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A Visit From Flickr!

Friday, July 16th, 2010

One of the best perks of working at Yahoo! is getting to attend first-class talks, especially when the talk is by one of your favorite groups. In this case, Flickr!

Flickr schwag: lens cleaner, phone cleaner, or iPhone 4 reception-enabler?Flickr schwag: lens cleaner, phone cleaner, or iPhone 4 reception-enabler?

…and it helps if one of the speakers was once a member of your team (Markus was in Yahoo! Mobile until recently).

Markus Spiering of FlickrMarkus Spiering of Flickr

I probably can’t chat too much about the future improvements they talked about, but I’ll just say there are some exciting plans for Flickr in the coming months! As you may already know, Flickr recently launched its new photo page. Markus went over some of the key new layout improvements, including the new prominence of geolocation and camera model information, which was previously buried deep in the exif info. He and Chris Martin also explained some of the improved photo navigation. Also, for anyone interested to know, the entire site was redone using YUI 3.

Chris briefly went over the public Flickr API they provide.

What’s really exciting is the amount of phones Flickr is being integrated into. It really says something when the top camera model for Flickr is the iPhone. More generally, just think of all the possibilities with packaging Flickr into lots of other phones out there (not everyone has an iPhone, after all!).

Markus was also proud to exclaim that not only was the native Flickr app featured in the recent WWDC keynote, but it was also featured in iPhone commercials around the world (“There’s an app for that…”). Coincidentally, later that day Apple approved the latest version of the Flickr app, which now supports uploading in the background!

Chris Martin of FlickrChris Martin of Flickr

Keep your eyes peeled on Flickr! Cool improvements heading to a screen near you…

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A Clockwork Box

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Clockwork Orange cover
With CSS there are always various ways to accomplish something. After reading this short tidbit, you should be familiar with the various ways of controlling the size of an element’s padding, border, and margin, and you should know what the handy “clockwork” tip is, and how it will be useful to remember when you’re putting your CSS into practice.

Equal values on all four sides

If all four values (top, right, bottom, and left) are equal, then you simply write the following:

padding: 1px;
border-width: 1px;
margin: 1px;

The longhand way

If you don’t want equal values on all four sides, then you can specify each side individually:

padding-top: 1px;
padding-right: 2px;
padding-bottom: 3px;
padding-left: 4px;

border-top-width: 1px;
border-right-width: 2px;
border-bottom-width: 3px;
border-left-width: 4px;

margin-top: 1px;
margin-right: 2px;
margin-bottom: 3px;
margin-left: 4px;

The shortcut (like clockwork)

However this seems to be quite a hassle typing out each property, so you’ll find it’s much easier to use the following shorthand, which is in this order: top, right, bottom, left (think of the hands going clockwise around a clock). The following is equivalent to the above code:

padding: 1px 2px 3px 4px;
border-width: 1px 2px 3px 4px;
margin: 1px 2px 3px 4px;

Other shorthands

This is the style I find myself writing in most often, but there are two other shorthand styles you should be aware of:

padding: 1px 2px 3px;  /* top, left/right, bottom */
padding: 1px 2px;      /* top/bottom, left/right */

Summary

In short, there are various ways to define the padding, border, and margin on an element. Here’s a recap, with padding used as an example:

padding: 1px;              /* 1 value: top/right/bottom/left     */
padding: 1px 2px;          /* 2 values: top/bottom, left/right   */
padding: 1px 2px 3px;      /* 3 values: top, left/right, bottom  */
padding: 1px 2px 3px 4px;  /* 4 values: top, right, bottom, left */

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Links for the week of February 21, 2010

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

General links

Mobile

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Links for the week of February 14, 2010

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

General links

HTML5/CSS3 and new web technology

Mobile

Videos

BlackBerry showing off its new WebKit Browser

Engadget’s hands-on demo of Windows Phone 7 Series

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Overall iPhone browser traffic share is decreasing (Jan2009 to Jan2010)

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

According to the statistics available on statcounter.com, from January 2009 to January 2010, iPhone browser traffic share actually decreased, not increased, as one might expect.

This is likely due to new competition from Android phones, as well as the possibility that more users are simply using iPhone native apps instead of web apps.

In any case, in my opinion these are the figures we ought to be looking at, not overall phone sales, as others such as PPK concentrate on. If we don’t use computer sales as an estimate of desktop browser share, then why should we use phone sales as an estimate of mobile browser share? Just because someone has a phone with a pre-installed browser doesn’t lead them to actually use it.

In any case, here’s the statistics, with a few surprises:

  • iPhone/iTouch web traffic share decreased in the US and worldwide
  • BlackBerry gained market share
  • NetFront gained market share (this somewhat baffled me)

And now for the stats…

Worldwide mobile browser traffic (% share)

Device 2009 % 2010 % % change
Opera 24.69 25.53 +0.84
iPhone 23.06 21.52 -1.54
Nokia 17.78 18.53 +1.75
iTouch 12.89 11.6 -1.29
BlackBerry 4.91 9.85 +4.94
Android 1.92 4.54 +2.62
NetFront 1.35 3.27 +1.92
Sony PSP 4.38 1.2 -3.18
Openwave 2.61 0.97 -1.64
(Other) 6.41 2.98 -3.43

US mobile browser traffic (% share)

Device 2009 % 2010 % % change
iPhone 37.01 32.96 -4.05
iTouch 23.49 20.62 -2.87
BlackBerry 11.37 19.32 +7.95
Android 5.19 11.9 +6.71
Sony PSP 7.68 2.18 -5.5
Opera 3.56 3.06 -0.5
Openwave 3.07 2.04 -1.03
NetFront 1 2.26 +1.26
IEMobile 3.12 0.74 -2.38
(Other) 4.5 4.92 +0.42

Predictions for 2010:

  • Android continues to increase market share
  • Decrease in NetFront market share (opposite of current trend)
  • Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series reverses downward IE trend
  • iPad grows in market share (this is a given, but will it break the top 10?)

Source: statcounter.com

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