As mobile OSes — especially iPhone and Android — wax and wane, the pressing question remains: How do you choose which mobile devices to develop for and which devices to omit from your roadmap?Cross-OS platforms for mobile development on the whole are not yet a completely perfect, have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too solution, but many of them offer an excellent alternative to ignoring one mobile OS in favor of another or, perhaps worse, burning serious resources to develop for two or three platforms at once.
Hooray! Embedded YouTube videos are beginning to work across iOS devices. How? YouTube announced they are experimenting with new embed code that uses the iFrame interface to switch between Flash and HTML5 versions of the video. The code will sense the type of device you're on so, as en example, if you're on your PC and you want to play 'double rainbow' you'll get the video in Flash. If you are on your amazing flash-proof iPad, the new code with kick into gear and load up your favorite internet memes using HTML5. If you are on a new version of Firefox and its available, it will kick in WebM video.
For instance, to embed the above video, you need to use this code:
Here are the downsides to this awesome innovation. Videos that are ad supported won't work on HTML5, website managers will have to manually adjust the video code (don't adjust the player size!), and YouTube HTML5 will need to be enabled on your iOS device. OK, fanboys, you can go back to hating on Google now.
“Once you use it, you won’t know how you ever survived without it” is a well worn cliche, applied over the years to every new technological development or advancement in gadgetry made available to the masses. The mobile phone, the electric toothbrush, ceramic hair straighteners – every important discovery of the technological era has been tarred with this overused tagline.
And the reason why? Because it’s actually true, and none more so than when talking about iPhone apps. You could probably survive without them, and you have perhaps been doing so, but they just make things so much easier, and not just for restaurant bookings and finding directions.
With the dominance of Apple’s iPhone in the recent years, Google’s Android OS seems to have been left in its shadows. However, this is only because the iPhone was released long before any Android device. Nevertheless, as the popularity of Android grows (and its growth is staggering) so does its range of apps.
On large websites and websites with hierarchically arranged pages, breadcrumbs are a really great way for users to navigate around the web site. They are a type of secondary navigation scheme which indicates the exact location of a user on a website. They greatly improve the findability of a web site’s sections and pages.
Breadcrumbs, in the simplest form, are horizontally arranged text links separated by a greater than symbol (>). Using breadcrumbs on your website can be really beneficial. It provides a convenient way for users to navigate around the website and also allows users to establish their location on the website.
It provides an alternate way for users to navigate the website. For first-time visitors breadcrumbs can be a great way to entice them in exploring the website. Hence, it can be really effective in reducing the overall bounce rate of the website.
Form submission is one of the most used actions and double form submission is one of most occurred problems in web development. Rather than dealing with this problem server side, eating up your CPU process time, it is much easier and better to deal with this problem client side using JavaScript.
There’s a lot of buzz going around about HTML5. Big companies such as Apple are predicting that it’s the technology that will sign the death warrant of the popular Flash platform that powers a lot of rich internet apps and complex dynamic web components.
But what is HTML5, really? How will it change the jobs of web developers and web designers? Here are 15 web resources to help you on your quest in getting current about the impending technology that’s already being adopted by major web browsers and leveraged in large sites such as Google.
The explosion of mobile phones has made them a nearly constant companion for many people. It's only a natural an ever-present device would become a favorite note taking and ubiquitous capture tool. Today we look at five popular note taking tools.
App store analytics provider Distimo last week published its report for June 2010, and zoomed in on the pricing of mobile applications across a variety of platforms once more.
The startup found that more than half of mobile apps are priced below or equal to $2 in Android Market, Apple’s App Store for iPhone and iPad, Nokia’s Ovi Store and Palm’s App Catalog.
The team at LinkedIn has published video from my Mobile First! talk at the LinkedIn Tech Talk series, where I made the case for designing Web applications for mobile platforms before the desktop in order to take advantage of explosive growth, useful constraints, and innovative capabilities. I also outlined tips for designing with: multiple screen sizes and densities, touch gestures, location awareness, orientation changes, tight audio/video integration, and more.
