Ipad 2, get ready

Posted on Aug 17, 2010 by Bill to Technology Trends

Will the Chinese Economic Daily News be right again?  They were the first to report that Apple was releasing the first Ipad when others had predicted a netbook.  This week the paper announced that Taiwanese companies were working on the production of a new Ipad 2 with a 7 inch screen.  The paper reports that Chimei Innolux will supply the 7 inch screens.  Chimei was formed in 2010 with a merger of Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO), Innolux Displays and TPO Displays.  Chimei is now in position to compete with Samsung and LG for the LCD market (http://www.chimei-innolux.com).  The paper also reports that Cando Corp will supply the touchscreen technology.  Cando is also located in Taiwan.  And to wrap up the Taiwan resources Compal Electronics is slated to assemble the new Ipad 2.  Compal has been in the assembly business for 22 years producing models for Dell, Compal and Hewlett Packard.  When the above companies were contacted they declined to comment, which isn’t a surprise if they are looking to build the ipad 3.  With Ipad sales projected to pass 7.1 million units in 2010, 14.4 million in 2011 and 20.1 million in 2012 (Source iSuppli Corp) competitors like Samsung, LG, Acer, Hewlett, Asus and Dell dont stand a chance at ever capturing any large percentage of the market.  Then add in the number of applications that have been developed for Apple (Over 200,000 to date) and you must wonder how the competitors think they have a chance.  But in todays market the vultures are always looking for their scraps.  Keep an eye out this week as President Obama visits Miami, apparently he has been struck by the ipad fever as well. http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/16/1778478/president-obama-to-visit-miami.html

@mention is now live on facebook

Posted on Sep 14, 2009 by Rich to Social Media, Technology Trends

With so many people having facebook accounts, and facebook’s user base significantly growing as well as  twitter rejecting facebook’s offers to buy them, it was only a matter of time before facebook decided to implement the ‘@’ feature in some form or fashion.

Today facebook launched the @mention feature which takes the basic principle of twitter’s @username piece and implemented it on facebook. Now you can @your-friends-name and have your post/status/ect post on your friends wall as well. In addition to being able to @-tag your friends, you can also do the same to groups, fan pages, etc.

Let’s try an example shall we:

@mention facebook feature

So what does this mean for us?

Well, first lets think about this new facebook feature as an extension of the already popular “tag” function. From images to videos to now basic posts and status updates, this will allow you to offer a more social connection to your posts. Instead of saying “I went to lunch with the people at THAT Agency”, now you can do something like “I went to lunch with my brother @thatagency today” * The @thatagency would be replaced with the link to the company’s account. The update will post on both yours and “joe’s” walls.

Call is saving some time.

I have to admit, I really don’t go around reading who said what on the main wall when I log in, but it would be of some value to be able to quickly see any mention of me on my own profile. Which you would probably already know about since you will get a notification of this action.

Pros:

• Could be used for tracking information later on.
• Posts about you, your company etc, that were missed could quickly be seen and response with customers, friends and such would be faster.

Cons:

• Maybe the other person does not want to be mentioned.
• The world is losing its privacy.
• I can just write on the other persons wall.

Do you have any more pros or cons? let us know.

Tags: @mention, facebook

What is Important for your Ecommerce Website?

Posted on Jul 24, 2009 by William to Technology Trends

Considering how competitive the Internet store business is, ecommerce websites have to establish a distinct identity to achieve success. Among the various factors that can help in making this happen are ecommerce website designs and site navigation.

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Tags: commerce web site design, ecommerce website designs, ecommerce websites

Progressive enhancement vs. graceful degradation

Posted on Jul 8, 2009 by William to General, Technology Trends

There is no doubt that the world of website creation is complicated. Even back in the day when almost everyone was using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, you still had several old versions floating around with one version supporting one plug-in and another browser not.

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Tags: Progressive Enhancement

Should we really “Flock”

Posted on Jun 29, 2009 by Rich to General, Technology Trends

So I recently came across a blog posts that spoke of a new “browser” that is labeled the Social Media browser. But what exactly does that entail? Well thats the same question I had.  In an effort to try to understand what this was about, I decided to install said browser. Wondering what the name of this browser is? it’s called “Flock“.

As you can see from the image above, Flock lets you have one browser to basically manage all your social networks in one place.  According the Wikipedia, here are Flock’s features:

Flock 2.5 integrates social networking and media services including MySpace,Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.  Notably, when logging into any of the supported social services, Flock can track updates from friends: profiles, uploaded photos, and more. Flock’s latest 2.5 version added Twitter Search functionality, multi-casting of status updates to multiple services, and the introduction of instant messaging via Facebook Chat in the browser.

Other features include:

• native sharing of text, links, photos and videos;
• a “Media Bar” showing preview of online videos and photos as well as subscription to photo and video feeds;
• a feed reader supporting Atom, RSS and Media RSS feeds;
• a blog editor and reader, allowing direct posting into any designated blog;
• a Webkit-mail component allowing users to check supported web-based email off site, compose new messages, and drag-and-drop pictures and videos from the “Media Bar” or webclipboard into a new email message;
• support for third-party add-ons, including a number of Firefox extensions.

From my personal initial glance, Seems like a very nifty way to deal with social media networking, but whats really the difference between Flock and let’s say the firefox plugin called Yoono?

I guess it would depend on the individual user.  As I would like to consider myself a novice at using Flock, I think it was beneficial to see a little bit about this Social Browser before I get into playing around with it a little more.

So far it the question of  “Should we Flock” seems to be based on a personal answer. Does it matter?

Tags: Flock, Yoono

New iPhone 3GS Effect on Web Browsing

Posted on Jun 19, 2009 by William to General, Technology Trends

Every time a new method of surfing the Internet comes along, people everywhere wonder if we are in for a revolution or simply a slight change in the way we do things. With the release of the new iPhone 3GS from Apple, many are wondering what the effect on web browsing is going to be. The truth is that this amazing new iPhone 3GS likely won’t change things very much, but it may lengthen the amount of time people feel okay about being away from their laptop or office computer.

Just about everything on the new iPhone 3GS has been improved, from the software inside to the rounded and more comfortable feel on the outside. The impact on web browsing has more to do with email and load times than anything else. The new intuitive software helps to instantly link your phone to your email for effortless syncing in real time. This means that your iPhone 3GS doesn’t need to be docked, plugged in, or otherwise fed into a larger computer to get the information you need. This does foster a higher degree of independence, but it is unclear if it will actually change the way people surf the net. Taking things a bit further is the fact that load times have been significantly reduced, which should lead to people surfing the web using the iPhone’s built in Safari browser more than they did before. However, since Safari in iPhones loads and works in essentially the same way as Safari for Macs, the actually loading of pages and using of content should remain unchanged, but now people can do it on the go far more effectively than before.

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Tags: iPhone 3GS, web browsing

In the year 3000! ok maybe 2012 – The future of Development

Posted on Jun 8, 2009 by Rich to Technology Trends, Web Design

So I have been reading lately on the evolution of web development and how it will affect our culture as a whole. I have seen many blogs and articles state that mobile development will grow substantially. I totally agree with this item. Most websites now have evolved into thinking of mobile website presentation as an important part of their design and development. Some may argue in having a separate presentation for your mobile edition like yoursite.com/mobile or m.yoursite.com others might argue that something like “Progressive Enhancement” might be the solution.  While others still might have their own reasons for doing what they do. I personally feel like there is no right answer. The biggest question to me is something that plagues us as developers and designers on the regular computer browsers.  That is cross-browser compatibility. For example, I went from a sidekick slide to a G1 and now to the iPhone. Each phone supports different functionality and such. which makes it very difficult to have the mobile edition look the same across all phones. Yikes!

Another thing I have read about lately has been on the “I hope IE 6 Dies” mentality. While me as a Developer would truly hope so, we might not have that even in 2012. With the prices of these systems, licensing costs, lack of IT manpower or whatever else could be impeding the upgrade of computer systems in larger corporations we might still have to deal with this disease.

Frameworks Frameworks Frameworks. Developers have their preference. Some might tell you to learn all, some might say stick to one. At the end of the day, I can see them integrating concepts together to form the ultimate framework like voltron.js

I would talk about HTML5 and CSS3, but why. If not all browsers support it, then we are back to 2009.

Tags: CSS, CSS3, Dojo, HTML5, jQuery, Progressive Enhancement, Prototype

Do I need an SSL on my site?

Posted on May 25, 2009 by William to General, Technology Trends

It seems that you can’t turn on a newscast or open a newspaper without hearing about Internet security. It could be a case of someone having their identity stolen or it could be a case of a massive hacker attack on a government computer. Many of these incidents happen because websites don’t use SSL. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, which is a standard security protocol on the web. SSL creates a secure connection between your company’s web servers and individual web browsers that connect to it.

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Tags: internet security, secure connection, SSL, SSL certificate

Is Captcha Still Effective? Slowly but Surely the Answer Is “No”.

Posted on Apr 17, 2009 by Damien to General, Technology Trends

First off I should explain what a Captcha is. Captcha is a method of fooling the spam bots so they won’t fill out forms, gain access to sensitive locations of a site, etc. by using a visual image instead of a password or readable text access point. For a time, this worked wonderfully…

But just as technologies evolve, the Captcha’s inevitable demise was immanent. Spam bots are getting smarter and smarter every day and now even the most sophisticated Captchas are being cracked (Window Live Hotmail, GMail and even Yahoo). The only real defense against the spambots now is to make the Captchas even harder to read and eventually they’ll be impossible to read… even for the people who are supposed to read them.

This has already been the case in many instances. I’ve seen some Captchas that even I couldn’t decipher and the only reason I was finally granted access or was able to submit a form was the life saving “refresh Captchas” button. Ridiculous.

Captchas also pose a significant hindrance to special needs users like the blind who’s screen-readers are unable to decipher the Captcha code.

So what’s the answer? I don’t see much of an easy answer. One answer I do have though is that the Captcha is or will be officially dead very soon. There are alternative methods of detouring the spambots from accessing various aspects of the stie such as logic questions like “how many sides a triangle have…”. Spambots still can’t “think” or answer questions requiring common knowledge.

In the end though with every advance in technology, the bad guys are right behind us with a solution, pushing us further and further along.

Fighting spam from inline email addresses using JQuery Plugin – Version 1.0

Posted on Mar 19, 2009 by Rich to Technology Trends, Web Development

This is a JQuery plugin I have been working on to try to eliminate; if not help, fight spam through bots and such going through websites and scraping email addresses.

Basically it works like this:  You add the emails in a certain way in your code, be it yourname^yourcompany#com or however you want to add it. Then let the plugin work its magic. The code will be shown as above, but will behave as if you had typed in yourname@yourcompany.com. Simple huh? Well here we go:

Javascript

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<script>
$(document).ready(function(){
// example 1
$('a[rel*=spemail]').spemail('|,:','linkbase');
// example 2
$('#email').spemail('|,:','mailbase');
// example 3
$('#plainemail').spemail('|,:','plainbase');
});
</script>

HTML

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<p><strong>Example 1:</strong> <a href="yourname|yourcompany:com" rel="spemail"></a></p>
<p><strong>Example 2:</strong> <span id="email">yourname|yourcompany:net</span></p>
<p><strong>Example 3:</strong> <span id="plainemail">yourname|yourcompany:net</span></p>

As you can see in the examples above, the code in the DOM, will handle specific email pieces based on their ID or rel. Try it out and see. It works well.

Check out a live example of Fighting spam from inline email addresses using JQuery

or

Download the Fighting spam from inline email addresses using JQuery Plugin – Version 1.0 source files

Tags: DOM, email, Javascript, jQuery, jQuery plugin, jQuery tutorial