Colt Tech

Archive for April, 2009

Cell phones are definitely not just for talking anymore. If a phone doesn’t have a camera, the ability to text, the internet, and a pluthra of other features most people won’t give it the time of day. There are two major names out there that take these features to the extreme. They are Apple’s iPhone and Research in Motion’s Blackberry. These so-called smart phones have the latest technology and have become quite popular. I will be focusing on the Blackberry more-so than the iPhone, because I own an Blackberry, and not an iPhone.

The most frequent question I get, and I’m sure other smart-phone users get is “do you really need a phone that can do all of that?!” I used to think the same thing when I had a regular cell phone, but after owning a Blackberry my answer would have to be no, I don’t need a phone that has all these features. With that being said I have used every single feature at least once, and they are extremely handy.

The one feature that I have become somewhat addicted to is how easy it is to check and send emails from my phone. This is the biggest selling point for the Blackberry, and also why they are so loved in the corporate world. All you need to do is set up the email account(s) you want to be linked to your phone, and that’s it - from now on, all emails sent to and from a particular email will now also go to your phone. I think it would be fare to say that in an environment where email is the primary mode of communication this feature is pretty fantastic. The full qwerty (qwerty is just an acronym for a keyboard that has an individual key for each letter) makes emailing and texting that much easier.

There is also something called Blackberry messenger. When you buy a Blackberry you get a special pin. You can give this pin to other people and send each other what are essentially text messages. I don’t ever use it, but it’s a nice novelty feature none-the-less.

Another feature that is fairly subtle but incredibly convenient is the small red light at the top right of the phone. When ever there is a message waiting for you it blinks red. This is probably my favorite feature of the phone.

It also has an mp3 player, camera/video camera built in. This is where the Blackberry falls behind the iPhone (a bit). IPhone’s come with either 8 or 16GB of memory where as the Blackberry only comes with 750ish MB of internal memory. So, iPhones have 10-20x more base memory than Blackberries which is pretty significant if you take a lot of photos or use the phone for an mp3 player as well. This is easily remedied by going to amazon and doing a search for “Blackberry memory” and purchasing an 8GB memory chip for around 18$. If you don’t plan on using it for an mp3 player and/or don’t take a lot of pictures I would still suggest getting a small 2GB memory chip since the internal memory gets used up pretty fast.

The camera on it is decent. It’s a 2 megapixel camera that has 1x,2x, and 3x zoom options, flash, geotagging, and the ability to select the picture resolution (1600×1200, 800×600 and  a few others). It can also be converted into a mini-video camera as well. They’re decent quality, but I would still have a real digital camera for anything half way serious.

The iPhone and Blackberry both are able to browse the Internet in full HTML. I don’t really use this feature all that much. It’s incredibly nice when waiting in the airport or for the bus/subway. Pages load relatively fast, especially if you have wi-fi or 3g activated. The only drawback is that a lot of sites have flash animation or java and this causes the phone to have some small hiccups since it can’t render that content.

I also have to talk about the Google Maps addon for the phone. Every single person with a Blackberry should have this. It’s also free. It works exactly like Google Maps on a computer, but it’s right there on your phone.

There are also some fantastic communities out there for the Blackberry as well. Crackberry.com has a really great website with tutorials, applications, wallpapers and tons of other goodies.

If you haven’t ever used an smartphone, I would suggest stopping in to your local AT&T, Verizon, or mobile carrier store and goofing around with one for a little while.

My next post will most likely be about some computer hardware and overclocking. Stay tuned!

I will preface this blog by saying that I am a Firefox user. So my opinion might be slightly biased.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there are essentially four major market share holders as far as web browsers are concerned. The largest is Microsoft with Internet Explorer, followed by Mozilla’s Firefox, then Mac’s Safari, and now Google Chrome is making an appearance. The first stable public release was on December 11th, 2008. It’s only been around for 5 months, so there are still some bugs that need to be worked out - more on that later. It comes with the (now) pretty standard feature of tabbed browsing. Another feature is what Google refers to as “crash control” which essentially keeps your other browser windows open even if one stops working - I have yet to actually experience this, thankfully. It also has a fairly neat feature called “incognito mode.”

First, a bit on tabbed browsing. To open a new tab all you need to do is hit Ctrl+t, and a new, blank window will open up. If you like to point and click, there is a small + near the top left of the screen - (left) click it and a new tab will open. You can click and drag to rearrange the order the tabs appear as well. As I said earlier, this feature is pretty standard on all web browsers now, and is incredibly handy. It is really quite handy for comparing prices between different online stores, doing research, and a multitude of other things.

One of the more unique things Chrome brings to the table is the fact that all the tabs are run independently of each other. Where as in Firefox and IE, and I believe Safari, they are all run on one instance of the web browser. What this means is that if one of the tabs stops working, the other ones will end up closing as well. This can be pretty annoying, especially if you have a lot of tabs open at once. Now, in Google Chrome, you don’t need to worry about this, because only that one window will be shut - leaving the rest open and safe. As I said before I haven’t actually had this happen (yet), but in any case it’s a neat feature.

Chrome also sports something called “incognito mode.” This prevents any information from the current browsing session from being saved in Chrome. So if you are browsing http://colt-tech.com the next time you open up Chrome, that site will not be saved in your history. I can see this being helpful on public computers, at work/in the office, or on something like a laptop. But, it also is going to make it kind of hard for parents to monitor what sites their children are going to. If there is a feature to disable “incognito mode” I haven’t found it - if there isn’t, it should be added.

It also has some developer features such as a properties inspector, which is similar to Firefox’s addon Firebug. Having this built into the browser is pretty handy, especially for a web designer and developer such as myself. It also comes with the standard page source viewer as well.

If you are planning on giving Chrome a try, it will also import all your bookmarks for you, so there is no need to worry about that. It will also import usernames/passwords as well.

Now, for the bad. There are some pretty annoying bugs still. The most obvious one is when clicking on an RSS feed to add it, all you are given is a page with a ton of text. I have tried to add an RSS feed from quite a few different sites, and have been unsuccessful on each attempt. The second “issue” is that it doesn’t seem to be very much faster than Firefox when browsing. I have my Firefox loaded down with quite a few addons, and I don’t really see any delta in performance. Note: this is an un-scientific observation. The final thing that is slightly annoying is the lack of addons for Chrome. For most people though, this won’t matter at all though.

Overall, I would give Chrome a B+. The overall experience it gives is pleasant, and relatively error free. I would easily suggest using Chrome over Internet Explorer. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Chrome starts to rival Firefox in a few years.

If you want to try Chrome out, you can get it here.

I just came across this incredible program by Adobe that allows students and faculty to get a free registration code for Adobe Flex Professional. The link can be found here. All you need is a valid student ID, or proof of enrollment. I believe Flex sells for somewhere around $250, so it’s a great deal.

Also, Adobe has set up a program for unemployed developers where they can get Adobe Flex Professional for free as well. That link can be found here.

Adobe flex is a powerful development tool that allows you to write rich internet applications (RIAs) for either the web or using Adobe Air. You write the programs using MXML, and can combine in Actionscript 3.0, .PHP and MySQL (and I’m sure more, but these are the ones that I use).

Anyways, it’s free if you’re a student, faculty, or out of work developer, so I would check it out.

With how fast the technology changes the learning curve keeps getting more and more steep. One thing I’ve noticed over the last year or two is that I get a lot of questions similar to: “Hey Keith, what is a …?” I’m sure others in the technology industry get their fair share of these kinds of questions as well. It is also especially important for those who are looking to get a website done for them. When a company tells you they’re going to “develop a robust backend” it would be good to know exactly what that means. I’m going to cover three main topics and some common terms associated with each: Web design, web development, and search engine optimization, as well as some general terms.

Frontend - This is the area of a website that the user directly interacts with - navigation, flash, video, forms, etc.. It gathers the information from the user to be processed by the backend. It also gives the user the ability to request or call up information from the backend.

Backend - The backend is sister to the frontend. It takes the information that that is either sent or requested by the user and processes that to return the relevant information. With higher traffic sites more complex backends are needed so that they can keep up with the amount of information being sent and received. This is generally where the term “robust” comes into play. This enables for faster load times, and in general, a better experience while on the website.

Search Engine Optimizatin (SEO) - This has become the hot topic for people in the web industry. Its sole purpose, as you would expect, is to make websites tuned for the best possible search engine results. There are hundreds of different theories on what works and what doesn’t work. I think that it is best to say that each case is different, and that there is no cookie cutter SEO. There is only one real rule that is agreed on by everyone, and that is “content is king.” Matt Cutts has said this numerous times, and I would like to think he has some good insight into search engines since he works for Google. The best web designers and developers will take SEO into account and naturally build a solid foundation right into the site, which limits the need to hire a specialized SEO company.

Secure Socket Layer (SSL Certificate) - This is more of a domain/hosting topic, but it’s good to know. SSL essentially means that the server is using some kind of cryptography to guard the transfer of information between you and the server. If you plan on doing any kind of online purchasing it’s an extremely good idea to make sure the site has a valid SSL. Firefox will pop up a warning if the SSL of a certain site can’t be verified. Hosting companies for instance have this issue, since they issue their own.

Dynamic websites - This connects back in with the frontend/backend topics. A dynamic website is one where the information that is displayed is pulled out of a database.  On non-dynamic websites, the information is simply entered right into the coding of the page. This makes it pretty tedious to update, and change. Dynamic websites solve this problem in that the information is all entered into a database, and then is just called up to the website.

Content Management System - The name says it all. These allow you to input, store, and edit information. This is very closely linked with dynamic websites, in that you can update the information in your CMS, and that updated information is automatically updated on the website. There are several extremely good free open-source CMSs such as Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress. Non open-source CMSs can be quite expensive though, and easily exceed $10,000.

Landing Page - This is essentially the page a potential customer sees after being directed to your site; usually by clicking on some sort of ad. A well designed landing page is essential. This is the (most likely) first impression that person gets of your company or product. It is also important for the page to “flow” well with your site, and the information that is being provided. For instance, if a graphic on the page is displaying some kind of hardware yet your company sells software, it gives conflicting messages. Moreover, it should be consistent with what the add originally said. This seems obvious, but I have clicked on quite a few advertisements that say “x item 45% off” but on the landing page it says 40%.

Web browser - Even though I’m sure 99.9% of my readers know what these are, I have to put this here. There are essentially four big names: Internet Explorer (MicrosofT), Firefox (Mozilla), Safari (Apple), Chrome (Google) (Cutts). From a web developers standpoint, I would suggest everyone to try something other than Internet Explorer. There are so many odd qwerks with it, that it is truly a pain to make sure all the content is displayed properly. Firefox and Chrome are both free, are incredibly fast, have great support, and tons of awesome addons.

I hope these are some help for those looking to get a new website, or just wanted some quick information about one of the topics. If you have any suggestions or questions feel free to leave a comment.

Sources:

Cutts, Matt. “http://www.mattcutts.com.” 2 April 2009. Matt Cutts’ Blog. <http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/chrome-marketshare-for-march-2009/>.

This is the offical blog of Colt Tech. We’ll cover a broad scope of topics here such as: SEO, graphic design, web design, web development, hardware, software, and more. We hope to give everyone a more in depth look into the latest technology. This blog should be updated bi or tri-weekly.