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Wednesday, 6 January 2010
This Week in Technology
I seem to have spent the last hour doing little else than sharing links to BBC News articles on technology. There seems to be so much going on at the moment, so I thought I'd write a short post to mention a few of them.Dolphin Browser for Android
I just came across this app tonight (free from the Android market) - it's an alternative browser for Android phones which has more advanced features than the standard one, such as tabs, easy sharing, select text and so on. The standard browser is ok (it isn't Google Chrome, which isn't available for Android as yet, but should be in time - it uses the Webkit rendering engine - the same as Chrome and Safari - which is the best one of them all) but I find it rather limited as although you can have multiple windows open at once, they aren't displayed as tabs and only the one in focus can load at any time. Apart from this feature being available in the Dolphin Browser, it also has a number of other functions I wouldn't have thought to ask for.
It has a fantastic share function which allows you to post the current page to Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Gmail, Text Message (all by default) or a particular app you have installed which supports sharing. It also supports gestures which you can set to perform a range of actions - so that, say, swiping an L-shape on the screen with your finger goes forward in the browser, or a backwards L-shape to go back, N to open a new tab, and so on. You can personalise them to do whatever you like.
Anyway, I've only opened it once to see whether it was any good, so I'm bound to find many more uses for it. I have Opera installed too, but I don't really like it and only use it if I have a problem with the standard browser.
Google Nexus One Mobile
This week, Google released their first mobile handset (although I'm not sure what makes it more Google than the first few handsets with the Android operating system). It's been released in the U.S. as far as I am aware, and is due for release in Europe in the second quarter of 2010. It's set to be made available on Vodafone in the UK, which is great news for me as I'm with them now (with my HTC Magic Android phone) and wish to stay with them. I've got about another 9 months before I'm due for an upgrade, so I'll have to see what's on the market then - maybe the Nexus One will still be the main contender, maybe something newer.
Anyway, it looks great - pretty much the same as my HTC Magic, with a few more good points to it, like the inclusion of a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack! Oh and apparently Google Maps comes with voice directions, telling you where to go while showing you 3D imagery from Street View! That's even better than a SatNav!
Firefox for Mobile
Apparently Mozilla have been building a mobile app for Nokia smartphones, which they will roll out to other smartphones in due course - including Android, but not the iPhone, as Apple are being very restrictive of what they will allow to get on to their devices (like Google Voice & Adobe Flash - and similarly, they restrict iTunes from synchronising with any device other than an iPod or iPhone, so users can't sync music from iTunes to a non-Apple mp3 player or mobile phone). Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what Firefox is like on a smartphone, but for now I'm happy with my recent discovery of the aforementioned Dolphin Browser.
Google Chrome OS Demo Video
The Google Chrome OS was announced in July of last year, and I'm terribly excited about it - as for one I love the Chrome browser, another I love the idea of a free & open source browser made by Google, also my mobile phone is powered by Google's mobile operating system Android (also free & open source), and I simply love everything about Google and its ways of furthering technology and its applications in society.
Anyway, today I caught an article on BBC News which showed a demo video of the Chrome OS in action - and straight away I could see how they had thought about extending the browser into a whole computer system, and even at a glance I knew I could see how it worked because it was purely simple and completely logical. The shot I saw had the look of the Chrome browser, with two small tabs to the left of where the browser tabs are positioned, only an icon's width: one containing the Chrome OS logo; the other containing the Gmail logo. It was logical that the Gmail icon would be a permanent tab containing the user's email, and the Chrome OS icon would drop down to show other applications to run, such as documents, pictures and so on, similar to the Start menu in Windows, or the similar variants in other systems such as Mac OS and various versions of Linux, but simple and minimalist. This was demonstrated in the video.
Google Homepage Celebrates Gravity for Newton's Birthday
If you were to go to the Google homepage on Monday, you would have seen an apple tree draped along the top of the lettering in the logo. Upon the page loading (it now loads only the logo and the search & I'm Feeling Lucky buttons until the user moves the mouse, when the other links and information fades in to view), an apple literally fell from the tree towards the bottom of the page. Google often celebrates the life and achievements of historical characters such as scientists, mathematicians, authors and inventors (as well as other celebrations such as the olympics, Christmas, Easter, and so on), but this is the first time the logo, however imaginative and brilliant, has ever been animated.
Labels: Android, Computers, Firefox, Google, Internet
Posted by Ben Nuttall at 03:29 
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
Version 3 & Problems with IE
I decided I needed a new website template so I made one. Much better, don't you think?It's compliant with W3C Web Standards (XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1) and I'm even using PHP to render it using Server Side Includes, as well as a PHP email form on the contact page. I've learned so much these last few months; a great resource for web developers (beginner/intermediate/expert) is W3Schools - it gives you all the information you need about every single tag, every single CSS style, how each browser renders each element, and which tags and attributes are permitted under each of the levels of markup (HTML/XHTML and Frameset/Transitional/Strict).
Version 3:
Versions 1 & 2:
(N.B. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the international standards organization for the World Wide Web, founded and headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA who invented the internet at CERN and is now a professor at MIT, probably the best institute for technology in the world)
Of all the people who converted to Firefox from Internet Explorer (IE), most of them know it's better but they don't really know why. One of the main reasons it's better is that IE does not comply with official W3C standards - it literally just ignores how things are supposed to work, and does it its own way. Firefox, Chrome and the other browsers all comply which means that when someone designs a website following the proper standards, as they're supposed to, it will look fine in Firefox, Chrome, or whatever they're using, but then they open it in IE, some of the elements will be displayed differently - something small like the spacing following a set of a bullet points - in the good browsers there will be a reasonable space immediately after a set of bullets, but in IE there will be no space. This can be resolved by adding the space manually using CSS, but that will double the space shown in the good browsers - and why should they suffer because of IE's incompetence? It should also be noted that if a website's code is valid, it will generally load faster, run smoother on all browsers and systems, and (along with other factors) increase a site's search engine optimisation.
One of the more famous bugs in IE is known as the Internet Explorer box model bug. This is a problem with the way IE interprets the markup and style differently to the W3C standards; when you set the width of an element, and then apply a margin, some padding and a border, IE will subtract the width of the border and padding and the content width will be whatever is left, whereas the W3C way is to declare the width, then add the padding, border and margin to it. IE's way means that if the sum of the margin, border and padding is greater than half of the width (half because it counts on both sides so can be doubled) then you are left with a negative width, which is impossible, so it just disappears! The diagram below should explain this clearer:
It's things like this that make web design much harder than it should be, because although everyone should use good browsers like Chrome or Firefox (or even Safari), unfortunately the web browser market is clearly dominated by IE with 66% because most people know no other way because they are trapped in Microsoft land. That will change, eventually, I hope.
Labels: Computers, Featured, Firefox, Google, Internet, Web Design
Posted by Ben Nuttall at 19:00
Thursday, 3 July 2008
New Everything
- New computer stuff from Ebuyer!- New blog template (in fact an entirely new website) in the making!
- New Firefox out last week! Version 3!
The night before last I bought some stuff from Ebuyer:
- Hannspree XM New York 19" TFT widescreen Monitor
- Western Digital Elements 500GB External Hard Drive
- Extra Value All-In-One Card Reader
- Labtec USB Webcam
And they all arrived this morning at 9:00! I got free delivery and they were here within 36 hours! How amazing is that? I first saw the external hard drive in the ebuyer edeals email (I get it every week and take a look for good deals on things I want/need but have never gone ahead and bought anything from looking at the email) because it was such a vast amount of storage at such a low price! Half a terabyte (500GB) for £50! Compared with the last external hard drive I bought for £60 in 2006 (60GB), with both storage/cost ratios measured in gigabytes per pound (GB£-1).
Therefore, based on my purchases:
In 2006 the cost of external hard drives was 1GB per pound = 1GB£-1
In 2008 the cost of external hard drives is 10GB per pound = 10GB£-1
To measure the rate of change in cost over time, we can use a simple calculation used to measure acceleration, which similarly is the measure of changing speed over time:
Acceleration = (Final Speed - Initial Speed)/Time
a=(v-u)/t
Therefore, the rate of change in cost over two years is (10-1)/2 = 4.5
So we can say that, based on my purchases, the ratio of storage to cost in external hard drives is falling at a rate of 4.5GB per pound per year! (That one's for you, Woollard!)
Anyway, I thought I'd treat myself to a sexy new monitor and get rid of the bulky old one that takes up half the desk. I'm well pleased with it already - I have a huge resolution (1600 x 1024) and I can now watch 16:9 films without huge black space at the top and bottom!
I thought it was about time I bought a webcam, especially seeing as I'll be moving to Manchester soon and won't be seeing much of my friends - and it was dirt cheap, like the cardreader.
So here's my setup showing my sparkly new monitor, webcam blue-tacked to the edge, my awesome mouse (the Logitech MX 1000 Laser Cordless Mouse - also bought from Ebuyer):
You can see a preview of my new blog template on my monitor in that photo! I've been working on it today and I overcame the problem I was having last week with it not rendering properly in Internet Explorer. Seriously, if it wasn't for IE, web development would be a walk in the park! This is one of the many reasons why everyone in the world should use Firefox! There was a new version out last week and there have been some amazing changes and really useful additions! If you don't use Firefox, why not give it a try and see for yourself what all the fuss is about? It's safer, faster and the all-round better choice when it comes to doing everyday tasks on the web! Download it now! http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/
I'm hoping to have the new site up some time next week. Watch this space! It might be a bit bluer next time!
Labels: Computers, Firefox, Maths
Posted by Ben Nuttall at 12:12
