Thoughts

How do you browse the Internet?

Do you use a desktop browser, or a netbook, maybe a smartphone, what about an iPad, or possibly via your TV? The web is more accessible than it has ever been via a wider range of devices than you might imagine. This is great, but at the same time how does that impact on what your website looks like to those viewing it?

Most websites are designed to a fixed width to ensure that it looks perfect and works well in a standard desktop browser (used by traditionally by far the largest audience). If done well then it will look good on most modern monitors, which are set to a resolution at least 1024 pixels wide. However, how does it look on an iPad 2, which might be 1024 pixels wide in landscape mode, but is only 768 pixels wide in portrait mode, or more importantly with the growth of the smartphone market, a mobile browser (e.g. on the iPhone) which is maybe 320 pixels wide… do your visitors have to zoom in and out and scroll around the page for the content they want? (more…)

Whilst Flash has been an important element on the web for years, it appears the Adobe have now vindicated the late Steve Jobs (from Apple) in realising that it no longer has a future in mobile browsers.

Adobe have ceased development of the Flash plugin for mobiles and instead are focusing on Adobe AIR applicatons for mobiles.

Whilst I’ve never been a fan of excessive Flash use it definitely has had it’s purpose, but now with the move to HTML5 and mobile apps to deliver online content this move does make sense in the long run as far as Adobe are concerned. This comes as especially bad news for Android developers who have cited the lack of Flash in Apple mobile products as one of the main advantages of that platform.

It also signals that the use of Flash for desktop browsing is also on borrowed time so it’ll be exciting to see how smooth the transition is to the newer web standards.

Okay, the rumours were true and yesterday (April 8th 2010) Apple’s Steve Jobs announced the release of OS4 for iPhone (rolling out to iPod and iPad soon).

OS4 has 100 new user features, and the one that was most anticipated (at least by the marketing community) was the iAd mobile advertising platform.

Developers have been embedding single adverts in Apps for a while but this is obviosly limited. iAd works like Google AdSense and delivers appropriate adverts  into your App experience. iAd allows advertising to appear directly within iPhone Apps, without the need to be redirected to a website. (more…)

Okay, first things first we need to clarify that Internet Explorer (commonly known as IE) is a web browser made by Microsoft, and also that it’s currently on it’s 8th major release (i.e. IE8), with IE9 currently in Beta (as I write).

A brief History of Internet Explorer can be found on Wikipedia, which is very interesting reading (sic).

I’ve been designing websites since about 1994 so I’ve used every single version of IE and have seen it take over from the original Mosaic, fight off Netscape and now compete with Firefox as the browser of choice (with IE still accounting for over 60% of all browser usage, depending on which browser usage report you read). (more…)

Twitter has taken the country by storm and everyone seems to want to have a Twitter account, or more appropriately, everyone wants you to know that they have a Twitter account. The reality is that most people don’t utilise social media (such as Twitter and Facebook) in a structured manner with clear aims and objectives.

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