Published on 30 Jun 2011 at 3:27 pm.
1 Comment.
Filed under Mobile.
The following are a list of my own, personal recommendations for apps on Android based devices. I stick with free versions of everything.
What do you like?
This post was originally published as My recommended Android apps for The BrandBuilder Company.
Published on 23 Jun 2011 at 2:10 pm.
Comments Off on Third Party Mobile Browsers – part 4: Firefox.
Filed under Mobile.
This is the fourth in a series of posts on interesting third party browsers for the mobile Web. Read part 1: Opera Mini, part 2: Opera Mobile, and part 3: NetFront Life.
First off, I will offer full disclosure before I continue with this post. I currently own the Motorola Droid, which has a known bug that causes the system to completely freeze that looks to be something with Motorola and a lack of sufficient memory in this device. That has been my main experience with this so I may be overly critical, but I have tested this on a Motorola Droid X which does not have that bug. Performance wise a completely up to date version of the original Droid is the only version to suffer issues, while Samsung Galaxy S and Nexus S may suffer issues if the phones have not been updated. Additionally, starting the application for the very first time may be a little slow as installs some files, but every start after that will be faster.
All that aside, at the time of this writing Firefox is available for all devices running Android 2.0 or above, and the Nokia N900. As with the case of Opera Mobile, Apple’s Terms of Service prevent Mozilla from releasing a version for iOS, but there is a simplified version for the iOS called Firefox Home that offers access to your desktop bookmarks, history, and open tabs.
Firefox on mobile (sometimes referred to as Fennec in some regards) is very similar to Firefox on the desktop. It runs the same rendering engine that you are used to on the desktop, and even offers the ability to sync your bookmarks with your desktop version. Like the desktop version, the mobile version also offers extensions for your browser. Extensions authors need to check off and verify that their extension is compatible with the mobile version, so some desktop extensions may not be available on a mobile device, but many popular extensions are still available. Browser plug-ins such as Flash are not currently available at the time of this writing, but they are working on it.
Firefox mobile offers focuses on giving you as much room as possible for viewing a page.Ă‚Â Tabbed browsing is done in a slightly different manner than other mobile devices in that tabs appear on the side of the browser and require the user to swipe the browser to see all of their open tabs on the left. Swipe the browser the other way and you can quickly add/remove bookmarks. Swipe upwards and you can access a search/address bar (aka the awesome bar). The awesome bar behaves just like it does on the desktop where it will search your previously visited pages and display an auto complete so you can just click on that to access it again and save on having to type everything out, a big win on mobile.
All in all it is a pretty decent offering from Mozilla. It offers everything you would expect out of them and is a pretty handy browser.
This post was originally published as Third Party Mobile Browsers – part 4: Firefox for The BrandBuilder Company.
Published on 21 Jun 2011 at 10:54 pm.
1 Comment.
Filed under Web stuff.
I am a bit of a Web geek who is really tired of seeing ads on the sites he visits, but IĂ‚Â do not want to run ad-block because I like a bit more control over what I block. I have taken to editing the userContent.css file in the chrome directory of my Firefox profile as described by Gozer.
Specifically, I include the following text in my userContent.css file.
@-moz-document domain(fark.com), domain(totalfark.com) {
#rightCol, #rightColSpacer, #topAd728x90 { display: none !important; }
#newsContainer { background-color: #CCCCCC !important; }
}
@-moz-document domain(failblog.org) {
#leaderboard, #panemain { display: none !important; }
#pane2 { width: 800px !important; }
}
@-moz-document domain(facebook.com) {
#rightCol { display: none !important; }
.hasLeftCol .hasRightCol #contentArea { padding-right: 20px !important; width: 759px !important; }
.hasLeftCol .hasRightCol .uiUfi { width: 664px !important; }
}
The first block above specifically targets fark.com and totalfark.com and disables the right column and the ad at the top, and extends out the left column. The second block targets all of the various failblog.org sites and similarly removes the right column and the ad at the top and extends the left column (making the comments MUCH easier to read). The final block again removes the right column and extends out the middle column so that it takes the place of the right. Admittedly, this looks a little odd at first, but you get used to it.
Just place the lines above into your own userConent.css file, restart Firefox and enjoy the extra room. 🙂
Published on 21 Jun 2011 at 9:43 pm.
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Filed under Web stuff.
This post is a follow up to my previous post.
This post was actually written following the platform preview, but apparently was never published. I am editing it slightly and posting it now that IE9 is out.
- Microsoft will officially make an announcement for it at Microsoft MIX 2010. – correct
- Border-radius support! – correct
- At least a portion of the SVG spec will be supported. – correct
- Native support for newly introduced HTML5 elements. They may not actually function, but no longer will one need JavaScript in order to style them. – correct
- Native Drag-and-drop – yes
- DOM2 events. – correct
- DOMContentLoaded support. -yes
- Box-shadow and text-shadow- box-shadow yes, text-shadow no – WTF!!!!!
- @font-face to support truetype fonts – yes
- opacity – correct
So that was 6 for 10 that are a lock right now. What about the stretch predictions?
- CSS gradients – coming in IE10
- CSS transitions and transforms – coming in IE10
- W3C Ranges/Selection – correct
- Video element to support H.264 and ogg vorbis – We know it supports H.264, but won’t support ogg. Does support WebM if you have it installed.
- Audio element to support mp3 and ogg. – We know it supports mp3 (and AAC), but won’t support ogg
- DOM3 events – correct
- Web Forms 2.0 – none
So that is two fully correct and two partials.
Published on 9 Jun 2011 at 4:20 pm.
Comments Off on Clearing up the confusion on Google’s new authorship support.
Filed under Google.
Earlier this week Google announced that they were beginning to support authorship markup. Since then there have been a slew of individuals that immediately assumed that this meant that you could steal credit for another author’s work just by editing markup. This is not the case.
The way authorship markup is designed to build the reputation of content creators. It does this by designating all pages as either a content page or an author page. Content pages would be ones such as a blog post, while author pages are pages that list posts by an author and perhaps some additional information on the author.
Under the headline for this post you’ll see the date that this post was posted and that it was written by Brian LePore. The link is marked up with the additional rel="author" markup to indicate that I was the author of this post. Doing so marks up that link as an author page. What’s important to note is that the rel="author" markup can only refer to a page on your site. Your average blogger cannot link to an article on the New York Times with the author markup and claim that this is their content.
If you visit the author page you’ll see my picture, a brief description, and links to my Twitter, LinkedIn, and foursquare accounts. Each of these accounts belongs to me, but does not point to any page on our site. Because this is an author page Google supports the rel="me" markup to establish a link between profile pages. This tells Google that both of those profile pages represent the same person. Both of these pages need to be author pages in order for the linking to work. Linking to a content page won’t work either. I cannot link my author page to a content page on the New York Times Web site to steal credit from that site.
This post was originally published as Clearing up the confusion on Google’s new authorship support for The BrandBuilder Company.
Published on 7 Jun 2011 at 7:26 pm.
Comments Off on The Basics of Twitter.
Filed under Social Media.
Twitter is a social media network that is an amalgamation of Facebook, instant message, and e-mail all in one. Users are said to “follow” individuals they are interested in. These users send messages called Tweets that are 140 characters in length.
To draw attention (called “mention” in the world of Twitter) to a user you place the @ sign immediately before their username in a tweet. This allows other users to click on the message to view more information about said user. Similarly, the # sign is used to represent a tag for easy searching. These tags are referred to as hashtags. For example, saying “I just met up with @BrandBuilderCo and they helped me set up a new Web site #awesome” would express your reaction to purchasing a Web site from the BrandBuilder Company.
The placement of the mention inside of a tweet is very important in regards to who can see the message. If the very first character in a tweet contains the @ then this tweet will be visible to both parties, and everyone that follows either individual. If it is not than the only users that will see it are the two parties and all of the users that follow the originator of the tweet.
Retweeting is when a user says something that you find worth sharing to all of your followers. You do this by hitting the Retweet button in Twitter. Common practice says that you should give the user attribution by including RT before mentioning them and including the tweet. You can include a short message prior to the post along with your message. For example, “eh, Captain America could take him any day RT @BrandBuilderCo #batman rocks”. Some people just use twitter to retweet things that they find interesting and do not offer their own tweets.
When you log in to Twitter you will be presented with the most recent tweets in something called your timeline. Depending upon the number of people you follow this can get a bit difficult to navigate. Twitter allows you to filter your timeline by creating “lists” that only show you tweets by the individuals that you place on a list. For instance, you could create a list for each of your favorite sports teams, politics, celebrities, etc. so that you can read about certain topics at a given time.
Fridays on Twitter are referred to as ‘Follow Friday’. On that day you are recommending users that you feel other people should follow. To recommend that someone follow ConnieC2011 and BrandBuilderCo you would tweet “#ff @ConnieC2011 @BrandBuilderCo”.
This post was originally published as The Basics of Twitter for The BrandBuilder Company.
Published on 3 Jun 2011 at 2:19 pm.
Comments Off on Google on Modern Browser Support.
Filed under Google.
Google has recently announced that they going to be dropping support for older browsers.
… Older browsers just don’t have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience.
For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.
As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.
I’m actually a bit surprised by the cuts. Firefox 3.5 isn’t really that far out of date/hard to develop for, while IE7 I thought had too many users for a company Google’s size and clientele to drop. I mean it is true IE7 is too buggy and too outdated to support at the quality service level I’d imagine Google wants (heck, I’d love to drop it too), but the official stance of “current release and previous release” seems like it is a bit too shortsighted.
Heck, with Firefox’s upcoming quarterly release cycle that means that by the end of the year they’ll have added and dropped support for Firefox 4.0. In a year or so when IE10 comes out then IE8 will be discontinued, and that will mean the end of XP support for all IE users. From a business standpoint, this would be a very good thing because IE and Safari on XP, and the current default browsers on all Android based devices lack of Server Name Indication means that every Web site needs to be hosted on their own dedicated IP address and thus drives up costs. With IPv4 basically being exhausted and IPv6 adoption at a slow pace not needing a separate IP for every site supporting SSL would allow more sites to be easily hosted securely.
This post was originally published as Google on Modern Browser Support for The BrandBuilder Company.
Published on 2 Jun 2011 at 1:38 pm.
Comments Off on Third Party Mobile Browsers – part 3: NetFront Life.
Filed under Mobile.
This is the third in a series of posts on interesting third party browsers for the mobile Web. Read part 1: Opera Mini, and part 2: Opera Mobile.
Moving away from Opera we now begin to look at some of the other active mobile browsers on the market. The NetFront Life browser from ACCESS Co. is an interesting little browser on the Android market. This browser represents 2.87% of the worldwide mobile market with 1.36% of the north american market share, so it’s worth at least checking out. Unlike Opera, this browser uses your phone’s HTML rendering engine so rendering wise it is the same as the stock browser on the device. This is useful knowledge for testing support, and means that its features are what make it stand out from the stock browser on your system. And standout it does with an impressive feature set worth checking out.
NetFront Life host a number of cool features. Features such as the unified navigation (sort of like Opera Speed dial) and visual page loading are pretty interesting (in fact, I’d be surprised if the visual page loading isn’t picked up by other browsers), and web clipping/scrapbooking with Everynote integration might be useful for you if you’re in to that type of thing. But the killer feature about this browser is the tilt mode.
NetFront Life’s tilt mode
Any mobile browser worth their salt supports an alternate view of displaying a Web page in both portrait and landscape mode. NetFront Life goes the extra mile and introduced a third, tilt mode. This tilt mode kicks in while you’re rotating the phone from one mode to another and places the site on a diagonal. This is useful if you’re in an odd position and can’t quite get it one way or the other. It does take some getting used to, and admittedly some layouts don’t do too well in this mode, but it is a very noticeable feature that makes the NetFront Life browser standout among its peers.
This post was originally published as Third Party Mobile Browsers – part 3: NetFront Life for The BrandBuilder Company.
Published on 26 May 2011 at 12:53 pm.
1 Comment.
Filed under Mobile.
This is the second in a series of posts on interesting third party browsers for the mobile Web. Read part 1: Opera Mini.
Last time I discussed Opera’s primary mobile offering when I talked about their Opera Mini product. Today I will be focusing on Opera’s second offering, the Opera Mobile browser. But first I will mention that Opera Mini 6 has been released for iOS since the time of my last writing. Opera Mini 6 was already available for the Android platform.
Opera Mobile
Opera Mobile is the Opera Mini product taken to the next level. It is a version of the desktop Web browser that has been shrunk down for smartphones. It does not cater to the low power crowd. While it does offer compression the page level compression (Opera Turbo) that was mentioned in the previous option, this is not the default. The default setting is to run a Web page in a native browser. This means your page looks better. It has better support for JavaScript. It really does behave just like you would expect out of a mobile browser. What’s interesting is that turning on Opera Turbo does NOT change the rendering to match up what you would see on Opera Mini (or at least it did not in my case).
Opera Mobile has support for some HTML5 features, and can even run Adobe Flash on the Android platform. Opera Mobile is available for Android, Symbian/S60, Windows Mobile, Meego, and Maemo. Unfortunately, because it is a full fledged Web browser and not just a viewer like Opera Mini, the Opera Mobile browser is against Apple’s Terms of Service and will not be available for iOS.
Because it is more powerful than Opera Mini, the support to drawback list from last time is a bit more in favor of the ‘support’ column.
Support:
- The aforementioned compressed page using Opera Turbo so users get pages faster and uses less data (saving users time and money)
- Quick access to your favorite bookmarks with Opera Speed Dial
- Save pages for offline viewing
- A cursor (if your device comes with something that can be used as such, like the D-pad on the Motorola Droid)
- SSL encryption with Server Name Identification (making it more secure than the browser on all Android based devices currently on the market)
- Support for CSS media queries allowing you to style the page in both portrait and landscape mode (still not perfect, but much better than on Opera Mini — though this may just be my device)
- Much better CSS support, including italic text, rounded corners (border-radius), drop shadows (box-shadow), and CSS transitions
- Decent JavaScript support, including touch events (not available in Opera Mini)
- HTML5 video (depends upon the phone — H.264 on all, and WebM for Android 2.3+)
Drawbacks:
- Higher power usage compared to the Opera Mini browser, but not necessarily more than the device’s default browser
- No ability to install plug-ins, with the exception of Flash on Android devices
This post was originally published as Third Party Mobile Browsers – part 2: Opera Mobile for The BrandBuilder Company.
Published on 25 May 2011 at 2:55 pm.
Comments Off on Filtering your Twitter feed on LinkedIn.
Filed under Social Media.
If you’re like me you like having most of your social media content filter some type of message to Twitter. My belief is that Twitter is all about what you are doing at that very moment, so if you’re posting something to Facebook or Foursquare then that content should automatically get posted on Twitter as well.
But LinkedIn is a different creature all together. Yes, there are times that I liked having stuff from Twitter going to LinkedIn, but that wasn’t always the case. I really don’t think anyone looking at my LinkedIn feed cares about my Foursquare check-ins. Begrudgingly I accepted this when I first set up the connection.
Then the other day I looked at the settings for Twitter on LinkedIn and I saw that they have added a Sharing Tweets filter. You can access this by logging in to your profile and then clicking the Settings option on the drop down on your left under your name. On the Profile tab at the bottom there is a section titled Settings which has a link under it titled Manage your Twitter settings. Clicking on this you can the box under Sharing Tweets that will filter out all tweets that do not have the hashtags #li or #in in them. Very useful! Now I can send Foursquare check-ins to Twitter without them showing up on my LinkedIn feed. I love the control. 🙂
This post was originally published as Filtering your Twitter feed on LinkedIn for The BrandBuilder Company.
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