What is a browser?
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.
Firefox 3.5 – Fonts, clean and crisp
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.
Are you afraid of Shadows? Part 2
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!
iPhone App Hurricane Ranking
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.
How to track iPhone App Success
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!
Hurricanes, Amateur Radio and life
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!
HAM Technician – The Amateur Radio Kind…
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.
Taking classes? Need flash cards?
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.
Chrome: Last browser standing
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.
What I’m talking about on…
Blogroll
