As companies struggle today with their mobile presence, they are often faced with the requirement of offering a “one-size-fits-all” approach or are forced to tailor their site for a few select devices. One alternative that’s making waves recently is an approach pioneered by Ethan Marcotte, called responsive web design. In short, responsive web design enables organizations to create beautiful user experiences that are optimized for a wide range of devices, while minimizing the need for costly device-specific development iterations. This approach breaks the constraints of the physical page and encourages designers to create designs that are dynamic and can reflow depending on size of the viewer’s screen.
Exploring Responsive Web Design
November 18th, 2011 by Andrea SimmonsApple’s Path to Become the First $1T Company
August 18th, 2011 by Vahe Kassardjian
A few months ago, USA Today speculated that Apple would become the first $1 trillion company. Earlier this week, Apple made great strides toward this milestone when it surged ahead of ExxonMobile Corp to capture the title of world’s most valuable company.
Whether Apple lives up to this prediction or not, it has already achieved what seemed impossible. The company saw a 300% increase in stock price in less than three years, in a very difficult economic climate. Today, Apple exceeds Microsoft in market capitalization ($213 Billion for MSFT vs $302 B for AAPL) although, just 14 years ago, Microsoft had to inject $150M into its bank account to keep from going out of business.
These facts are extremely unlikely and unpredictable, but don’t come as a surprise to anyone who has observed the last few decades with objectivity and, amongst other trends, paid attention to principles such as The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Read more on Apple’s Path to Become the First $1T Company…
A Hands-On Look at Adobe Edge
August 12th, 2011 by Kent Rahman
This week I had the chance to play around with the first preview release of Adobe Edge. Edge allows web designers and developers to create web standards based animation without doing any coding whatsoever. Reminiscent of the way in which Flash helped to open the world of web animation to designers from non-technical backgrounds, Edge stands poised to lower the barrier to entry into HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript animations. In an environment that has seen Flash become somewhat of a pariah, embracing the open web is a logical way forward for Adobe. While it’s still very early in development, Adobe has managed to do some impressive things with Edge, and releasing it this early demonstrates that they are serious about incorporating user feedback into future iterations. Now, let’s get under the hood… Read more on A Hands-On Look at Adobe Edge…
Why Won’t IE6 Die?
July 7th, 2011 by Nadine Husain
A few weeks ago, WordPress announced that it was dropping support for Internet Explorer 6. For now, this will only affect blog writers and publishers, but this could soon affect viewers and readers of these blogs as well.
WordPress is definitely not the first to make this kind of announcement. Google announced that it will not support IE6 when it makes new improvements to its YouTube, Gmail Notifier and Google Docs services. Facebook, White Pages, Digg and many more sites are also on-board.
Microsoft, the maker of IE6, has been actively promoting its website http://www.ie6countdown.com to encourage and explain why people should move away from the browser. IE6 is two-months short of its tenth birthday, making it a real relic in a technology landscape where new browser versions are announced every 3-4 months. In fact, trying to load most websites on IE6 will bring up a very intrusive graphic encouraging the user to upgrade. Read more on Why Won’t IE6 Die?…
Apple Backtracks on Subscription Model Requirements
June 20th, 2011 by Jason MacDonald
The other week, Apple announced that with the upcoming changes to iOS that it would also reverse some of its stringent requirements for in-app subscription handling. Specifically, Apple removed the requirement that all subscriptions available through Apple be the same price or less expensive than ones offered outside the application. It also now allows publishers to once again offer external subscriptions, even if they don’t offer them in-app as well.
This doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me, as I never really understood Apple’s reasoning for forcing subscription model changes. Asking publishers to change a successful multi-channel subscription model just wasn’t realistic, even for Apple. This to me is parallel to Apple’s initial requirement that all iPhone applications had to be natively built using Objective C. The company soon realized that while this approach would protect the application quality and user experience, that the trade-offs were too high in terms of limited developer adoption. They simply needed to open up additional options for building iPhone applications to ensure that there were compelling titles available to sell the hardware. Read more on Apple Backtracks on Subscription Model Requirements…
Delivering Web Experience Management
June 1st, 2011 by Andrea Simmons
As you may have heard, we officially became an Adobe Solutions Partner last month. As a long-time Adobe friend and partner, this was a logical next step for us. However, the real catalyst behind us joining this program was Adobe’s new Web Experience Management (WEM) platform, CQ5. Over the past few years, we’ve worked with a number of clients to build websites and help them create their digital presence. Until recently, we’ve mainly leveraged open source technology (such as Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress) as the foundation and built bridges to other solutions or we’ve done customizations to create the desired experience. For some of our clients, the open source web content management systems (CMSs) have been great and have met all their requirements. But for others, we started to run into some walls and barriers where we were stretching the technology to its limit.
Cross-Platform Mobile Development – Which is the Right Path?
April 15th, 2011 by Laurent Brigaut
With the announced availability of the Blackberry Playbook, the growing popularity of Android devices, and the traction that Windows Phone 7 is seeing, is it’s getting more challenging for businesses to develop a mobile applications strategy.
There are several different paths to building a mobile application, including:
- Native Development: This involves building a separate application for each platform using the recommended native language.
- Titanium Appcelerator: An open source platform that allows developers to build mobile apps in Javascript and to package them for delivery on different platforms (Mac, Windows, mobile).
- Open Plug: A software developer kit (SDK) to build cross-platform native mobile apps using ActionScript/Flex.
- QT: A cross-platform application and UI framework that enables developers to build once and deploy across many platforms.
Read more on Cross-Platform Mobile Development – Which is the Right Path?…
What You Need to Know about Google’s Recent Algorithm Changes
March 11th, 2011 by Andrea Simmons
Late last month, Google made a major change to its search algorithm. The intention was to improve the rankings for high-quality sites and push down results for lower quality ones. Initial statements from Google said that about 12% of all search queries would be affected, but now, just a few weeks later, hundreds of businesses are up in arms that they are being unfairly targeted.
Google’s goal was to improve the relevance of search results and reduce rankings for sites that simply scrape content from others and pool it together to boost their rankings. These sites, dubbed as “content farms”, use other people’s keyword-loaded content to boost their rankings and draw in visitors, which in turn, drives up their advertising dollars.
What does this mean for your business? There are two main groups affected – those that aggregate or reuse content from other sites and those that rely heavily on article submissions as part of their marketing mix. If you aggregate content from other sites, and don’t supplement this with original content, your search rankings with Google will fall. Likewise if you submit articles to sites like eHow, EzineArticles and Associated Content as a way to boost site referrals, you will likely see a big drop in referral traffic as these sites are seeing significant drops in their own traffic due to Google’s change. Read more on What You Need to Know about Google’s Recent Algorithm Changes…
The Book is Not Dead and Other Take Home Messages from TOC 2011
February 23rd, 2011 by Jason MacDonald
Last week I spent a busy couple of days connecting with the publishing community at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York. It’s been a few years since we’ve attended this show, but with our recent surge in publishing related projects, I felt it was a great venue to hear what others were doing and what emerging trends we should keep our eyes on.
Read more on The Book is Not Dead and Other Take Home Messages from TOC 2011…
Competition Heating Up in the Tablet Market
February 16th, 2011 by Andrea Simmons
What a busy few weeks for major announcements in the tablet market. First Google announced Honeycomb, the latest version of its OS for mobile devices. Honeycomb is specifically designed to run on the larger tablet-sized screens adding a new level of support for multi-tasking, more elegant notifications, better home screen customization with a new 3D experience, and redesigned widgets. The OS also delivers big changes for the web browser, including tabbed browsing, auto-fill forms, bookmark synching with Google Chrome, and incognito mode for private browsing. The launch of Honeycomb makes the huge influx of Android-based tablets even more competitive against the iPad by adding the last layer of support and the necessary refinements to the OS to make it work well on tablets.
Just this morning, Google announced at the World Mobile Congress in Spain, that Android 2.4 will combine both Gingerbread and Honeycomb into a single OS. This simplifies things for users and makes for a more harmonious experience for Android users across their phones and tablets. Read more on Competition Heating Up in the Tablet Market…
