IE6 Must Die!

July 18th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized
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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?

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Disaster Voyeurism

July 18th, 2009 Posted in weather
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Disaster Voyeurism – It all starts with a hurricane :)

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Refreshable Braille and the Web

June 29th, 2009 Posted in browsers, design
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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.

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Post Click Marketing – What it is…

June 26th, 2009 Posted in SEO
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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…

SMX Advanced: Landing Page Myths
View more documents from ioninteractive.
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What is a browser?

June 19th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized
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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.

And with that, I am just amazed.

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Firefox 3.5 – Fonts, clean and crisp

June 18th, 2009 Posted in browsers
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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.

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Are you afraid of Shadows? Part 2

June 17th, 2009 Posted in browsers
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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.

Looking for more specific information? Try Firefox 3.5 for developers at Mozilla.org.

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!

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iPhone App Hurricane Ranking

May 23rd, 2009 Posted in iPhone
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In my previous post, I mentioned an app that shows you your current ranking in the iTunes App Store.  This list is modified for order, but uses the script:

Hurricane Ranking in Category Weather:
Mexico: 1
United States: 8
Canada: 11
El Salvador: 12
Slovenia: 17
Indonesia: 22
Deutschland: 24
Thailand: 26
Singapore: 29
Luxembourg: 29
Argentina: 31
Sweden: 33
United Kingdom: 35
Greece: 32
Italia: 45
Belgium: 46
Nederland: 46
Espana: 51
Turkey: 53
Norway: 55
Japan: 57
France: 61
Schweitz/Suisse: 61
Australia: 70

Using this perl script, I could also take a look to see how my competition is doing in the same markets.  For data and information, the possibilities are endless.

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How to track iPhone App Success

May 23rd, 2009 Posted in iPhone
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A few months ago, I posted that our Hurricane App hit #1 in Mexico. I checked back again yesterday, and it still seems to be at #1, or it hit #1 again. While I haven’t automated the check, I did notice that there were a lot of people looking for how to find their App Ranking in various countries in the iTunes store. For us, tracking the ranking of Hurricane has been fairly easy. We have remained in the top 25 paid weather apps in the US since the release on September 16, 2008, and have been within the top 10 since February, and hit top 5 when a storm looked like it was brewing this week. Over all, considering the amount of apps that are now in the weather category, and that Hurricane is a very niche app, it is doing exceedingly well.

When looking for your app ranking in other countries, the missing key is simply to go to the iTunes Store main page, scroll all the way down to the bottom, then use the select box to switch your country, or click on the flag dot to see a list of flags and countries.

Once you are in the new country, click on App Store, and your category, then start searching for your app. You cannot use the “search” feature because you will loose your place. Quite annoying I assure you.

To find your reviews, there are automated systems out there which you can purchase and/or use.

AppViz by Ideaswarm – $29.95 – Mac OSX
This Mac OSX application not only downloads and visualizes decent daily/weekly/monthly monetary reports, it also pulls the reviews for each country. It will also export the original reports.  This app has saved me hours of spreadsheet time!  I fire this app up a few times a week to check on how things are going with my sales.

AppSales – a Google Code project – Free – iPhone
I have this app loaded on my iPhone. When I got it, it was the only iPhone App tracker app available for the iPhone. This is the app I look at every day to see where my sales for the previous day were. This app shows you your daily and weekly sales, accumulates them for the month, as well as the break downs per app and per country. It is a very simple interface, giving the basic necessities. They have an updated version which also has graphing – which I will need to pick up very soon! Someone asked why they are not selling this app in the App Store, and the simple reason was because they want you the user to know that your data is secure. This app must be compiled by a developer and put onto an iPhone. Considering my financial information is in that app, along with identification information, I am VERY okay with that reasoning.

Sales Tracker by CXI Gaming – $18.99 – iPhone
This app can be found in the iTunes App Store. I haven’t checked it out, since I’ve already paid for AppViz. However, it seems to have all the same data as AppSales, with a much more refined interface. For security, they say they use the Apple Keychain, and have the ability to turn off automatic login. The drawback that I can see with this app is that it requires OS 2.2.1, which means that anyone who has not yet upgraded their iPhones (not sure why this would be an issue for a developer??) will find this app a waste of their money.

Scraping AppStore Reviews article by Erica Sadun – Perl Script
If you are looking to pull iPhone Reviews and understand Perl, this article was written with all the details, and the script. This script could also get you started on pulling app store ranking as well. But you really need to dive in and understand the system before you can do this.

Scraping App Store Rankings Around the World article by Ben Chatelain – Perl Script
This however is the script to beat all scripts. Again, it’s written in Perl, but it will report back what your current app store ranking is in each country. This one I just found while writing this article, but now, I think I will go give it a whirl. It would be neat to see if I can get AppViz to incorporate this into their application :)

In short, a quick Google search on what you are looking for really provides some great results. Some of these things I happen to know about because of word of mouth, so maybe this will help those apps get a little more visibility.

If you know of other apps that I have not listed here, please feel free to comment!

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Hurricanes, Amateur Radio and life

April 25th, 2009 Posted in iPhone
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What I should be doing with my free time right now is getting the new hurricane site finished up, but I am having a hard time getting into it. Lately I have been working on certifications, learning the new changes from the NHC and spending much needed time with my family. The other thing is socializing on Twitter (@weatherangel) about all of my interests, and more. It is amazing how much time that service can suck up when you are not paying attention! And then work gets 10 hours of my day, every day.

What about today? Waiting for my son to finish math tutoring while posting here, updating plugins, watching Twitter and listening to the radio. Mult-itasking at it’s best!

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