Is the Android OS doomed?

(This was posted 6 months, 2 weeks, 2 days, 17 hours, 13 minutes's ago.)

Things are not looking good for the 'iPhone Killer' NeXus 1, in just a few days they have received two blows, Firstly from the Philip K. Dick’s estate for intellectual copyright infringment for the use of 'Nexus' and secondly just yesterday a Trojan reveals the Androids lack of security.

The Philip K. Dick’s estate believes that the book in question "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was referred to when actually naming the 'superphone', and sought no permission, which they feel is an infringment of their intellectual-property rights.

But the more severe blow for Google in my opinion is the major security flaw in the Andriod operating system. Just yesterday a Trojan within a banking application was found by the bank in question and they themselves had to inform Google to take the app off.

The reason this app seemed to have made it into the public domain seems to be the laxed vetting controls when submitting an app, all you have to pay is $25 and you are able to submitt an app ready to be downloaded around the world whereas the Apples App Store has a rigorous vetting system which make it near impossible for these type of malicious applications from being available. So is it time for Google to take away some of the freedom for the developers in return for a safer experience for the phone owner? Google has not commented on how they will improve the security as of yet!

How does you site look in firefox and chrome?

(This was posted 6 months, 3 weeks, 15 hours, 49 minutes's ago.)

After Microsoft IE became the most popular browser to use taking around 95% of the market share is its time finally up and is it going to fall and burn like the Roman Empire?

In recent times IE has dropped to around 62% which is taking into account IE6, IE7 and IE8 and within the last 6 months alone it has dropped in use by around 5% while its main rival FireFox has just pass the 25% milestone and seems to be going from strength to strength.  

But the browser to watch seems to be Googles Chrome which was released just 16 months ago and is now the third most used browser in the world taking over from safari (some may ask safari? Whats safari? To answer It is Apples attempt at a web browser) with 4.63% over the market share.

So is now the time to ask yourself as a website owner, how does my site look in browsers other than Microsoft IE? As believe me there can be a drastic difference. If you like many others would like to make sure your site still functions currently check out browsershots which will allow you to take a screenshot from as many different web browsers as you would like.

Domains Names - Hyphenated or Not?

(This was posted 7 months, 1 week, 4 days, 23 hours, 51 minutes's ago.)

As web developers we get asked many questions and one of them is whether to hyphenate a domain name.

If you Google the question you will find a number of different opinions, ours is relatively simple, the domain name is one of the most important parts of a website for small businesses when you look at optimisation.

We suggest you keep it as simple as you can for the search engines to understand, hyphens are treated as a break in the word so if you are an accountant in Southend the ideal domain would be www.southend-accountants.co.uk as that is a logical search term.

If you use www.southendaccountants.co.uk search engines sill look at the word ‘southendaccountants’ and try to make sense of it – it does not know where one word ends and the other starts.

If you are ‘Alexanders Accounts’ you can have for marketing purposes www.alexandersaccountants.co.uk as your domain name, simply buy that domain and forward it to www.southend-accounts.co.uk, the browser will not know the difference, but the latter will work much better than the former.

There is a cautionary note though, if we wanted to have www.knowitallwebguys.co.uk we would not register www.know-it-all-web-guys.co.uk as this is frowned upon. Our experience is that you can have two hyphens but no more.

So there you are, just a little food for thought, have a great online time!