storm tracks did not follow them through to the coast, the extratropical storm remnants did make it, causing torrential rains and minimal damage to land.
In the Eastern Pacific, off of the West Coast of the US and Mexico, we have had a large number of storms. Right now, we are following Category 4 Hurricane Rick. Hurricane Rick is heading to the Baja Mexico peninsula, which has already seen the remnants of Tropical Storm Andres, Hurricane Jimena, Tropical Depression Olaf, and a quickly dissipating Tropical Storm Patricia.
The Central Pacific is an open area that you would think would not matter much, unless you are in shipping. While that could be partially true, residents and visitors to Hawaii would most certainly disagree with you. Storms like Hurricane Felicia, Hurricane Guillermo and Tropical Storm Hilda form in the eastern Pacific ocean, and travel a long way to become a threat to the Hawaiian islands.
While Hurricane does not presently track Typhoons in the Western Pacific, we have found another oddity of the season. The west coast is feeling the remnants of Typhoon Melor. How often does that happen? About as often as Hurricane remnants hit the UK!
Prior to creating our iPhone App Hurricane, I like most people in the US paid little attention to the tropical systems outside of the Atlantic Ocean. Growing up in South Florida made it necessary to watch those storms because we were directly affected. Last year, Hurricane Norbert opened my eyes to the simple fact that hurricanes do affect the west coast of North America. This year, thanks to Hurricane, I have kept better track of the affects of hurricanes on areas outside of my little sphere. As an application developer, my hope is that Hurricane can help travelers and residents stay better informed about storms that affect you.
Even as this year’s storm season seems to have come to an early close for most on the US eastern seaboard, we will continue to keep watch on the tropics around the world.
If you track hurricanes, and want to see a little of what Hurricane can do for you, I often post screen shots directly from Hurricane on twitter @weatherangel. Feel free to take a look and see what you have been missing! Keep in mind that my screen shots are not automated, I post them as time allows or I see fit.
Over the last week I have watched Hurricane go from number 5 to number 3 in the US iTunes Store, a place Hurricane has not seen since last year, before the release of The Weather Channel and Weather Bug paid apps. Hurricane has remained in the top 5 in Jamaica, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, and has remained in the top 10 in El Salvador and Canada. Hurricane has also been in the top 100 over all apps in El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica during July and August.
We love our customers! Kitty Code has received so much great feedback, both through the App Store and through email, which has shown how great we are doing with the app. Things are running smoothly with the data feed, and while we do babysit the data, just to be sure, it’s nice knowing we don’t really have to – and the system just handles it all.
Haven’t checked out Hurricane yet? If you live in an area prone to hurricanes, you should definitely take a look. You will not be disappointed.
Previously I wrote about where to find cool scripts to handle getting the App Store Rank for each country. Back in April, Apple added a few more countries to the app store, did you know? The script attached below needs to be credited to the original author: Erica Sadun. The version I use is based off of Ben’s script with my own modifications to it to handle multiple id’s a little cleaner, and really, just a tad of code clean up that made me feel better
The script itself is attached as a zip file here: AppStoreRank.zip. This version is still written in Perl, but it is extremely easy to add a new app to the script. At the top, just modify the following section:
appName is just for display purposes
appID is your application ID from the iTunes store.
categoryName should match a category in the list below (this will pull the right category number).
As you can see in my list, the order of the parameters does not matter.
Added the following store codes to my script:
# stores added April 1, 2009
143508 => “Dominican Republic”,
143509 => ‘Ecuador’,
143516 => ‘Egypt’,
143518 => ‘Estonia’,
143510 => ‘Honduras’,
143511 => ‘Jamaica’,
143517 => ‘Kazakhstan’,
143519 => ‘Latvia’,
143520 => ‘Lithuania’,
143515 => ‘Macau’,
143521 => ‘Malta’,
143523 => ‘Moldova’,
143512 => ‘Nicaragua’,
143513 => ‘Paraguay’,
143514 => ‘Uruguay’
I am a little more retentive than most, and wanted my rankings to be listed in alphabetic order, so my version of the script does this automatically.
Also the way the script is written, it can be used as a stand alone script, or as part of a package.
If you have updated the script to add a check for Ratings, I would be very interested in seeing your changes!
A few days ago, Mashable posted an article stating that IE6 must die. The Twitter community agreed, and took it one step more and created a cause on Twibbon to spread the word!
Support IE6 Must Die and add an overlay to your avatar! Twibbon.com is the easiest way to promote awareness of your cause on twitter. Start something today !
With all of the push behind killing off Internet Explorer 6, one must really understand that it is a business decision. As web designers and developers, it is our job to express the sound judgement of what the majority of our users want to see. The unfortunate thing about this movement is that there are a lot of people in business who are stuck on IE6, because their IT departments do not see the value in updating their computers. I would think for security reasons alone the browser should be updated to at least IE7 if not IE8. Each company and business must decide their own fate.
With all of that being said, the users of our web applications should not be held back by the 15% still using IE6 in my opinion. There are SO many cool things that we can do with the new technologies, and based on the sales of next generation devices like the iPhone, people clearly want the new cool things. The answer maybe as simple as letting the user know they need to update their 8 year old browser. With services like YouTube and Facebook dropping support for IE6, where a vast majority of non-tech savvy users play on the web, the social media websites will be the biggest help in pushing users of older browsers forward. Like the upgrade from HTML 3 to HTML 4, maybe the upgrade from HTML 4 to HTML 5 will be the thing that pushes developers to drop support for the older browsers, and therefore push people who are behind to the newer browsers.
We can all hope for the best, but ultimately the people who are still using the older browsers, and the IT departments which have not rolled out the latest need to decide that now is the time. The question becomes, how do we as a development community convince those who are left behind to catch up?
Refreshable Braille and the Web came up as a search result when I was looking for CSS language accessors and IE. While it’s not what I was looking for, I took a few moments and watched the video. I know there are screen readers out there, as well as language translators and more, but this was very compelling to me. I did not know that there was a braille reader which is essentially either a keyboard or an attachment to a keyboard which allows the reader to read just as if they were reading a book. Instead of reading lines of braille, there is a single line at a a time which is available.
Articles like these remind me of why great HTML markup is SO VERY important to accessability, and forward thinking. One of the points which is made is that the HTML outline is used by the screen readers to not only describe where the reader is, but also describes the importance of that information which is being read. Ironically, I do not believe I have ever worked for a company which specifically targeted their audience which may require the accessability standards which are now in place. Just like you and me, people who need the accessability standards work, shop and play online. It is important to make sure that we test not only for the vast majority of our users, but we also test for those who may need that extra little push of our time at the end of the day.
I hope that you find the video as compelling as I did.
This is actually a great presentation on post click marketing and landing page myths. It contains information that I was learning when I was working with paths for a really great company a few years ago, and rings very true to what we found out. It is an overview, but also goes into depth as well. Just one more thing that I need to understand fully…
Google asks people in Times Square “What is a browser?”… Considering I started using a “browser” back in 1995, I was in a good deal of shock that most people had no idea what a browser was. No wonder so many people still use Internet Explorer after all these years!
At this point, if you have watched the video already and are still looking for the answer. It is simple.
Simply put, a web browser is the thing you use to visit websites. The most common web browsers are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera. There are MANY more not mentioned here.
A SEARCH ENGINE – Google, Yahoo, Bing (it’s new), and Web Crawler (do you remember that one?) …
What causes the confusion?
There are a lot of factors, but having the Search Engine plugins which automatically search when you get your website URL wrong is probably a good indicator of why there is confusion. If you don’t understand how it works already (and most people don’t want to understand) then you will think that all of the rolled up technologies are a single technology instead of seeing the small moving parts.
Something that I have been detesting is how my sites have been looking in Firefox under Windows. I know, I know, you deal with these things for security, etc. But I looked at Safari, and the fonts were always clean and crisp… So what gives?
I found an article relating to @font-face css rules, read it in Firefox 3, and then decided to look at the same page in my VM instance of Firefox 3.5. The difference was staggering, and yet very slight. Firefox 3 looks very grainy and even pixelated where Firefox 3.5 looks crisp, like an Arial font should look. I start looking at the author’s CSS (yes, I’m a nosey person) and realize that they’re not actually using @font-face styles on their page! So I looked around the web a little more, comparing the pages side by side just to find that wow, the experience may not bring me headaches any longer!
For me, this one little thing is a huge win. I look at Firefox every day during my development cycle and to be able to see the fonts just as I would in any other application is frankly awesome. This is something that I expect, and it was a disappointment before. I am very glad to see that Safari has taken up the challenge of being innovative and improving the user experience on the web. Other browsers like Firefox are now catching up, and for those of us who develop applications for the web, and those that use our applications, this is nothing but WIN!
Thank you Mozilla – for something so simply pretty. Thank you WebKit for making the challenge happen.
Back in March, I asked the question: Are you afraid of shadows?
In the article, I showed off some really neat transformations which at the time, were only available to Webkit users (Safari and Google Chrome), and the users of the early beta release of Firefox 3.5 (at the time Firefox 3.1).
The little things like text shadowing, which you really wouldn’t think much of unless you look at the power of the iTunes stores. The iPhone App Store in iTunes, much like all of iTunes is simply a web interface to the database of apps available for purchase, but if you’re a developer, you’ll notice the sweet effects that are laid on top of your app icon. Being both a developer and a web developer, I was curious how they went about making that happen automatically. My first thought was that they modified the image, but that wasn’t the case, it’s all CSS transformations which have been submitted for addition to the CSS 3 recommendation. Take a look at some of the documentation Apple has to offer
So now one must wonder if Internet Explorer will try to catch up[1], or if we will continue to require our web developers to handicap the abilities and speed of their websites just to appease the MANY users of Microsoft’s always behind browser. With luck, we will see Internet Explorer 8.5 which will add many of these abilities, and allow even the most novice of users to see the best that the web has to offer, but until then, those users will look upon the web with unseeing eyes. Ironically, once Internet Explorer does catch up, the world will be amazed at everything Microsoft has brought to them, never to realize that these things had been available for years before.
1 – To be fair, Internet Explorer does have this functionality, but it is something that must be handled in javascript, or by other programmatic means in the stylesheet, and is not the cross-browser way to handle this functionality.
Text Shadowing availability by browser:
Safari 3 & 4
Firefox 3.5
Chrome 1
Have I missed a browser like Opera? I don’t run it and am not required to test against it, so if you know of other browsers that support the latest CSS let me know and I’ll add them to the list!
