The two key players in this scene are Apple and Samsung, who until recently were playing nicely and making money from each other quite happily. Apple’s recent spate of legal attacks on its competitors such as Google, HTC, Samsung and Nokia , to name a few of the many (estimated to be 46 as of March 2011) have sparked some support from Apples ever loyal fanbase, cries of outrage from those looking for open technology platforms and more importantly a raft of counter suits against them.

So why is Apple so keen to shut down the competition? Could it be they feel threatened by Android and Googles ever steady march on their market share? I think so. If you discount the iPod and iPad which are mobile, but aren’t phones, then Android accounts for 43% of the market. This is a skewed view I know, what with the boom in the tablet computing market, but the prevalence of smartphones over tablets, for me at least, gives this statistic weight. I think you’d be hard pushed to find a company who doesn’t want to be in everyone’s pocket, next to their wallet or purse no doubt.

With this realisation we arrive at the crux of the matter. If your competitor is putting its software on a device which people are buying, it’s going to be much easier to shut down the device than it would be to shut down the software. So this is where Apple is attacking, the soft underbelly of Google, its phone manufacturers. Thus the lawsuits against companies like Samsung and HTC, to tackle the manufacture of the device and thus blocking Google from being able to ship Android.

Samsung have recently announced that they are looking to block the sale of the iPhone 5 in South Korea and Europe, just as Apple have done with the Samsung Galaxy Tab in Europe. These pre-release lawsuits are part of Samsungs new stance against Apple’s continued aggressive protection of its technology. For me, as a fan of open technologies, I think this is all much of a muchness as they are all using the same base technologies in order to create the devices that the consumer wants to buy. Wouldn’t it be better to have an open standard for these technologies which could be shared amongst manufacturers and thus enable a collaborative enhancement of the technology rather than a childish playground antics we see at the moment? Well, yes, it would be marvellous but unfortunately the large technology companies spend millions of dollars developing these specific tweaks and features in order to try and edge out the competition and thus are not willing to share anything with anyone. If you thought you owned your phone, I’d be willing to be you’d be wrong. You’ve probably got a license to use the technology from the manufacturer.

So why is this hugely expensive and petty legal chess game now so popular? It’s certainly popular enough for companies to buy whole companies just for the patents. This summer saw Google lose out to a consortium of Apple, Microsoft, RIM, EMC, Ericsson and Sony for the company Nortel, and more importantly its portfolio of 6000 patents worth $4.5b, a little too rich for Google’s top bid of $4b. So you can see why Apple don’t have many or any, that I can find, lawsuits against its consortium buddies, and has thus focused its Sauron-esque gaze upon Google. Google’s time did come in August, when they announced the purchase of Motorola Mobility for $12.5b and with it a patent portfolio of 17,000 patents with which to battle its legal challenges.

Another team to consider is Microsoft and Nokia who brokered a deal in February to work collaboratively to drive the Microsoft mobile operating system forward with Nokia manufacturing the phones and Microsoft providing the software support. We’ve yet to see anything from this partnership other than a handful of Nokia Windows devices, and some information about Windows 8, and its tablet capabilities.

The speed at which this new mobile computing market is moving is truly staggering and it shows no signs of slowing down. It certainly seems that if you don’t already have the money to compete you’ll either get bought, shut down, or end up in court on patent infringement. Let’s hope the market does open up and we can see some unhindered innovation.

Written in memory of Palm WebOS.

Ref:

1. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/stephen-frys-100-greatest-gadgets/articles/the-list
2. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/21/samsung_could_block_iphone_5_in_europe_patent_wars_rumble_on/
3. http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/apple-counters-samsung-lawsuit-in-uk-39849
4. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/19/samsung_will_block_sale_of_iphone_5_in_korea/
5. http://www.blognotes.in/apple-iphone-patent-violations-list-nokia-lawsuit/
6. http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/apple-vs-samsung-list-of-all-19.html
7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Mobile_devices
8. http://www.techwatch.co.uk/2011/07/04/google-lose-out-in-nortel-patent-portfolio-auction/
9. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-to-buy-motorola-mobility-for-125-billion-2011-08-15-1013140
10. http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/11/exclusive-nokias-windows-phone-7-concept-revealed/
11. http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/10155/hp-to-discontinue-webos-devices/

Green Chaud Color Theme For Aptana
Version 20080311A
Author : Boris POPOFF
Home Page : http://gueschla.com/labs/green-chaud/

I love this theme and use it all the time. First thing after installing Aptana is this theme and I was shocked to find that the guy who created this fabulous theme doesn’t seem to have the file hosted on his site any more, so I’ve hosted it here, mainly so no matter where I am I can always get to this great theme

Download green-chaud theme

See a graph of this website

Hopefully it’ll be totally transparent, to everyone, even Google! So all your lovely people who visit my site from Google Image search can still find what you are looking for

I read lots of blogs and tweets during the week most of them always seem to link to a “Top x things that y should know/use” great stuff, but often most of the content is either recycled or explained better elsewhere. The internet is the greenest place on earth when it comes to recycling content. The idea behind this post is to collect some of that information and yes, again, recycle it.

The post is more for my own personal benefit as I’ve been building website for a number of years now and as the dev landscape changes so do the ‘best practises’ and I wanted to note down the ones that I think are important to me, so that I don’t forget them. Hopefully if you are reading this, it might be helpful to you too.

I will look to try and periodically update the post with further useful bits of information. All of the links are saved in my delicious somewhere, but frankly it’s becoming hard to find things even in there with the amount of links I’ve saved. Don’t believe me? See for yourself, www.delicious.com/neon1024

Beaten to it!

Then you are looking for the Google Speed blog. As I was compiling this list of bits and bobs, Google went ahead and released a site which pretty much covers everything here. So thanks to them, well worth a read.
http://code.google.com/speed/articles/

Setup your browser

No matter which developer you speak to everyone has a different browser preference. Me? Mine remains Firefox, despite a rocky relationship between v3.0.11 and Gmail. Anyhow, that fresh install needs a load of extensions to get things comfy again. You can download whole collections of extensions all in one place! Awesome. Here’s what I generally run give or take, http://twitpic.com/8d9l2
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/webdeveloper

Things to do in basic code

Title attributes

Adding a title attribute to all your <a title=”Lemons!”> tags is beneficial from an SEO point of view and also means you can give users more information when they hover, try and remember to drop one in every time.

Google hosted javascript

Make sure to link commonly used javascript libraries from the Google Api’s. They will serve quicker and from a closer server to where ever you users might be.
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/

Loading javascript

Put your javascript at the bottom of the page. The browser will stop when it finds a script and go load the whole script. Usually your javascript will be effecting the page once it’s loaded. This means putting your libs at the bottom of the page allows for a quicker page load for everyone, even more so if users do not have javascript enabled.
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/30-html-best-practices-for-beginners/

Compress your javascript

Following on from above, you should always make sure that you compress your javascript once you have finished writing it, making it load quicker.
http://javascriptcompressor.com/

Compress your CSS

Again you can compress your CSS sheets once you have written them to shave precious kb off your site size and load times.
http://www.cssoptimiser.com/

Faster page loading

If you are building stuff, you should be making sure to optimise it best you can using something like yslow. I tend to favour Googles extension more these days though, although you can happily use both!
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
http://sixrevisions.com/web-development/five-ways-to-speed-up-page-response-times/

Validate your HTML

You should also be making sure that you are using html validator to ensure you have no errors, there is a great Firefox extension which will validate your code as you build it.
http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/

Encode your special characters

Always encode your entities, even standard stuff like £, or even make sure of the arrows and stuff,
http://www.cookwood.com/html/extras/entities.html

Do more CSS quicker!

Make use of CSS frameworks, nowadays you have to write more and more code in the same amount of time, as peoples web experience becomes richer and their expectations higher. I can see the advantages in these frameworks, although I’ve yet to use one in a project, so still learning how they work.
http://www.blueprintcss.org/

Cut down on your HTML

This is a direct steal from a blog post (if it’s you email me for credit and a link) which I can’t seem to track down right now. Less is more. Much more. When building stuff we all put extra bits and bobs into the code to make things work. How many people go through and remove all the redundant stuff afterwards? Honestly. Yeah right. I know I don’t, but this will make a huge difference to your site. Having less code to load means a quicker site and cleaner markup. Try and merge some of your css styles so they are properly cascaded. Try removing some of the wrapping div’s. Keep it clean, lean and mean!

Designery bits

Looking for better Lorem Ipsum

Need dummy text? Look no further,
http://lorem2.com/

Custom fonts

CSS3 bring @font-face and with it the ability to link to fonts hosted on other servers. This allows native custom fonts without having to hack anything or do anything crazy. Supported by most of the latest modern browsers too.
http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Web_font_linking_with_@font-face

The idea would be to replace the fonts with an @font-face then implement a check with deprecated down and implemented Cufon to replace that missing font with a javascript replacement.

Okay, so lots of people have heard of sIFR, which replaces custom fonts with flash. Move over buddy, there’s a new kid on the block and frankly he’s awesome. I wouldn’t chose to use anything else for custom fonts these days. Cufon will create a javascript version of the font and write that to the page instead.
http://wiki.github.com/sorccu/cufon/about

Get rid of IE6

Make sure to include something for IE6 users. I know they are a pain in the ass, but there are ways to push them out into the light. Consider a flat IE6 sheet, http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/universal_internet_explorer_6_css/
or giving them a proper clean styled update notice,
http://ie6update.com/ or http://code.google.com/p/sevenup/

Speed up image loading

Optimise your site. Save your images for web and make them small. There is no excuse not to do this, I don’t care if everyone has broadband, it’s contended so the more people using it the slower it goes, if your site clogs the lines then it will still load slowly.

Put all your icons into a sprite

Use css sprites. A fantastic way to load loads of those fiddly 16×16 icons all in one chunk. Simple to do too and very effective. Don’t forget that you can do hover states in your sprites too!
http://css-tricks.com/css-sprites/

Things to do in PHP

Always comment your code

Comment. Comment. Comment. We all know we should be doing it, but not many people actually do. Hell even in your CSS files, put a nice heading in to collect stuff together, it takes 5 seconds and makes life a billion times easier. I’m totally guilty of not doing this. Really should make an effort to comment all code everywhere. After all you should be crafting code, rather than writing it.

Using a code documentor

If you are commenting your code properly, you can also use /** to start your comment block. This will allow PHPDocumentor to better read and understand your comments.
http://www.phpdoc.org/

Sending email

A recent Twitter poll by @snookca voted SwiftMailer as the best PHP emailer. I’ve tried to make it work, but I feel that it’s a little overcomplicated for most things. I tend to use a simler alternative, such as HTMLMimeMail.
http://swiftmailer.org/ or http://www.phpguru.org/static/mime.mail.html

Improving database performance

If you are using PHP with MySQL then you should be using the newer MySQLi driver. It’s quicker, better and more feature rich.
http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/showtopic54239.htm

Using CakePHP?

See everything everywhere

Always make sure to drop the debug kit into your project when you start working. It really is fantastically helpful and you’ll not have a need to pr() anything ever again. Well maybe sometimes.
http://thechaw.com/debug_kit/wiki/home

Things on your live box

Keeping things tidy

Always keep your server and working folder clean. If you make modifications you should delete the stuff that you are no longer using. This will keep your working folder clean and under control. If you leave it too long soon it’ll be a horrendous mess and this will lead to a depressed web server Plus if you don’t know what it does you can’t really delete it so the problem soon spirals.

In a similar vein, DO NOT, yes this bugs me, under ANY circumstances back stuff up on the server. That means no .bak no .20090527.bak no contact.php2. There is no need. Your online environment is your Noah’s Arc, your clean room, your Mum’s pants draw. What’s in there should only be what’s needed.

Everything else

Version control

So if you delete stuff from your working folder and you can’t back up on the server, how the hell do you corral all these wayward files I hear you cry? Git. It really is that simple. I wouldn’t even really recommend Subversion any more. Git is devilshy confusing and hard to understand but when you master it you’ll want for nothing. Srsly.

Supporting your users

The site doesn’t work. I can’t click Cancel. Blah blah, we all get it. Now you can fight back! Tell them to head to supportdetails.com and put in their email address and you get a nicely formatted email with all the relevant information on it, genius.
http://supportdetails.com/

The end bit

Well, congratulations you made it to the end. If I’ve missed anything or there is something vitally important that really should be on here, or that I should know, please do, by all means, let me know.

If you want to find out where I got most of this stuff from read my tags.

RIMMER: (VO) After intensive investigation, comma, of the markings on the alien pod, comma, it has become clear, comma, to me, comma, that we are dealing, comma, with a species of awesome intellect, colon.
HOLLY: Good. Perhaps they might be able to give you a hand with your punctuation.
RIMMER: Shut up.

Credit

Twitter, tbh. It’s the people I follow on Twitter that are the experts really. Great articles and great developers and designers. So thanks to everyone on there. I’m a big fan of Delicious too, always worth reading the Delicious Popular every day for great articles.

Great! Definitly going to be trying to get this into some apps in the future, especially that date picker! No more lines of date validation for me

http://jqueryui.com/home

Project 2 (beta) of course, or should that be Projct?, Projektr?, anyhow, was a few idea’s on processing someone’s activity online and syndicating it via RSS to a site. I have a distinct feeling that I’ve read or seen an article about (visited the site now) Friends Feed or similar, which is to do with aggregating online activity. I plumped for Yahoo! Pipes actually, seeing as I have an account with them from way back. So off I bustled to grab the 960gs PSD and get cracking. This was after about 5 ideas on various A4 pieces of paper and quite a number of pages of my trusty Moleskine. You really can’t beat paper prototyping for getting an idea out of your head and into daylight. I do find writing things down, even in scribbly mess always makes room for that next idea, no pressing buttons, no trying to make that one box shape in word 1px smaller so that it fits nicely and all the various niggly fiddly, grr, bits in between.

I’ve always been fond of Terry Pratchetts writing on ideas,

Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way to make lightbulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one. Some people are even more unfortunate. They get them *all*.

(Ah for the day when computers will understand me and not the other way around, then we shall see! Give me wetware interface!)

So I have very nearly put the finishing touches on the design. Well, version 1 revision 1. One day, one revision. Now it’s time to put it aside for a day and come back to it on Friday morning for a fresh glimpse. I will be putting the site up on one of my many and varied domain names, I have one in mind, but I don’t think it will be www.organogasmagram.co.uk, yes really.

Found a superb tutorial site in, rubylearning.com which has all the basics for learning Ruby on it. After that’s all tackled it will be onto learning the Rails framework and getting to grips with transferring my CakePHP MVC knowledge over to the Rails structure.

Also started using Aptana again now that they have finally got a solid build out. So I have switched from what was Eclipse with the Aptana plugin to using the pure Aptana app now with the PHP and RadRails perspectives loaded and so far it’s working great. A few niggles like basically not knowing too much about really using Aptana to develop quickly. The fact it interfaces so closely with the RoR script/generate though is great!

If like me you are a fan of a darker background, there is Green Chaud theme for Aptana too which makes coding much easier, as I was moving from the old Textmate Vibrant Ink theme in Notepad++ (scroll to the bottom) over to Aptana.