Archive for the ‘Web development’ Category

Future of Web: Unification

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

With the spread of mobile devices with Internet access, two main types of sites have appeared on the Internet – the sites which can be accessed and used via iPads and other mobile devices, and the sites that can’t do this. In 2012 the owners of websites and web services that haven’t been adapted to the new tendencies, will try to make up for the lost time. As a result, the owners of smartphones and tablets will have fewer problems and their lives will be easier. post_reg_social_unification_graphic

Although mobile development companies will continue creating fully functional mobile versions of all relevant sites, the main revolution will happen in the sphere of online video – it will actively migrate from Flash technologies to HTML5 technologies supported by all devices without exception. Last year Adobe admitted that it wouldn’t be able to make Flash work perfectly on mobile devices. Most probably this technology, that has been dominating on websites where users were offered video and music, will leave the stage in a year or two.

Mobile apps developers for BlackBerry may not worry since Flash games will stay longer because in this sphere the new HTML5 will have some difficulties in replacing multimedia plug-in from Adobe.

16-Year-Old Programmer Cleans Internet

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

The young software developer from London Nick D’Aloisio, who has just turned to be 16, has attracted the attention of the entire world having started the commercial development of his innovative technology which lets users get the required information from the Internet much more quickly. trimittttttttttttttttttttttttttt

The main idea of the Summly technology (in the summer it appeared under the name Trimit) is in making digests on the content inquired by a user. The Suumly utility automatically analyses the content of the sites and creates a short list of 1000, 500 or 140 symbols. Such shortlists are also produced automatically. Nick D’Aloisio has already applied for getting a patent for his innovation.

At first, this technology was debuted in the App Store for the iOS (mobile phone application development store) as a utility application Trimit. It allowed getting a short summary of the page opened in the browser. The technology attracted the attention of experts and investors and, as a result, the billionaire Li Ka-shing from Hong-Kong joined the project Trimit. Now all the further development of the technology is financed by his investment company Horizons Ventures.

Under the supervision of Horizons Ventures, the new company Summly Limited was established. The company has already received the first tranche of $250,000 for hiring new web development experts.

The main function of the Summly technology is automated preparation of the concise summary of the content so as the user will be able to share the ready-made digests vie text messages, e-mail, social networks and blogs. The team of software developers will develop a powerful architecture based on Nick D’Aloisio’s basic algorithms that, according to the author, use the principles of genetic programming and artificial artificial intellect.

According to the author, the Internet at present is overloaded with content and the Summly technology will make it much simpler thanks to more convenient information viewing and searching options.

Google+ With New Games

Sunday, September 4th, 2011

The social platform Google+, launched about two months ago, starts attracting users by popular social network games. According to the officials from Google, the new social network will soon accommodate such popular games as Angry Birds, Zombie Lane and Edge World. The representatives from Rovia and Zynga say that in Google+ their projects will work the same as in Facebook or on the screens of mobile devices.

Google+-launches-games-for-social-networking-siteApart from two big web development companies, Google has also signed agreements with Wooga, Funzio and Kabam. According to Google, users will see in their accounts in Google+ a new tab ‘Games’ that will contain games. The users who don’t want to play social games can hide this tab.

Ezra Gottheil, the analysts from the Technology Business Research, thinks that the social network Google+ will allow Google to get the additional growth in the user database since web games are becoming one of the key competitive advantage of social networks.

At present the company offers some promotional actions for games and web developers in Google+. Thus, for fans of Zynga theu offer a 5% discount for buying virtual gaming accessories (in comparison: Facebook offers a 30% discount in case of paying via Facebook Credits).

This news can stimulate software development companies to develop new games for social networks and the competition will increase.

Gartner Reviewed Global Forecast on IT expenses

Friday, July 8th, 2011

The analytical company Gartner has updated its forecast on global expenses on information technologies this year and has stated that they will probably increase by 7.1% up to 3.7 bln dollars. The growing expenses on the migration into the cloud computing as well as the integration of new IT services and software development is likely to become the main driven force.

Earlier Gartner forecasted the growth of expenses by 5.6% up to 3.4 bln dollars. According to Richard Gordon, Vice-President on R&D of the company, the growth of expenses will be observed in 2012 as well.

IT_costs952The expenses on cloud services will reach 89 bln dollars. However, cloud services are expected to present the sphere that will attract many other trends as well. By the year 2015, Gartner is expecting the expenses on cloud services will reach 177 bln dollars.

The expenses on telecommunication solutions will grow up to 2.1 bln dollars, which means the increase by 6.9% in comparison with the previous year. Thus, we are likely to expect that mobile software programming will develop as well and we’ll see many new cutting edge solutions in the nearest future.

Сreating a high quality and original web site

Friday, March 25th, 2011

gs075065The number of web sites on the Internet is growing from day to day. It may seem that tough competition should have frozen some enthusiasm for creating resources online. However, it doesn’t happen. And even on contrary we can observe quite opposite things. More and more people, companies and businesses would like to have their own website.

Practice has shown that earning money online is possible but only in case of meeting some specific requirements. One of them is creating a high quality and original web site.

Firstly, you need an original idea. It can be considered one of the most difficult stages of web development. But there is a wide category of web developers for whom generating ideas and concepts for sites is a profession. They earn much money but, certainly, the people who bought these ideas also get profit. You just have to realize your ideas correctly and professionally.

Thus, in order to have the best site and the best idea, you have to trust this to the experienced offshore web development company. An amateur can kill any idea.

CMS Drupal 7

Friday, February 25th, 2011

The final version of the content management system with the open source code Drupal 7 has been finally released. The participants of the project, software developers, have spent more than two years on its development.drupal7

The new version of the platform is characterized by numerous improvements. Among the most interesting ones one should mention the optimized CMS core and the updated mechanism of data caching, the improved security tools, the new administration interface, the extended set of API functions as well as the system of automatic Drupal modules updating. The complete list of the introduced changes is presented on the official site.

Drupal 7 is positioned by software developers as a convenient and powerful platform for creating any types of resources: from micro sites and blogs to portals and large social projects. The system allows installing additional modules, expandable basic functions and supports the localization of the interface for various languages including the Russian language.

According to the research carried out by the experts from the W3Techs laboratory, among one million popular network resources in Alexa terms the Drupal platform is one of the three most popular platforms among open solution web developers, only WordPress and Joomla being ahead of it.

Analytics: Android will overcome iPhone by popularity in 2012

Monday, August 16th, 2010

In 2012 Android will become more popular than iPhone. The main reasons for this are its attractiveness among other manufacturers and the modeliphone vs android of distribution.

According to the analytics from iSuppli, the number of Android smartphones will exceed the number of Apple smartphones by 2012. iSuppi predicts that by the end of the year 2012 the market share of Android will be 19.4% on the world’s market of smartphones in comparison with 2.7% in 2009. The market share of iOS from Apple will increase from 13.8% to 15.9% for the same period. By 2014 the Android sjare market will increase to 22.8% and the iOS share will reduce to 15.3%.

The future domination of Android is due to the different model of the platform distribution. iOS is a proprietary solution unavailable for third party producers. Android is an open OS available for everybody. By now it has been supported by NTS, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Acer, Samsung, LG and other companies while iPhones are produced only by Apple.

By 2014 the high quality content and mobile application will bring more than $100 bln. It’s a very promising and profitable market not only for smartphone producers but also for mobile apps developers who create apps for Android.

Website designers should use more free space and at least 1 usability tester

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Designing new layout for your website live some free space

Free space improves visual perception — it’s a well known fact for website designers. They take into consideration importance of space between paragraphs, images, buttons and other elements on the page. They can also group items reducing space between them, it helps to show connections, structure and hierarchy of elements.

Free space also makes content more readable. Numerous studies show that spaces between paragraphs increase perception by 20%.

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Effective user testing should not be extensive

Jakob Nielsen has calculate the ideal number of website usability testers. His statistics shows that only 5 testers identify almost 85% of all the problems on your site, while 15 testers identify almost all the problems.

The most serious problems usually can be found by the first or the first two testers, the rest testers will only confirm these problems and will find some more minor bags. So those who working at website and web application development can obtain good results without extensive and expensive user testing.

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Dribs and drabs that can improve web site usability

Monday, December 28th, 2009

Creating a new site use unique design, but when it comes to usability, it is better to use approved models (like most of web developers do). When people visit a new site, they always look for well-known things; they use their experience to perceive new content. People want to use the same modules on different web pages (such as color options, company logo location, principles of navigation, etc).

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Google always makes its links blue, and there is a reason: this color is familiar to most of users (that is why it’s much easier for them to find all the links).

Any other color is not a problem, but users will need some more time to find your links.

An ideal input field for search queries must be 27 characters long

Jacob Nielsen conducted a research to determine the ideal length for search boxes. So he ascertained that most of modern input fields are very short. Despite the fact that you can write quite a long search query, you can’t see all your text. It’s a problem with usability, because it’s difficult to edit such a search query.

The study showed that an average input field has width of 18 characters. According to the research results 27% of search queries are too long to fit in these input fields. But 27 characters wide fields can contain 90% of search queries. Remember that you can determine width not only in pixels and points, but also in “em” (a relative unit of length for current font).

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Input field in Google search is wide enough for long searches

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Apple input field is too short, the query “Microsoft Office 2008″ does not fit in it

In general, it is better to do too long field than too short one, so your users would be able to find all the information without any problems. This is a very simple and useful advice for website designers, but, unfortunately, they often ignore it.

Web-development: trying to draw users’ attention

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

1. Users concentrates on faces

People instinctively notice other people. The same occurs on web pages, users focus their attention on somebody’s face and eyes. So web developers and designers have a good tool to manage users’ attention. Moreover they also can take into account that people usually start to look in the same direction, following photomodel’s look.

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Temperature map that shown quantity of users looking at an image with a child who looks at them.

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And now he is looking at the content. Pay your attention to the increase in the number of people who read the title and the text.

2. Most of users do not see advertising

Jakob Nielsen says that most of people do not see ads. Looking for some information or focusing on site content, they simply do not pay any attention to banners. It means that users also avoid anything that looks like an advertisement, even if it is not an ads actually. Some menu items may look like banners, so website designers should be careful creating such elements.

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Square banners on the left side of the FlashDen site are not banners: they link to content on the same site. But they may be ignored by some users.

However, advertising that looks like content, can be visited by people who are looking for this very information. It can bring more revenue from advertising, but also can reduce level of visitors’ trust because they will click on a banner thinking it’ just a reference to required material on the site. So consider what will be better for you: short-term gain or long-term trust.