PDG & Associates Web Design

May 25, 2011May 25, 2011

Hype Flash replacement spawned at Y Combinator

The Startup Foundry website published an interview with a software programmer, one of the cofounders, Jonathan Deutsch, of Tumult Co. He left a job at Apple to launch a startup.

I was faced with the decision of continuing to work with the great people on my team on a clearly high impact project, living with the “what if” syndrome, or trying to forge my own path. ”Regret Minimization” is what should win out in life, so it did. I had done a lot of different projects at Apple, and felt I made my mark both internally on the company and externally on Mac OS X.

About his experience at Y Combinator:

YC is definitely worthwhile. The network effects are staggering… it gives any YC company an advantage in making the right contacts, finding investment, and being in a support net with others in the same boat. And if you’re starting a company, why wouldn’t you want every advantage available to you? Paul Graham, Paul Buchheit, and Harj Taggar all give great advice with brilliant ideas sprinkled in. The dinners are fun, and there’s a lot that we learned from the speakers. Most founders would come early before each dinner just to hang out and discuss their startups or demo their products. The atmosphere is electric and contagious.

Visit the Hype website. Unfortunately for Mac OS Leopard (10.5) users, the app requires 10.6. A bad decision for many thousands of us.

May 25, 2011May 25, 2011

Google makes new image format

But fails to support Alpha channels (for true transparency)!

Firefox maker rejects the format, and will not support it until changes are made.

WebP’s lack of basic feature parity with JPEG in areas like metadata handling and ICC color profiles is identified by Muizelaar as another major problem with Google’s format. It also doesn’t add any important features that JPEG lacks, such as support for an alpha channel. He goes as far as using the phrase “half-baked” to describe the deficient WebP feature set.

Adopting a new image format in Web browsers is a big decision. Once a format becomes a part of the Web, it will have to be supported in perpetuity—adding overhead to the browser—even if it largely fizzles and only gains a small niche following. The chances of WebP attracting widespread use at this stage are very limited, so it seems prudent to avoid shoveling it into the browser.

Ecommerce – Mobile Payments

Have you heard of Square yet? It’s the hot new mobile payments tool for smartphones/mobile devices. Visit squareup.com

Square wants to replace cash registers, loyalty cards and paper receipts — with one device.

From the NYTimes on Tuesday:

On Monday, Jack Dorsey, Square’s co-founder and chief executive, announced a way for shoppers to pay by simply giving their name to the merchant. Mr. Dorsey, who also co-founded Twitter, said customers would use a new feature on Square’s iPhone or Android apps, called Card Case, to make payments. Merchants would use one called Register to ring up and track purchases.

Point of Sale technology is ripe for change

Recent comments at the wired.com article.

Nick Houldsworth wrote: I work for a web based point of sale software start-up called Vend (www.vendhq.com). I think this is a fantastic development. We at Vend, alongside some other startups (Cashier Live, Erply) been working on disrupting this sector for a while now. Traditional POS is expensive, clunky, and requires outrageous maintenance and infrastructure costs. We’re pleased to welcome a large and well funded player such as Square, into this space. Their iPad app may not be for all retailers (lacking some of the finer control over inventory, barcode scanning, and integration into 3rd party apps such as ecommerce and accounting) but for a simple get up and go POS and payment system, and an innovative shake up to the industry, this can only be positive :)

I ordered a Square reader for Android. It will be great to sell items without using PayPal.

One major POS equipment maker is Verifone. As quoted in the NYTimes article… Good luck, Mr. Bergeron. I think your prediction of failure is wrong:

Initially, the company most in Square’s sights is Verifone, whose point-of-sale terminals and software are in 70 percent of businesses in the United States. In an interview before Square’s announcement, Doug Bergeron, Verifone’s chief executive, said that Square would not catch on for payments because people will prefer N.F.C. technology and have security concerns about using Square.

May 18, 2011May 19, 2011

Adobe updates Flash player for Mac

Adobe has released a critical update to its Flash Player software (the browser plugin) that fixes critical security flaws and gives users a better way of controlling whether they are being tracked on the Web.

The Flash Player 10.3 update, released May 12, lets users manage Flash cookies using their browser’s privacy settings or through a new, native OS control panel.

And at long last, Mac OS users will finally get automatic software update notifications. It has been a disgrace that it took so long for Adobe to provide this, but we’re grateful nonetheless.

Because of this missing update notice functionality, I just found out about it today, May 18.

You can check which version of Flash Player you have installed at Adobe’s site.

Annoyingly, the control panel does not use Sparkle to check for updates, but launches a new browser window.

May 12, 2011May 12, 2011

Apple iPad Subscriptions — Evil?

Insight into the world of iOS developers

CNET ran a story yesterday about BeamItDown Software, the start-up software developer who made the iFlow Reader app for iOS. They condemn Apple for a draconian policy.

And a full interview at CNET of BeamItDown’s co-founder Dennis Morin.

Nowhere in the history of application development has there been rules associated with it, let alone hundreds of rules like there are now. I mean, this extends their [Apple’s] control-freak nature to a whole new level. So yeah I can sell an app on my Web site, that’s fine. But if I have something for sale on my Web site, I have to have a button in the app that allows a user to purchase that item through Apple’s In-App Purchase system for the same price that I sell it at on my Web site.

Now if I’m selling a book for $10 and someone clicks on that button in the app, I lose $1.15 on the sale and Apple makes $3. Let’s face it, the user doesn’t give a s—. They’re going to purchase it from wherever’s easiest to purchase it.

The bottom line is that if you buy a book through iBooks, Apple makes 30 percent on the sale. And if you buy a book through iFlow, Apple makes 30 percent on the sale. And I lose money.

To clarify the outrage these developers feel:

What people don’t understand is that if you’re selling an app on iOS, Apple hosts that app on their server. You upload it, the customer downloads it, it gets downloaded from their servers. OK. With In-App Purchase it doesn’t work that way. You host everything. You ship it directly to the customer. All Apple does in the process is collect the money and basically give you a token that says it was collected and you do everything else. It’s essentially doing exactly the same thing as a credit-card processing company for this 30 percent. Nothing more.

Another article: http://bit.ly/ixbNAv

May 12, 2011May 21, 2011

WordPress editor has an iframe glitch

If you have been trying to paste in Amazon product iframes, then you will discover that the WYSIWYG editor in WP (provided by TinyMCE) strips out the entire Amazon html snippet that you’re trying to embed.The editor does not know how to show the iframe, so it strips it out. Argh.

WordPress configures TinyMCE (i.e. the Visual Editor) to strip IFRAME tags. So it’s not a bug per se. It’s just terribly inconvenient for those wishing to embed a product from Amazon.com, like this:

One way to stop this is to keep the post in HTML view/editing mode. Do NOT switch to Visual mode, ever, for that particular post. But this is a hassle.

A blogger posted a solution in this WordPress Forum post. It involves editing your Theme’s functions.php file. I tried it and it works well; just be careful if you every update your Theme; it likely will be overwritten.

You can also install the plugin TinyMCE ADVANCED by Andrew Ozz — it has the option in its Settings config to allow iFrame tags. Go to: http://www.laptoptips.ca/

I don’t prefer solving the problem by using this plugin, however. The TinyMCE editor is heavy already; adding 17+ new buttons and features will slow the page load times even more.

Recommendations: edit the functions.php file with the easy fix by Chip Bennett. It is:


function mytheme_tinymce_config( $init ) {

// Add IFRAME to list of valid HTML elements (so they don't get stripped)

	// IFRAME
	$valid_iframe = 'iframe[id|class|title|style|align|frameborder|height|longdesc|marginheight|marginwidth|name|scrolling|src|width]';

	// Add to extended_valid_elements if it alreay exists
	if ( isset( $init['extended_valid_elements'] ) ) {
		$init['extended_valid_elements'] .= ',' . $valid_iframe;
	} else {
		$init['extended_valid_elements'] = $valid_iframe;
	}

// Pass $init back to WordPress
	return $init;
}
add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'mytheme_tinymce_config');

It works great for this blog.

May 7, 2011May 12, 2011

SEO Advice from a Pro

Understanding the SEO business.

Build a solid understanding of the SEO business with this interview of Jon Payne of Ephricon Web Marketing.

This post is a work in progress; more thoughts soon.

What not to do in SEM

The takeaway is simple: do not pay for inbound links to your site.

Why? These so-called “backlinks” are prohibited by Google’s guidelines.

The only time you can legitimately “pay” for links is via their own paid ad networks (AdWords and AdSense).

Read what the NYTimes discovered about the country’s 4 major flower sellers google-gaming efforts for Mother’s Day.

April 30, 2011April 30, 2011

Amazon’s Cloud service failure

A client of ours wants to host their video subscription site on Amazon’s cloud services. Last week they had an outage. Egads, this was not to supposed to happen. A point of view by Scott Gilbertson:

Amazon Autopsy Reveals Causes of Cloud Death

Amazon is also promising to improve its communication with customers when things go wrong, but as we pointed out earlier, the real problem is not necessarily Amazon. While Amazon’s services unquestionably failed, those sites that had a true distributed system in place (e.g. Netflix, SmugMug, SimpleGeo) were not affected.

In the end it depends how you were using EC2. If you were simply using it as a scalable web hosting service, your site went down. If you were using EC2 as a platform to build your own cloud architecture, then your services did not go down. The later is a very complex thing to do, and it’s telling that the sites that survived unaffected were all large companies with entire engineering teams dedicated to creating reliable EC2-based systems.

That may be the real lesson of Amazon’s failure — EC2 is no substitute for quality engineers.

Amazon has offered its promised apology. It’s published its post-mortem on the recent outage of its AWS EC2 (Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud) and RDS (Relational Database Service). It says what went wrong and how it’s planning to avoid such problems in the future.

April 30, 2011

Sony Playstation Network breach

Sony’s network has been hacked, and millions of customer credit numbers and personal data are in the hands of hackers.

Security for Mac

Mac OS X Security — Urgency is Growing for Protection

A client of ours, CHEN PR, handles the PR and social media strategy for Sophos. This is how we came across their free antivirus software for Mac.

As an all-Mac shop since we began in 1996, PDG & Associates has never used or needed antivirus software. For various reasons the Mac was not an easy or viable target for malware writers. But with Apple’s rising dominance in the computer industry ~~perhaps~~ it’s time to batten down the hatches!

Read a blog post by Sophos. Sophos created a free, award-winning antivirus program for Mac OS X.

Another columnist at ZDNET writes persuasively about the urgent need to prepare for the coming tide of malware. Read the article Why malware for Macs is on its way… by Ed Bott on May 5, 2011.