Ad Blocker

AdBlock – The most popular Chrome extension, with over 2 million users! Blocks ads all over the web. Configurable

Password Saver

Autocomplete = on – Changes ‘autocomplete=off’ to ‘autocomplete=on’ in web pages, so your passwords will be remembered.

Bookmarks

Delicious Bookmarks – Delicious Bookmarks is the official Chrome extension for Delicious. Note that the YouTube founders recently bought this from Yahoo. Maybe they will buy Flickr as well? Please? Please?

Web Development

Eye Dropper – Eye Dropper is open source extension which allows you to pick colors from web pages, color picker and your personal color history.

Firebug Lite – Firebug Lite for Google Chrome, supported by the Firebug Working Group.

Measure It – Draw out a ruler that will help you get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.

Social Media

FB Photo Zoom – Nice zoom photo on mouseover effect.

SEO/Network Tools

SEO Site Tools – On-Page / External metrics, Social Media info, PR / numbering on Yahoo, Bing, Google SERPs.Extends WMT, YSE and GA with metrics

Ultimate Chrome Flag – This extension displays country or region name, Geo, Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and WOT info for the websites you’re visiting.

Chrome App

TweetDeck – The TweetDeck Chrome App is a better desktop client than the Air app, in our humble opinion.

In Windows there are several ways to mount and dismount disks, as well in Mac OSX. It’s a bit easier in Mac as there is a built in utility called Disk Utility, but you have to go find it in the Utilities section of Applications (or run from a command line).

For Windows, the easiest way is to use a free utility called MagicDisc. Then you can add and mount discs at your leisure and have them mount on bootup.

For Mac OSX, dismounting a disk is as easy as dragging the icon to the trash. This is counter-intuitive as some people might think they are deleting the contents. For Windows, there is the right-click and disconnect from the windows tray. Or, as I prefer, to use the disk flush utility Sync.

In both the Mac OSX and the Windows cases, the important idea is to flush any pending writes to the contents of the disk before physically disconnecting them, whether these be USB memory sticks or hard disks. Otherwise data corruption is possible.

Encrypted Virtual Disks

TrueCrypt allows for encrypting an entire disk, or to build a partition and create a virtual disk. Encryption is on the fly, as files are accessed and moved to and from the encrypted virtual disk.

Setting up TrueCrypt is quite straightforward and a quick process.

Encrypted Operating System

TrueCrypt supports encrypting the Windows operating system itself as well.

Plausible Deniability

One great feature of TrueCrypt is that while the presence of an encrypted disk is detectable, what is inside it is not. This allows for plausible deniability. TrueCrypt allows for two different disks to be present (different sizes if desired). Each disk has a different password. One can provide a password under duress and access plausible disk contents. At the same time an entirely different disk contents could still be protected, and undetectable.

Prey and Hidden – Stories with a Happy Ending

Lifehacker has a few articles on Prey, especially a nice story on how Prey helped one user recover their laptop. This is a similar story dealing with Hidden App, a similar app for Mac only, and on a subscription basis ($15 USD/year and up).

It will be nice to see iphone/ipad apps for this, which I am sure are coming.

Video Introduction of Prey Project

Prey Project introduction from Carlos Yaconi on Vimeo.

Now that 256gb SSD are available in the Samsung Series 9 and Apple MacBook Air. For those who don’t want a complete system upgrade, replace the HDD with SSD. It is a game changer.

Oh, and make sure you are at 4gb RAM as well. The combination makes a significant difference.

Cross-Platform Development

For many people, cross-platform development is critical. This is especially for those organizations who have a need to be everywhere or to specifically allow for any-platform interaction with their applications and data. Tablet and Mobile may be only one part of this, for example other platforms include:

• The Desktop
• The Web
• Facebook Apps
• Print media

In this case well thought-out approach needs to include the kinds of interactions as well as information which exist across the platforms. In the case of a book publisher, a slew of offerings could include:

• Website (which may or may not have app-like functionality)
• Web Apps, such as Chrome App, Facebook App
• Print book
• Ebook (pdf, kindle, ibook, nook, sony), note that google might be a player here, at least for SEO and as an affiliate
• Enhanced Ebooks (with app-like functionality, animation, audio or video), supported by a subset of readers
• Tablet, Mobile apps (iOS, android)
• Desktop applications (e.g., for enhanced ebook and app functionality)

Which Operating System/Platform to Target

Designing for today and designing for tomorrow are two different things. The streamlined approach is to get to between 50-75% of the market and not ignore anyone who could be 10% of the market itself.

Another approach is to start with the biggest, develop for that market, then move onto other markets and platforms.

Development Platforms and Frameworks to the Rescue

There are several platforms and frameworks that are useful to accelerate development, and a number of them are targeting either a wide range of mobile os/devices or the iOS/Android duopoly.

PhoneGap plus Libraries

PhoneGap supports iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Symbian and Bada. PhoneGap is open source and is used for creating Web apps, rather than native apps. There is much discussion (and disparagement) regarding web apps vs. native apps. In any case, it comes down to more look-and-feel perhaps more than functionality and performance. That said, be sure to check out all frameworks/platforms to ensure that the kind of functionality needed is supported.

For widgets, there are some great open source libraries to use, including:

• JQuery Mobile
• Sencha Touch

There is also many more such libraries and tools that are more expensive than free. PhoneGap also integrates with Dreamweaver 5.5.

Rhomobile

Like PhoneGap, Rhomobile’s product Rhodes also supports a number of platforms, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone. If Windows Phone is important, then this is a good option for development.

Rhodes is a Ruby platform and creates native apps. There are also other components that Rhomobile offers, such as Rhosync, a platform for synching data from mobile apps to enterprise servers. This of course costs money. Good for Ruby programmers.

Appcelerator Titanium

Appcelerator’s Titanium is one of the more popular platforms, as it came out fairly early. It supports iOS and Android as well as desktop apps for Window, Mac OSX and Linux. Pricing is from Free to $49 USD/mo. to $199 USD/mo. Developing desktop as well as mobile (and using the web technologies of HTML5, CSS and Javascript as with PhoneGap, is a mighty incentive.

This offering includes the Aptana IDE as well as support for Ruby, Rails, PHP and Python. Advanced APIs cost monthly but the standard offering is free and open source.

Xamarin

Xamarin brings C# and .NET/ Mono development to both Android and iOS with two different products (one for each). Price as of September 2011 is $299 USD each (includes an IDE and 1 year of upgrades). This is useful for .NET developers.

Ansca Corona

Corona uses the Lua scripting language and supports iOS and Android ($199 USD/year each). They focus on games and interactivity and outperform flash. This platform has been effective at quickly creating top-selling games.

Note: this Failboat is for the article, not for Dropbox.

Errors, Errors, Errors

First, both Dropbox and SugarSync (which the author preferred) are around the same age, namely both were first released in 2008.

Not Dragbox, Dropbox

Secondly, the important thing with Dropbox is that you don’t have to move things in and out of Dropbox all the time. This would better be called Dragbox. Instead, simply move everything into Dropbox and let everything live there. This is the best and easiest approach. It also allows some things to be kept out of Dropbox, e.g., movies or music, so that you don’t have to sync all the really large files.

Tools to Sync Any Folder

Thirdly, there are many free tools to create symbolic links so that Dropbox will back up things that don’t live inside the dropbox folder.

Pricing and Limitations

The real difference between Dropbox and SugarSync is not functionality, as they more or less compete directly, but the pricing model. These of course change over time but SugarSync is generally more expensive for most use cases.

The Real Reason to Choose Dropbox

Dropbox is becoming ubiquitous in terms of a generic cloud storage option used by third party tools, especially for the tablet and mobile platforms. This is the real advantage. So many third party apps allow for use of Dropbox files, including editors and file synchronization tools (image saving, etc.).

In addition, using Pages for the Ipad, one can connect WebDav to Dropbox (though this does get a bit technical).

Non-Dropbox Dropbox Alternatives

The real question is not SugarSync or Dropbox but Dropbox and some other non-proprietary service. There are options for building one’s own cloud and controlling the type of data storage backend, such as AWS.

Browser Wars

The Browser Wars are proliferating with multiple platforms. There are actually four companies (one a nonprofit foundation) involved, and the browsers themselves are fragmenting:

• Internet Explorer (Microsoft), v.7, 8, 9
• Chrome (Google),
• Safari (Apple), including versions for Iphone, Ipad, MacOS as well as Windows
• Firefox (Mozilla Foundation),
• Opera (Opera)

Because there are multiple platforms which each have unique built-in browsers and the inability to add others,

Of Internet Explorer, v.6 went from 22% to 9% of Internet Explorer share. v.7 went from 32% to 19%. V.8 went from 46% to 64%, and v.9 went from 0 to 7%.

Note that the overall share of Internet Explorer went from 59% to 44%.

Firefox Holds Share

Firefox has an enormous number of version numbers. V.3.6.13 is the largest single version at 16%, and the 3.8 series is around 50% in total. Overall Firefox stayed at around 21% of visits.

Google Chrome

Chrome is even more version-segmented than Firefox. Chrome went from 5% to 12% of visits.

New Mobile Browsers Emerge

Android is now 1% of visits. Opera mini makes up a small number of visits, but still ranks as the 9th most popular approach with Mozilla-compatible agents (some of which are mobile) coming in at the 7th.

Apple Safari

Safari’s 53x (5.0.3) series makes up a majority of versions, though there are many sub-series accounted for. The 653x (v.5.0.2) is the second most popular.

Overall Safari went from 7% to 20% of total. This includes ipad and iphone access as well as MacOS and Windows.

Opera

Poor old Opera comes in at 1% as well, but down over the previous year. A really excellent browser descending into irrelevance.

India Traffic

In another dataset with a large amount of traffic from India, the following differences are found:

• IE predominates at 42%
  • IE 8 at 62%
  • IE 6 at 18%
  • IE 7 at 13%
  • IE 9 at 7%
• Firefox comes in at 28%
• Chrome comes in at 22%
• Safari is 6%

Operating Systems

This data is not necessarily accurate but does give some idea as to the order of magnitude:

• Windows from 84% to 73%
• MacOS from 11% to 18%
• Iphone from 2.4% to 3.7%
• Ipad from .1% to 2.2%
• Androd from .9% to 1.3%
• Linux declining from 0.9% to 0.6%

Screen Resolutions

The real story here is the proliferation of different resolutions and the flattening out of screen resolution popularity.

• 1280 x 800 is the most popular resolution but declined from 23% to 20%
• 1024 x 768 is the second most popular, but also declined, from 27% to 17% (ipad in portrait mode)
• 1366 x 768 increased from 5% to 12% (popular 13″ laptop resolution)
• 1440 x 900 had a slight increase from 7.7% to 8.2%
• 1280 x 1024 declined from 10% to 7% (non-widescreen aspect for 20-21″ monitors)
• 1920 x 1080 increased from 2% to 4% (popular 23-24″ monitor resolution)
• 1680 x 1050 decreased slightly from 4.1% to 3.9% (another common monitor resolution)
• 320 x 480 is clearly a mobile screen (portrait mode) increased from .7% to 3.5%
• 768 x 1024 is a portrait-mode (e.g., ipad) that went from .1% to 2.1%

There are hundreds of combinations but a few others of interest:

Width Issues

• 2560 is the largest width (27-30″ cinema displays), and increased to .5% with a width of 1920 at 5.5% of visitors
• Interestingly the 800 x 600 ebook common display and the 768 x 1024 ipad portrait mode offer an interesting opportunity. While resolutions will change with lowering of costs at higher resolutions, the 6-7″ and 9-10″ form factors will not (nor will the human eye). Pinch-and-zoom interactions help navigate an interface designed not for a different resolution, but for a different form factor.

Height Issues

• 396 is the smallest height but this declined from 2.9% to .6% so that 480 is the successor minimum with 600 as a more common minimum with over 3% of visitors. over 30% have a height of 768 or smaller and more than 50% have a height of 800 or less.

Current Recommendations

Design for Five Experiences

• 3.5″ mobile (480 x 800 to 640 x 960)
• 6-7″ tablet (600 x 800 to 800 x 1024)
• 9-10″ tablet (1024 x 768) as well as the classic netbook size (1024 x 600)
• 11-13″ Laptop (between 1280 x 800 and 1440 x 900 with 1366 x 768 as the middle point)
• Desktop monitor (2560 x 1440 maximum, but targeting 1920 x 1080 is ok, and few people would use this large of a screen without resizing the browser window or changing from native resolution on a 24″+ monitor). The point is to have a graceful degradation of any background images or monitor-wide graphic display and wrapping.

Of course this is a bit overwhelming, and should be done in stages:

• Target a consistent look and feel for resolutions 1024 x 768 (ipad) and 1440 x 900 (macbook air)
• Make sure it looks ok at 1920 width (24″ monitor)
• Check on navigation (pinch-and-zoom) on an Android and Iphone/Ipad Touch
• Take a look at how this works on a 7″ tablet (Samsung Galaxy or similar)

On to Apps

Once the basic website experience is configured and tested, it is time to think of designing apps that provide enhanced experiences to smartphones and tablets, as well as the desktop. More on this later.