Posts Tagged ‘Articles’
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
With all the press and hype in the community about the announcement of Google’s foray into the mobile market. Some claim it will not catch on due to lacking partners such as AT&T and Nokia, the major mobile US carrier and the largest handset manufacturer who currently relies on Symbian. But Google’s platform has more ambitious goals that of the iPhone. It doesn’t just end with the handset, there is also googles proposal to buy the 700Mhz spectrum in the US, this I am not sure if I agree with as it may be stepping on toes a bit much here with the telecomms industry, but I guess if its good for the consumer, whats good for the goose is good for the gander..
The Android platform will be very accessible to developers at all levels, but a stack such as this could in itself cause complications and misconceptions of the end product. In effect while Android based phones could be a rival to iPhone’s, that is only scratching the surface of what is planned. The interface can be custom developed, so on the low-end of the scale using the Android platform we could see phones not unsimilar to currently available handsets. What is more interesting though is that these applications can interact and provide interfaces unlike any other available on the more high end pricier range of the market.
There is also the fact that the Android platform is not solely intended as a new iPhone beater..its general foundation is to reform how we access the web from mobile handsets, changing the infrastructure and interoperability, improving the overall user experience for users accessing the Internet over a mobile device. The biggest challenge for this to happen is for enough market interest to be created for the platform to be adopted and get more of the big players involved. The market could stabilise in the mobile sector if a common base platform was adopted, as much or as little power could be taken by the users phone of choice, and perhaps avenues to expand on a given handset should the need arise.
Despite some of the slating Android has been getting since its official announcement from the rest of the general media, I for one look forward to seeing the impact this technology has on the mobile sector over the coming 18 months. The developer API is to be released next week.
  
Tags: Articles, Google, Mobile
Posted in Google, Mobile | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 1st, 2007
Google Gears is installed locally on the user’s machine and integrates with your web browser, you then grant access to web sites wishing you use Gears. Once this has been done the online application can synchronize data locally to work with offline while also enabling the application to work and be fuly functional without an active connection, making the transition to offline use of the web site almost seamless since upon connecting to the network at the next oppurtunity any modifications to data made offline will once again be synced online.
Google Reader, Google’s home grown RSS/Atom news reader is the first app to use Gears officialy by Google. And it works quite nicely as a proof of concept. Their are endless possibilities for such a platform as Gears, especially in the enterprise where commutes and travel often leave one without access to the internet, trains, flights and the general to and fro. Wireless networks are at a high penetration in a lot of cities, and yes mobile cellular broadband is starting to become practical, but there will always be a time or place when you are an exile from cyberspace. In these dark times getting to your online applications that you require can be made possible by Google Gears.
The application candidates best suited for adoption are those in the line of collaboration and content managment. And I’m quite sure Google has thought of this too as the Google Docs suite of applications is a prime candidate for Google Gears and I, along with many others eagerly anticipate this reality. One has to think that Google is trampling Mircosoft’s garden with this bold move.
Tags: Articles, Google
Posted in Web Design | No Comments »
Friday, January 19th, 2007
Many organisations have over spent on hardware without realising it. About a year ago I looked into proper server monitoring tools, and of course being Linux servers I wanted to monitor I found some very capable free open source solutions. First is munin, which runs over a web interface, but has standalone server which means you can monitor Apache, along with mail services and any other services you may need to keep an eye on. It also emails when a service restarts or dies. For our own purposes we have written a WAP gateway for munin to allow us to check and restart services and server status when an internet connection is not otherwise available. We have also set up email alerts to be redirected to SMS as events occur.
Another nice piece of software is monit, which generates reports on just about every aspects a sys admin would need to know about a system, CPU, disk usage, tasks, mail queues and a host of other useful tid-bits along with a full historical graphing for most too…this can easily identify bottlenecks or under usage of server resources.
Plenty of details on setting these up can be found on howtoforge.net
If you would like to obtain the WAP/SMS solution outlined above, please get in touch with sales@bluestar.ie for a quote. SMS solution only available in Ireland, but WAP application can be used anywhere.
Tags: Articles, Sys Admin
Posted in Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Saturday, August 26th, 2006
AJAX is a set of technologies that has been around for quite some time but only maturing and being taken advantage of now. In true geek speak it stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. What it really translates to layman’s terms is being able to dynamically update a partial section of a web page without having to refresh the entire page. Google Maps, Wikimapia and most of Google’s webmaster tools are built on AJAX. Pages are built with DHTML, such as DIV elements that can be filled with content by creating an XMLHttpRequest object with Javascript. A request is sent to the remote server to retrieve either a snippet of XML or text which can be interpreted and displayed on the web site. For example, if you wish to have your visitor select the region they are from, when they select their country a list of regions for that country could be displayed on the page in a DIV element which is dynamically filled with content from the XMLHttpRequest object without the need to refresh the entire page. There are many possibilities for this technology and it is taking the web a step closer to the responsiveness and type of applications previously dominated by traditional desktop software. A fine example of AJAX at work is Google’s spreadsheet application at spreadsheet.google.com. Many more will follow and over time the underlying desktop operating system will become less significant as most of our everyday desktop tools are migrated into an AJAX equivalent. The term Web 2.0 has been coined by Tim O’Reilly and other leading figures in the Internet marketplace, AJAX is more or less the foundation of this new craze that’s spreading through the web like wildfire.
Diarmuid Ryan, Managing Director
Blue Star Web Design Ireland
Tags: Articles, Web 2.0
Posted in Web | No Comments »
Saturday, May 13th, 2006
There has been quite a lot of hullabaloo both in the web design trade and wider IT circles. At the end of the day what it really comes down to is social networking, gathering the knowledge of the masses, or the experiences of the masses and stories that people can tell…there are just some examples, Wikipedia and Bebo respectively. Bebo perhaps more so, as it is more freeform, Wikipedia has the unfortunate vulnerability of allowing any Joe Soap to be a so called expert. del.ico.us is another fine example, it breaks the mould of current web site directories say like Yahoo, which uses an organisation known as taxanomy where by directories are managed by directory managers and editors, del.ico.us uses what is known as folksonomy, which is a rating and listing of a web site based on votes from other surfers. It is a golden age of growth for creative internet applications, a re-birth, probably the biggest thing since the dot bomb of late ’90s, but this time the technologies and philosophies are both more intelligent and better thought out, keeping the user experience in mind all the time. I’d like to think of this dawning era as the renaissance of the web…
Tags: Articles, Web 2.0
Posted in Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 24th, 2006
It appears Micro$oft is a little worked up over the spread of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python/PHP) platform for web applications and internet solutions. Monopolistic capitalism and giving things away for free seem to be conflicting interests, it is certain that the cost of development tools for Micro$oft-based web applications is prohibitive to a lot of people. For example to get up and running with Windows Server 2003, Visual Studio and SQL Server would have previously set you back a couple grand- compared to LAMP which is free and perhaps more importantly also open source.
So what do M$ do? The nice people in Redmond have decided to give away its .NET development environment for free, dubbed “Express” editions. This includes Visual Studio 2005 in an Express edition along with SQL Server. This is obviously to encourage more people to the M$ view of the web and of course expand their already extensive marketplace foothold in the wider computing community. The question that remains is which do you choose? And why. The reason not to go M$ on your website’s ass is that it is still a black box technology. Open source has thousands if not millions of enthusiasts and evangelists who work for technology’s sake and not money, this enthusiasm among the open source counterparts has lead to a very fully developed technology and a tried and trusted platform. This is one market M$ will unlikely monopilise anytime soon.
Diarmuid Ryan
Blue Star
Tags: Articles, Microsoft
Posted in Web Design | No Comments »
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