Thursday, November 19, 2009

iPhone Development - Web Style

Basic HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a bit of AJAX...boom, you have an iPhone App. Never would have guessed but just by styling your web page correctly you have an iPhone App. Take a simple web page created with HTML, open it up in your iPhone web browser...how does it look? Ok, but not great, and certainly not like a native App. Throw in some CSS, add a bit of JavaScript, and just a touch of AJAX and that HTML now looks like a native application. I wouldn't exactly call it creating an App...more like formatting a web page for the iPhone but just discovering this is pretty cool for me. Using basic web development I can now create a web page that has the look and feel of an iPhone App all without learning a new language or using a new technology.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Net neutrality

Net neutrality is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates no restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as communication that is not unreasonably degraded by other traffic.

The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for a given level of access, that the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.

Neutrality proponents claim that telecom companies seek to impose a tiered service model in order to control the pipeline and thereby remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services. Many believe net neutrality to be primarily important as a preservation of current freedoms. Vinton Cerf, considered as a "father of the Internet" and co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the web, and many others have spoken out in favor of network neutrality.

Opponents of net neutrality characterize its regulations as "a solution in search of a problem", arguing that broadband service providers have no plans to block content or degrade network performance. In spite of this claim, certain Internet service providers (such as Comcast) have intentionally slowed peer-to-peer (P2P) communications. Still, other companies have acted in contrast to these assertions of hands-off behavior and have begun to use deep packet inspection to discriminate against P2P, FTP and online games, instituting a cell-phone style billing system of overages, free-to-telecom "value added" services, and bundling. Critics of net neutrality also argue that data discrimination of some kinds, particularly to guarantee quality of service, is not problematic, but is actually highly desirable. Bob Kahn has called the term net neutrality a "slogan" and states that he opposes establishing it.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Find..ability



Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. Relating findability to the web or SEO, it means how easily your site can be found when doing a search engine search. How high are you ranked on a search? If you did not make it onto the first page of a Google search...the chances that someone will dig through the search results far enough to find your site fall drastically. Findability and SEO together bring together many web designs ideals...SEO deals with the things that a developer can do to make a site more findable; things such as header tags, the title tag, and key word ratio all seek to make a website more findable with regards to a search engine.