Posted by admin on Jun 17, 2009 in
browsers 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!
Tags: chrome, css, css3, firefox, ie8, safari
Posted by admin on May 23, 2009 in
iPhone 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.
Tags: app store, hurricane, iPhone, ranking
Posted by admin on May 23, 2009 in
iPhone 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!
Tags: app store, finance, hurricane, iPhone, ranking, reviews, tracking
Posted by admin on Apr 25, 2009 in
iPhone 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!
Tags: ham, hurricane, skywarn
Posted by admin on Apr 11, 2009 in
random This has been a very busy week for me, and really, I can’t complain! Today marks the accomplishment that I should have made when I was a teenager, and too chicken to try to pass the test. I always did horribly in school, mostly because I didn’t study well enough. Well, I planned to study all this week for the Amateur Radio Technician license, and what I ended up doing was studying last weekend, studying a little bit on Thursday, and cramming last night. But the good news is that I passed!!! So now I have to wait until the FCC database has my ID, and then I can transmit. I am so happy that I really did need to share. So, if you want to know how geeky I am, I am just that geeky
I had the opportunity to take the General class license test while I was there, and even though I never opened the book for it, I took the test. Well, I did not pass that test. As a matter of fact, I failed that one with flying colors! But that’s okay, because I did not go with the intention of taking let alone passing that test. I can study for it, and take it at a later time. For now, I am excited that I passed the test that I intended to take, and that I will be able to converse on the frequencies which are used by SKYWARN and other weather related amateur frequencies.
Posted by admin on Apr 10, 2009 in
blackberry In the following article, they talk about how to Create BlackBerry applications with open source tools. This is something that I will need in the near future, so I am adding it here for myself, and for you should you choose to take the challenge.
The most intriguing and powerful phenomenon in the digital age is the impact of social-networking applications on the consumer and business markets. Marketing professionals are changing how they interact with prospective clients, peer groups can easily form, and, as demonstrated in the fall of 2008, social networking can be part of a successful political campaign. Combined with the popularity and power of the BlackBerry platform, you have the makings of a dynamic combination. Part 3 of this “Create BlackBerry applications with open source tools” series explores how the BlackBerry is a great device for writing and deploying social-networking applications.
Tags: app, blackberry, development, social networking
Posted by admin on Mar 31, 2009 in
iPhone There are various reasons and ways to use flashcards. If you are like me, you want to take them with you, hand an iPhone or other device to your child while you’re on the go so they can study up on absolutely anything. That is where Study Stack and gFlashPro come in. Study Stack is the back end providing the flash card data, and gFlashPro is the iPhone app which allows you to take your flash card deck anywhere you go. The combination helped my daughter pass a music vocabulary test she was worried about, as well as improve grades in other subjects. She simply created her flash card deck on Study Stack, then grabbed the stack using gFlashPro, and now she can take it with her anywhere we go. In the car, in a restaurant, or in her room – Study Stack lets her study when and where she wants without taking a bulky stack of cards anywhere.
Tags: flash cards, iPhone, study
Posted by admin on Mar 20, 2009 in
Uncategorized Interesting article on browser security…
Browser vendors often make strong claims about their responsiveness to vulnerability reports and their ability to preemptively prevent exploits. Security is becoming one of the most significant fronts in the new round of browser wars, but it’s also arguably one of the hardest aspects of software to measure or quantify.
Chrome: Last browser standing
Posted by admin on Mar 19, 2009 in
internet explorer Internet Explorer 8 was released into the wild today. The enhancements are great, but what about CSS3? Looking at my Blog, I have created some very cool styles that highlight and bring the text more into a 3D view. Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browser supports all of these enhancements, Firefox 3 supports some, but the major player, Internet Explorer continues to leave us swinging in the wind.
A quick sample is this page: Kitty Code / Products When you look at this page in Internet Explorer, you find image icons which are square. Take a look at those images using an iPhone/iPod Touch, Safari under Windows or OSX (all of which run Safari, so maybe that’s not fair), then look at them using Google Chrome (which again probably isn’t fair since the underlying engine is WebKit which Safari shares), then look at it in Firefox and Internet Explorer. This is only one sample of the very cool effects you can create just using a little CSS, which is portable and allows you to use the same image anywhere.
Why is this important to me? Why does it matter? Simply put, Internet Explorer is still the market share stake holder. All large companies acknowledge this. So how are those large companies going to be able to move toward the future if they have Internet Explorer hanging on them like a noose? I find myself dumbing down the websites which I write for this very reason. The website is written to look the same in each browser, which means rounded corners in all browsers are only attained by images, which weigh more than a simple CSS border. This makes those same websites load MUCH slower on hand held PDAs, like the iPhone, PSP, Windows Mobile enabled Cell Phones and more. The point of CSS was to take the design away from the programmers, and leave it in the CSS where it can be manipulated in just about any way without the need for a code change.
So really, until Microsoft decides that CSS2 and CSS3 should be fully incorporated, we will have slow browsing ahead for all.
Tags: css3, ie8
Posted by admin on Mar 13, 2009 in
browsers,
iPhone Have you ever wondered how iTunes manages all those cool effects with the iPhone App images? The neat text shadows and box shadows for images, the curved corners… I thought it was something they were using an image tool for, but the more I looked at the feeds, the more I noticed that the the feeds were just that, straight text with not a lot of graphics. Yes, the app image is an image, and yes they are manipulating it, but does it surprise you to know that they are simply using CSS3 effects that are available in WebKit?
I was going through styles at the end of my work day today because our pages just look so bland. I was looking for easy ways to spice it up, even just a little. I started playing with shadows, and instantly fell in love. I made the title of the page look like it was popping out of the screen, and the boxes appear above the page. These were VERY cool effects, but they would only be available to webkit browsers – Safari on Windows and OSX, and on the iPhone and iPod Touch – pretty much anywhere if I understand the documentation correctly.
And that’s when it hit me. Isn’t Google’s Chrome web browser based on WebKit too? So I open it up to the page I was testing and wow! My shadows all worked wonderfully!
I was upset because I know FireFox 3 does not support shadows, but then found a reference to FireFox 3.1a saying that this will be the first version that allows for the shadows. About time I say!
But here we are, supporting an 8 year old browser which will never support these cool effects. I even looked to see if IE8 will show the text shadowing, and even though it’s in RC1, it does not support text shadowing. Maybe that’s why there’s word on the street that IE8 will possibly be the last version – which I’m sure only means for the engine, which is already out dated before launch since it does not support many of the visual effects that WebKit does, which really amounts to the coolest browsing with the least overhead.
With any luck, the tide will turn, and we will be able to produce more and more rich web applications, with eye-popping effects by simply using CSS. Here’s to hoping!
Tags: css, css3, firefox, google chrome, ie6, ie7, ie8, iPhone, safari
