We just launched kids-apps.mobi, a showroom dedicated to gathering in one place iPad and iPhone/iPod touch applications for children.

It intends to be a collection of only the best applications for your kids offering a easy way to find what you are looking for without the need of searching the entire Appstore for this.

Upload your kids application

So if you have launched an application and would like to show in the kids-apps.mobi website, drop us a line using the form here.

I am sure you all know about Mictosoft’s IE9 Testdrive. Its main target was, for now, the developer – in an attempt to showcase the improvements in IE9 and maybe make us be more nice to them and forget how much time we waste with IE6.

What I was interested as a frontend developer was the the compatibility tables for features like SVG, CSS3 and DOM. And the test results, as per Microsoft’s page, are all gorgeous.

A more detailed list of supported features can be seen by checking their website but long story short, everything is green for them and not so green for the other browsers, except CSS3 :nth-child selector and CSS comments

and DOM level 2 style @import inside of @media

Another very interesting source of information regarding the present and future features supported by the browsers is When can I use… that also includes HTML5 elements – I notice IE9 testdrive page is not mentioning anything about HTML5 altough IE9 is expecting to support it in a certain percentage. They have also calculated the support that past and future browsers have for some features and their numbers are like this:

But you’d better check their website to see the features they worked with cause there are some differences that worth being taking into account.

We salute Microsofts initiative, altough we would love to see some of these CSS3 borders, backgrounds and selectors embedded in an IE8 update…cause we all check our statistics….

I have recently discovered an interesting blog and while reading one of its posts I firmly believed Julio, the author, read my mind. I translated it with his help and with the help of Alex & Gillian Meldrum and here it is for you to read and enjoy.

When quoting for work, we seem to hear the same refrain – “expensive”. Why?

When you take your car to the garage to be repaired, do you automatically question the cost and suggest that the mechanic’s hourly rate is too high? Probably not. Yet we hear it routinely. Why should construction of a website be any different? Is there any real suggestion that the level of skill involved in creating websites is in any way less valuable than that of a mechanic? Or any other skilled trade or profession for that matter?

And even if your business model is geared to offer the client genuine value for the level of expertise provided, it’s still the same complaint. Somehow, clients are able to find lower quotes and still think that this will deliver the same result (“their website”) and therefore that we are “expensive”. And they are not afraid to tell us this.

There are a number of reasons why this is happening. One of them is that the market is not yet ready to really understand what constitutes a ‘good’ website. There is a difference between being able to find what you need on the web (as a user) and understanding the architecture that the site needs to guide users to it. Many clients don’t really understand what they need so they leap into the unknown and keep their fingers crossed. After all, when people are competing for your work, they will always tell you that they can deliver what you need – and they will usually tell you what you want to hear (as opposed to what you need to hear).

Let’s think about this in a wider context. If you need a very good brain surgeon, how do you reach one? How would you choose one? You can’t exactly look in Yellow Pages, under “good surgeons”! Other doctors would recommend one based on reputation and experience in their field. After all, most of us wouldn’t know where to start with a list of criteria that makes a good brain surgeon. But what if you still had to choose from a shortlist? Where would you start? What if none of the candidates is suitable? How can YOU evaluate them, when THEY are the experts?

Inexperienced clients tend to rely either on mainly subjective criteria (such as the impression given by the salesman/developer and whether their face fits) or on a very common objective one: the price.

If the quotes for the “same job” are 6.000 Euros and 1.500 Euros respectively, what quote would you choose? The majority of clients would instinctively say “the 1500 Euros one”.

But if you think about it for a moment, is it ever really possible to get more for less?

Clients are rightly wary, but if somebody offers a product for a fraction of the price, they somehow still believe that the final product will be essentially the same. But here’s the crunch: all website are not equal. And if we continue the car analogy, if somebody offers you a brand new top of the range Mercedes for next to nothing, do you really think that it’s a genuine bargain? Or do you suspect that there must be something amiss?

The truth is that, at the moment, websites seem to be bought much like apples at the supermarket. You can go to the budget supermarket, where they’ll be cheaper, because you know there won’t be much difference between them. Or if there is, it is probably so subtle that it is not really worth the effort of going to a different shop. After all, it’s only apples.

But a website is not a kilogram of apples. It’s not simple merchandise. A website is a custom development and the difference is always in the team working on it. The experience, knowledge, formation, seriousness and commitment of the team is key. The final product and its quality will be the fruit of this custom development and the results obtained from it will be directly proportional to this quality.

This is what the client needs to appreciate. If the product or the strategy of the client is not correctly established, or if the website is not usable, accessible from different platforms or if the code is not standard and semantic (and hence indexable by search engines) then they are wasting their money.

Suddenly the 1500 Euros “bargain” will be seen for what it is – a false economy. Perhaps the client will recognize that they have missed an opportunity to promote their business, to outshine their competition and to have a website that does what they need. Sooner or later they may need to develop a new website from scratch. This involves investing further time, energy and of course money.

Unfortunately, the majority of projects seem to fall into this category and that’s why a lot of companies go through various websites, always looking for “the final version”. Browsing a few random websites is enough to see how much wasted money and how many lost business opportunities there are.

Now that’s what I call “expensive”.

Other interesting posts can be found on Julios blogs: Stanque and Realidad Aparte. I strongly recommend those who understand Spanish language to take a look at Padres y empleadores. Clientes y usuarios.

Today ICANN approved the Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process which means we soon will see Internet addresses containing non-Latin characters. That is a fair thing to do since maybe half of the world population is not writing with latin characters.

The process will begin on November 16th and will allow nations to apply for Internet address names that reflect their name in their own language.  Of course all these names will be evaluated and will take forever to be approved but at least the first step is made and the future will bring a lot of diversity in the domain-names’ world.

More news about the Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process can be found here.

There’s no reason for our Google Maps to look ugly because of  the icons Google used to offer. Now have become available a huge number of icons offered by Nico Mollet under the Creative Commons 3.0 license. The cherry on the cake is that they give away everything related to these icons so everybody can develop their own icons based on the original Photoshop files.

The Google Map icons set now includes:

1. Grocery
2. water sports
3. winter
4. Administration, Office & Industry
5. Culture & Entertainment
6. Education & Kids
7. Events & Weather
8. Friends, Family & Real Estate
9. Media
10. Miscellaneous
11. Restaurants & Hotels
12. Sports, Health & Beauty
13. Stores
14. Tourism & Nature
15. Transportation

As far as I see they intend to continue developing icons so the future looks bright for our Google Maps.

Today was a great day for Microsoft…or not.  The company finally reached a deal with the European Commision in the never ending fight concerning Microsoft attempts to impose IE as a unique browser for Windows and not willing to help the developers build compatible software with MS products. The measures that Microsoft will take are (quoting their press release):

• ensures that PC manufacturers will continue to be able to install any browser on top of Windows and make any browser the default
• PC manufacturers and users will be able to turn Internet Explorer on and off
• for the next five years in Europe, PC users who are running Internet Explorer as their default browser will receive a ballot screen that will enable them to easily download and install another browser if they would like
• PC users can make any other browser the default if they prefer. They can even turn Internet Explorer off, although there’s no need to turn off Internet Explorer in order to use a different browser or make another browser the default.
• developers throughout the industry, including in the open source community, will have access to technical documentation to assist them in building products that work well with Microsoft products
• Microsoft will also be required to support certain industry standards in its products and to fully document how these standards are supported. Microsoft’s proposed undertaking will make available legally-binding warranties that would be offered to third parties.

You can read the full press release here.

Ok, we all know now Google Frame. What is it ?

It’s a plugin for IE that  creates a frame inside and uses Webkit as renderer & javascript engine. All great because it allows you (the IE user) to see all the fancy new stuff like canvas, HTML5, SVG( maybe?).

But why?

I mean why would I take the overhead and want to use some sort of webkit disguised in IE, when I can have  the real Chrome on my computer?

I believe is just a manner of saying “because we can”, because in the real world we won’t be able to use this in a productive manner.

IE is (sadly) still used in a very big percentage, meaning the final users don’t care, or don’t know or don’t want to use another browser. Most of the time all the news and efforts to popularize a better browser are done in a restricted “geeky” circle. How many computer users know about Chrome? or about Firefox? How many of them care about which browser helps them find information?

How  about corporations? I’m stunned that a big telecommunication company used to register my personal data using IE6 –  come on, they are internet providers, they are a telecommunication company, they don’t sell shoes – and still they don’t give a sh*t.

As developers (web developers) we have all sort of browsers on our machines, to test and make our work cross-browser, but for the others one browser is enough, and guess what : this one is still IE, the old pure IE ( 6 of course ).

So going back to Chrome frame:

-  yes, it’s a nice plugin and in a smart company that does not want to disrupt the employees workflow with learning a new browser this would be a solution, even if implies a lot of work from the network admins –   printing is still not working so this may be an issue.

- yes, it’s a nice tool to allow the latest web technologies work in IE

- yes, it’s a nice idea –  just for the fun of having IE hacked

But regarding the real world with practical and pure pragmatical applications –  I believe it won’t make a difference.

I know almost every blogger wrote about this subject (lately all complaining about IE6 still being used by common users) – but this time I think we should take all this to the next level and start doing something about it.

I admit I don’t usually have contact with the final clients or have access to their websites stats – working as a freelancer made me lose contact with the real world and soon I started to believe that IE6 is slowly dissapearing. My sites’ stats show that Mozilla “rulz” when it comes to browsers and slowly, over the years, I began hoping that maybe one day I won’t have to code for IE6 anymore. The release of IE8 should have been the final stroke.

I was wrong. On most of the websites I code Internet Explorer is the master and mostly IE6 (I saw IE 5 too). We’re talking about brochure sites for small companies from Western Europe targeting users over 30years. Not IT sites read by coders who probably have all the existent brosers installed on their computers.

So it’s time to do something – we cannot talk to everybody asking to upgrade but we can add some custom message into our code to encourage users to upgrade. It’s safe, it’s free and it’s recommended. Starting from simple messages/ icons in the footer/sidebars of the websites you code to a more “extreme” solution like “IE6 Upgrade Warning Script” asking you to upgrade your browser and choose from IE8, Mozilla, Safari, Opera & Chrome. I think this kind of script scares people but maybe a small percentage will actually click.

I know I did not re-invent the wheel, coders wrote about this a long time ago – but no common user is reading IT blogs or actually talking about browsers at the pub – so I think a lot of messages shot blank by addressing to the wrong users. Asking permission from the final client to use their site help people move on from IE6 towards something better is my idea.

I look forward to reading about yours.

We made an usability case study for Kroppr.

Read it here.

Nicewallpapers.info is organizing a wallpaper contest with the Easter holidays as subject.

All you have to do is to upload as many   wallpapers as you have ( please don’t steal other people’s work ), and win 100$.

nicewallpapers.info