As we know, the Motorola Corporation refused to sell its mobile unit. Now the management of this American electronic giant is betting on Android, an operating system developed by Google. Motorola plans to release from 20 to 30 new models of smartphones during the year 2010. And all these devices will use the Android OS. This information was reported to Electronista.com by some unnamed top-manager of the company. So Electronista, a popular online source of news about such mobile application platforms as Android, iPhone, BlackBerry etc., published this informal announcement without delay.
As for other “simple” Motorola cell phones, new models will use either the Qualcomm Brew platform or a special mobile platform that was developed by Motorola.
Now the company has three working groups of mobile developers and all their activities are somehow connected with the Android platform. First group works in the U.S., the second one works in China and the third one applies its ideas in industry in Korea. Their results can be seen in practice. Motorola has already announced four devices based on Android: Cliq, Droid, Backflip and Motoroi. But soon companies that work at application development for Android will offer their mobile soft not only for these four models.
Steve Wozniak admitted in his last interview for NBC Bay Area, that he is a happy owner of the Google Nexus One smartphone. He so wanted to test this new gadget that bought it on the first day of Nexus One sales. Moreover, according to Mr. Wozniak’s words, now Google phone is one of his most favorite gadgets. Although he is still using iPhone as the main phone for communication.
Wozniak said that he regularly buys new models of mobile phones from different popular manufacturers. Besides Google Nexus One he used phones based on such mobile application platforms as iPhone and BlackBerry, also he tested the Motorola Droid Phone.
RIM products caused the most serious complaints from Apple founder. Mr. Wozniak has been using BlackBerry phone for a few months and as a result he has remained dissatisfied with it. And as for Droid and Nexus (which mobile apps were developed on Android OS), he considers them as excellent phones, stressing, however, that not every phone with the Android platform on board will be as good as Nexus One.
Most users do not scroll… or they do, nevertheless
According to the research conducted by Jakob Nielsen, a famous usability consultant helping thousands of web developers all over the world, only 23% of users scroll web pages visiting a site for the first time. It means that 77% of users will not scroll web pages; they will look through only the upper part of websites. These data indicate how it is important to show the most significant information on the visible part of a web page. Nevertheless it does not mean that you should put excessive amount of information in the website header.
Basecamp shows how excellently can be used space of the main web page. It contains a great screenshot, subtitle, proposals, call to action, list of customers and video at the top of the site (height = 768 pixels).
So, those who working at web application development and custom programming services should put only key data on the home page:
1. A site name.
2. Your unique value proposition.
3. Navigation or links to the most important pages.
However, user habits change constantly. Recent studies show that in some situations users are ready to scroll to the bottom of the page with pleasure. Also web development companies should take into account a great variety of displays with high resolution.
If to consider the near future of mobile application development (2-3 years ahead) Android OS seems to be a very interesting option. Why? Because number of devices based on this OS is growing before our eyes. Such a giant as Google develops and supports this system, so it guarantees that Android won’t be lost and won’t be forgotten.
Analysts forecast that Android devices will overtake iPhone and even Windows Mobile in 1012-1013 years. Also, we must note that Google begins to inform its users (we mean users of Android phones) that mobile software will be provided in both variants, free and paid, as well as the company expands the list of countries, where can be accepted payment, also it expands payment options for users. These steps will have a positive influence on turnover of those companies who provide application development for Android (developed mobile apps –> money).
Google Android wins our hearts by its open source: any developer can write apps without any licensing applications. All development tools are also available in source code and free.
All mobile apps developers always face choice of the right platform. The existing abundance of mobile operating systems can easily throw you into confusion. Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian — which of them is the best one? And moreover we should take into account a large number of the applications and frameworks developed by manufacturers of cell phones, communicators, PDAs and smartphones. Let’s come to know the particulars of all this mobile stuff.
First of all, a developer should define the main objectives:
professional development of commercial mobile software or amateur development (open source);
target audience;
competitive abilities and competitive environment.
All this seems rather complicated. With relation to monetization (commercial development) it’s better to choose such leading OSes as iPhone and Windows Mobile. This variant has some significant pluses. For example: a large number of users who are ready to pay for their software. But at the same time you will have to compete with more than 200,000 developed mobile applications for Windows Mobile and iPhone. And as is well known Apple follows a quite tough policy of apps submission. That is why it may take a long time before your new program is approved and appears in App Store.
The number of Apple iPhone users has exceeded the number of sold mobile devices based on Windows Mobile operating system.
According to a study conducted by the ComScore company, Apple iPhone smartphones are very popular among Americans older than 13 years. Moreover, sales of Apple phones in the U.S. have overtaken the popularity of mobile devices with Windows Mobile OS for the first time in the U.S. market. ComScore experts get the following results in October of this year:
8.9 million of iPhone users vs 7.1 million of WM-smartphones.
This ‘’alignment of forces’’ should be taken into account by mobile software development companies. Especially because such a result can’t be considered as fortuitousness. The number of Apple smartphone lovers is growing at high rates this year:
But a top position hasn’t changed. The Research In Motion company with its BlackBerry remains as undisputed leader in the U.S. smartphone market. The number of RIM customers has reached 14.9 million in October. So application development for BlackBerry can be considered as strategic direction for many software companies.
Web development services is inseparably linked with online business. So our next two projects are connected with e-trade. Today no one doubts the effectiveness of online trading. Sales through the Internet shopping minimize costs, allows to enter new markets, and attract customers.
But before to make profit from website you must launch your customized online store. And this process will be related to the right choice of CMS. It is cheaper and safer to use a ready-made software for the most common and typical tasks of online business.
The best solutions among open source e-commerce systems are Magento and X-Cart. These products help to create e-shops and obtain multifunctional, high-tech sites for easy sales. Moreover they can be managed without special knowledge in programming. These are ready web sites for electronic commerce. You can add additional features or modify design according to the peculiarities of any specific business.
With the help of Oxagile software programming our customers obtained new online stores with pleasant look-and-feel:
An X-Cart based online store for a Canadian company that offers furniture, wall decor and home accessories.
As a result, we have gained experience in ecommerce and online business. So now we can easily attract more visitors and raise product sells for our customers.
What determines success in web development? Component of success are professional design, attention to customer’s needs and the correct choice of CMS. We have made certain of it from our own experience.
So we want to share the results of successful web development based on open source CMSes for our clients from USA and the Netherlands.
Let’s start with our favorite CMS Joomla. By the way, why so many webmasters choose this CMS for their projects? The answer consists of one word, and this word means “accessibility”. So accessibility has made CMS Joomla such a popular one. It is absolutely free of charge. But it does not mean poor quality or lack of functionality. In reality Joomla has incredible functionality and it was made as a software product of high quality.
So Oxagile has created two new fully functional websites and expanded its company portfolio:
CMS Joomla is very logical and consistent, developing software projects you can see it at all levels, starting with installation and finishing with text editing. It simplifies your understanding of how to work with site content.
1. Use DOCTYPE Declarations
It is always better to indicate doctype in the header of each html page: <! DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “- / / W3C / / DTD HTML 4.01 / / EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>
For XHTML: <! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “- / / W3C / / DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict / / EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
Don’t write any other characters before doctype (no gaps, no line breaks). Otherwise you will get strange fields in body and html tags.
2. Set “position: relative”
Using this hack you can cure the vast number of problems with IE6 (for example, invisible or weird positioned blocks).
3. Use “display: inline” for floating blocks
Floating elements with margin can cause a well known bug in IE6, we mean double margin.
For example, indicating the left margin as 5px we get 10px as a result. “Display: inline” fixes this problem and your CSS becomes valid.
4. Set “hasLayout” in properties
Many rendering bugs in IE6 (and also in IE7) can be corrected by “hasLayout”. This is an internal feature of IE, which indicates how content must be aligned and positioned (relatively to other elements). This feature can be also used when you need to transform line item (e.g., <a>) into block or when transparency effects are needed.
The easiest way to indicate this property is to set height or width (zoom can also be used, but it’s not a standard CSS). It is recommended to specify the actual size of your block, and if it’s not possible (dynamically changing height or width), you can do this: “height: 1px”.
5. Fixing the repeated characters bug
This bag appears in lists and duplicates the last 1-3 signs of the last item in the list. There are some ways to fix it:
Use “display: inline” for floating elements;
Set “margin-right:-3px” for the last item in the list;
Use conditional comments;
Add an empty div in the last item of the list (sometimes, you must set “width: 90%” or other appropriate width).
6. Use advanced CSS selectors for other browsers and standard selectors without percentage values for IE Or you can just use “!important”.
Example #1:
# element (
min-height: 40em;
height: 40em;
)
/ * Ignored by IE6 * /
# element [id] (
height: auto;
)
Example #2:
body (
margin: 4% 0! important;
margin: 40px 0; / * IE6 only * /
)
Oxagile team is pleased to inform you that WordPress, one of our favorite content management systems has won CMS Award 2009. It’s not a surprise for us, WordPress-as-a-CMS provides great possibilities for themes, templates, widgets and modules development. This victory is a result of hard work, thousands of web designers and programmers created numerous additions for this product, developed high-quality and easy-to-use sites (from simple personal sites and web blogs to corporate portals and even online shops!).
So, here’s the distribution of prizes for Overall Best Open Source CMS Award:
The next category is Hall of Fame, it’s a special place for winners of the last years. Drupal and Joomla were the best systems in the year of 2008. This year balance of power remains the same:
• the 1st place – Drupal
• the 2nd place – Joomla
And at last we present you the Best Open Source PHP CMSes:
the 1st place – Drupal
the 2nd place – WordPress
the 3rd place – Joomla
It’s a strange fact that the main category has only two prizes: the second place was decided between two “competitors”, and the third place wasn’t given to anyone. We suppose that it was done in order to save money because organizers spent a lot on prize fund (Drupal took more than anyone :)).
So we congratulate all the winners and wish good luck to all defeated systems.
1. Use DOCTYPE Declarations
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