By Jordan Hall 1st April 2010
Firstly, happy April Fools' day to you! There have been a crazy amount of April Fools' jokes flying across the Internet today. Here are a few of the best from some of the biggest names. Google Animal Translate Google have supposedly released an ever so sneaky version of Google Translate that can translate animal noises in to English! This is a mobile application, suprisingly for the Android platform and is (not) available in the Android App Stor...
By Jordan Hall 18th March 2010
Google is highly likely to be shutting down Google Search in China, after discussions with Chinese authorities regarding censorship laws appear to have reached an impasse. Last Friday, the Chinese government challenged Google directly, stating that it refused to compromise its censorship laws to prevent Google from leaving China. Google's removal of censorship occurred after a number of 'cyber-attacks' has occurred to Google's systems from an ...
By Jordan Hall 8th March 2010
Google has recently released quite a tweak to its google.com web design to a select few users. Below are a couple of screenshots of the new web design from Google. Clicking the screen shots below will show the new web design, which features more squared off search button, a highlighted sidebar on search results and a change in default link colour to a significantly lighter shade of blue. This also appears to be a slight re-brand of the Googl...
By Jordan Hall 10th February 2010
In an update to our previous post on Google Buzz, we now have a screenshot to show of the Google Buzz interface within Gmail. The following screenshot shows the Google Buzz Welcome screen, as shown the first time you access Google Buzz. Google Buzz welcome screen...
Google has tried social networking in the past, with ventures such as Orkut and Google Friend Connect, however neither have really become very popular. In fact, I imagine many of you reading this article may not have heard of Orkut at all. Google Friend Connect on the other hand is a API for web developers to put Google hosted social networking features directly into their websites via a iframes, JavaScript and AJAX. Anyway, I'm here to talk abo...
By Jordan Hall 8th February 2010
WordPress, possibly the most popular blogging software out there, is set to heavily open source the design of its user interface this year. WordPress is an open source blogging solution written in PHP and powered by a MySQL database backend. Code wise, it is entirely open source and licensed in entirety under the GNU General Public License (version 2), and as of typing this, it is used by over 200 million websites worldwide. Design in WordP...
By Jordan Hall 5th February 2010
As web developers, we are using web browsers continually to preview and debug our web pages, dynamic web application and the website page's we develop. However, many consumers are unsure of what a web browser actually is. Admittedly, for many, this can be very confusing as there are such a lot of Internet related terms flying around now that it can be difficult to explain exactly what a web browser is. This can be especially true where many we...
By Jordan Hall 4th February 2010
Will Apple's release of the iPad slow the surge past few years of mobile web development? Some people think so. The release of Apple's ever popular smartphone, the iPhone, back in mid 2007 caused a huge development spike in websites and dynamic web applications designed the mobile devices. Of course, the vast majority of these mobile website were developed specifically with the iPhone in mind, however the results were beneficial to pretty much a...
In a move that should help with mobile web design and development for Nokia's mobile devices, the Symbian operating system which powers these devices has been made open source. Nokia is releasing their Symbian operating system, which includes the Symbian web browser, under an open source license. Symbian is the most popular smartphone operating system, and its total code base is valued at "billions of dollars". The open sourcing of Symbian hopes...
By Ashley Peake 21st January 2010
Lo ruok? Bin 2 town 2day 2 meet sum m8s wot u up to? Nufn much, wru? Wot u doin l8tr? At home, Nufn till the wknd tbh n e way cu 2moro ;) Need the above translating? Then I guess you’re not ‘down with the kids’. Experts claim that using this abbreviated texting style can actually help the development of reading and writing skills. Research has shown that children who use ‘textism’ will also have less difficulty regarding spelling s...
By Jordan Hall 11th January 2010
As a user of desktop Linux distributions, both at work and at home, I'm often trying to promote the use of Linux-based systems such as Ubuntu. Systems such as Linux to often seen to be only for the most geeky or technical minded of people, whilst Windows or Mac are heavily promoted as being used for everyday, family orientated purposes. This can be as complex as managing home finances and budgets with a spreadsheet application such as Microsoft ...
By Jordan Hall 28th October 2009
Ubuntu 9.10, the user-friendly, free, Linux-based operating system, is to be released tomorrow (the 29th of October 2009). Canonical, Ubuntu's corporate sponsor, states that Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, 'puts the user at the heart of its new design', and being an Ubuntu user myself for about three years and a Linux user for significantly longer, I can certainly agree. Having been a tester of Ubuntu 9.10 during its development, I can tell...