Paul O'Flaherty

Browsers, OS, Mobile, Resolution – The Top 10 Of Everything

I’m sure you’ve all heard me boasting lately (probably to the point of wanting to stab me in the eye with your pen) about how happy we’ve been with the traffic that our fledgling humor site, Daily Shite is getting.

Daily Shite is a very interesting site to me, not just because I own it, but because it is an ” every man” site. Our demographics and audience are not the tech crowd. Nor are they of any one particular niche. We’re a bit of everything for everybody, something which has come about by the fact that we don’t post anything with a  visual over roughly PG 13. In other words, no T&A, so you can browse at work, or school or with your girlfriend and not worry

This universal appeal makes the statistics gathered by tools such as Google Analytics (which is where all the stats in this post come from) incredibly interesting because it gives a more real world view of browser and OS usage than looking at the statistics for this blog or TechCrunch would. Niches tend to be skewed one way or the other and Daily Shite manages to avoid all that.

Anyway, the graphs below are based on our Google Analytics for the past 30 days (February 5th 2010 – March 7th 2010) and cover 1,427,403 unique visits (not page views, that’s a far higher number but useless here, all we want is actual user statistics).

The Top 10 Browsers:

Firefox is way out in the lead with a massive 74.77%

The big surprise here is that Chrome (11.28% of traffic) is seriously outpacing Internet Explorer (7.72%). Another surprise is that IE only makes up less than 8% of our traffic.

The break down of IE usage is also interesting with almost 72% using Internet Explorer 8 and just 3% still back on the archaic IE6.

The Top 10 Operating Systems:

Does Linux matter anymore?

No surprise that Windows in the big leader here. I am surprised to see Mac OS at nearly 23% and I’m also wondering how long it will be before iPhone and iPod (and iPad) start to eclipse Linux.

Vista is the dominant Microsoft OS at the moment with at over 40% but a big surprise is the Windows 7 adoption which is already making up over 24% of our windows based users. I expect to see both XP and Vista numbers decline over time as Win 7 adoption continues.

Top Ten Browser & Operating System Combinations

Firefox is the browser of choice

Mac users must not like Safari all that much. Firefox is getting more than 4 times the love than Safari does on it’s native system and Chrome is making decent inroads with 1.27%. Of little surprise however, is that regardless of what operating system you use, Firefox is the browser of choice.

I thought that in 2010 Java support would be almost ubiquitous, however 8.62% or 123,001 or our visitors didn’t have Java support enabled.  This can’t be accounted for by mobile visits because mobile traffic only made up 0.56% of our visits ( a number which we are definitely working to improve.).

Over 8% of users don't have Java enabled

Top 10 Mobile Operating Systems

iPhone and iPod dominate

No real surprises here as the iPhone and iPod dominate with over 78% of the traffic combined. Android puts in a good showing at almost 12% and I wonder if it’s not time to say “bye bye” to PalmOS?

Top 10 Screen Resolutions

1024x768 isn't going away any time soon

While these numbers probably aren’t that interesting to most folks, to developers they are key as we get some idea of what kind of screen real estate we have to play with and what kind of resolutions we need to be targeting.

The most telling resolutions here are the dominant 1280×800, which is probably due to laptop owners and people who purchased early TFT’s, and 1024×768 which is still in use by over 9% of our visitors so I don’t think developers will be able to drop support for that resolution anytime soon.

So, that’s out roundup based on the past 30 days of traffic and 1,427,403 unique visits according to Google Analytics.

There’s a lot of interesting information to be gleaned from this and I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. I’ll do another post like this in a month or two in order to see how the landscape has changed and what we can learn from it.

The Problems with the WordPress Theme Ecosphere

WordPress

Much of this post applies to all CMSs (Content Management Systems) and blog platforms but I’ll be talking about WordPress as that is what I have been dealing about the last few days.

I’ve spent a lot of time searching for themes lately. Not just for this blog but for projects as well. I’ve also spent time talking to folks who are in search of themes and hitting the same issues I am.

This is what I’ve discovered while searching for WordPress themes:

The WordPress theme repository sucks ass.

It’s full to the brim with out of date themes that in some cases, haven’t been updated by the theme author in 16 months. It’s also full of themes that are essentially the same theme that have had  few of the colors swapped in the CSS and been given a new header. Why is this? Why is there no apparent quality control beyond the exclusion of themes with encoded and embedded advertising links (sponsored themes)?

Searching for themes outside of the repository is near pointless unless you want to either pay for a “professional” theme, get a freebie functionally retarded version of a “pro” theme or get a freebie infected and designed to allow you blog to be hacked theme. Either that or you get themes that the designers were too embarrassed to include in the WordPress theme repository.

95 percent of theme creators are cloners.

Either lazy or they just create bog standard, shite themes so that they can drive traffic to there sites and annoy the piss out of people who are searching for usable themes. Why bother creating a theme that is a literal clone of all your “other” themes other wise.  When two separate themes are so similar that they would probably both validate on the same hash check you should know that you are doing something wrong!

What is the point dear theme cloners (I won’t call you designers – that’s reserved for the 5 percent that pump out quality, usable work) of rereleasing the same theme over and over again? Or even worse, what is the point of spending ages crafting a beautiful theme, releasing it, and not maintaining it?

I’ve seen some gorgeous themes out there that have never made it beyond the initial release. They are useful, perhaps, to people like me who hate to reinvent the wheel and love to use existing themes a kick off point to build upon, but to the average, not much if any coding experience, HTML or PHP scares them more than meeting Michael Myers in a dark alley, end user?

If you’re not going to maintain it, don’t release it!

I love WordPress. I love open source. I love that we have the freedom to build, to build upon, to fork and release pretty much anything we damn well like.

I hate that by having no quality control, by being simply lazy or unscrupulous we are damaging the user experience for new users and utterly frustrating the crap out of experienced users.

Chromium OS First Impression: The 90’s Set-top Box of 2010?

An Operating System. Supposedly.

As most of you are aware I am a huge Google fan but…

If Google’s Chrome browser went to the office Christmas party and had a one night stand with Linux behind the bar, then Chromium OS would be the resultant bastard child.

Unfortunately for this particular bastard child it would share none of the looks, speed or intelligence which makes either of its parents great.  In the chromosomal world of this coupling all of the good genes have been invited to a party and headed off to get pissed and enjoy themselves, leaving only the crud of the genetic pool to great baby Chromium.

Normally I take a great deal of geeky pleasure in testing a new operating system so today I enthusiastically followed Jorge Sierras quick post about how to run Google Chrome OS from a USB drive, edited my bios settings to allow booting from USB and in next to no time was looking a a big blue login screen. That was where the fun and excitement stopped.

Chromium (or Chrome OS) is supposed to be an operating system for connected folk. In fact about all you can do with the operating system is be online. Want to do something offline? Forget it, better go back to your Windows or Mac laptop, Chrome OS is not for you baby!

So being the connected chappy that I am I was surprised when asked to log in with my Google account but wasn’t presented with a place to enter the network password for my Wi-Fi.

I had to log in with the default username (chronos – no password) and then go about finding out where the network settings were. After clicking enable wi-fi a few times it still wouldn’t connect and never asked my for my password even though my wi-fi light was glowing happily away at the front of my laptop.

In the end I was forced to whip out an ethernet cable and connect that way (irony or what?).

Windows 95?

Inside the operating system wasn’t much of a better experience. The UI felt slow and very underdeveloped (although the browser itself was fast but that’s to be expected, it’s Chrome after all) and moving through the options menu felt like I was back in Windows 95 or NT.

To be fair, part of the slowness I felt could have been attributable to the fact that I was running the Chromium from a USB key but I have run other linux distros (and that’s what Chromium is under the hood) from USB keys before, as well as tested a lot of portable apps and none of them felt quite this slow.

It wasn’t terribly slow, just slow. Hard to quantify although as I said earlier the browser felt snappy enough actually surfing.

Chromium comes with a few “preinstalled” applications which are actually all shortcuts to web based apps such as Gmail, Pandora etc. There is actually nothing installed in the operating system. I suppose if living exclusively online is your thing then this won’t bother you but my love/hate affair with the cloud is well known and I don’t really want an operating system that is practically useless if  you don’t have access to web.

Everything about Chromium feels unfinished and even not particularly well thought out. It’s as if the guys at Google had a collective brain fart, decided to prototype an operating system, gave up a fifth of the way through the prototype to go for beers and decided to release it when they came back a full six sheets to wind.

Just won't open!

Take saving an image you find on the web as an example.

I visited the gallery on this blog and attempted to save an image. In order to find my saved image I had to go to the downloads section of Chrome where I could see that it was downloaded. Clicking on the link to display the file or open the folder didn’t work.

It didn’t matter how many times I clicked that link, it wouldn’t open and to top it off, the preview image didn’t display either.

Now, for someone like me that is not the end all of trying to access the file. The more tech savvy of you are aware that in most (all?) browsers you can get to the file system of the computer.

Browsing files

In Chromium this can be achieved by typing “file://” and hitting enter in the address bar. This results in a listing of directories and files much the same as you get when you visit an open directory on the web in your browser.

If you are familiar with Linux it’s easy to find the file image you’ve saved, once you’re prepared to click on “mnt” and then find “chronos” all the way to the “downloads” folder. Easy simple. No seriously, everyone will be doing it soon so you might as well get used to it!

Chromium isn’t finished. Not by a long shot. It’s shitty even for a Linux distribution of the incredibly lame ‘made by a 1st time learner’ variety. It has no file explorer, the interface is crap, finding saved files is a nightmare and even simple things like logging on and off or even just properly shutting down your machine are lacking UI menus and buttons.

Chromium may have a place in internet cafes and libraries where a locked down environment without much functionality is required, but even there it may have problems. Printing is not supported at the moment and for those of you intending to use it at home you can forget about hooking up your portable hard drive or that nice mouse you’ve got.

If you have a laptop or even a netbook and you install Chromium then you are cutting the functionality and usefulness of that device by about 50% (90% for a decent laptop) and that’s a best case scenario. If you do eventually buy a device that is Chromium only then I’d consider getting your head examined because there are better things to spend money on, like a descent coffee machine while you save for a real laptop that can actually do things beyond just surf the web.

Back in the 90’s we had set top boxes for your TV that allowed you access the internet and had about as much functionality as Chromium. They were a gimmick. Cheap, cheerful and useless.

Do we really want to go back to that?

The Cloud isn’t Everything

Which one?

John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has been arguing the case for PC manufacturers to build their own operating systems.

The essential argument being that with everything that we use every day already existing in the cloud it shouldn’t matter what OS we are running.

Apple has separated themselves from the crowd by developing their own OS and hardware, other PC manufacturers should be doing the same thing or just give up and die.

If Palm can create WebOS for pocket-sized computers — replete with an email client, calendaring app, web browser, and SDK — why couldn’t these companies make something equivalent for full-size computers?

If Apple and Palm can do it (and now Google) then why aren’t Dell, Sony, HP and the rest of the big gin PC manufacturers?

These PC makers are lacking in neither financial resources nor opportunity. What they’re lacking is ambition, gumption, and passion for great software and new frontiers. They’re busy dying.

Johns logic is sound as long as you are willing to make the assumption that the only reason personal computers are used today is to surf the web and be online.

The web is a great resource and has enriched or lives dramatically but is only of any value if you can actually connect to it. Admittedly, for most of the developed, world it is now easy to connect to the web even while on the move, but even when you do connect the service that you want is not always there.

Your email host may be down. Your web applications host may have server issues or simply shut up shop.

What about graphic designers or people doing audio and video editing? Photoshop on the web? Not likely! Not in a way that offers the power and options of CS4 running on my laptop.

As we’ve already seen most online applications are cut down versions, lacking the feature set and power of the their desktop “big brother”.

Can you imagine editing a high definition video and having to upload gigabytes of data to the cloud before you could begin editing your footage? Not to mention the bandwidth costs to the service providing the editing software.

What of the lowly PC gamer? Will Activision develop a version fo Call of Duty 2 for Sony OS, Google OS, HP OS, Windows, Mac and god knows how many other OS’s?

How about Photoshop, Firefox or iTunes for all these platforms as well?

I think not. It’s just not a practical solution. Most companies have a hard time getting versions of their software out for Windows, Mac and Linux at the moment.

The reason we have so much diversity in software at the moment and so much polished quality software that we rely on, is because the operating system arena is not saturated in the way that John wants is encouraging.

If it was, then talented developers would all be working on incredibly similar projects for a vast number operating systems, their talent and the programs they develop reaching incredibly limited audiences.

As it stands now we have vast armies of developers working for a limited number of platforms which allows them to develop and innovate without having to constantly reinvent the wheel. They can build upon and learn from the work and code of others.

Lets not even bring the issue of software patents into the mix!

Imagine if every time you wrote an application you had to do it for 16 different operating systems with their own file systems, quirks and API’s? A nightmare!

In fact it is that nightmare that would bring us very rapidly back to a situation where we had only a small number of OS’s as developers would develop for the platform which is the most developer friendly.

This is turn would lead to end users choosing that platform as it would have the greatest choice of software and support. That in turn brings more developers to the platform because the money is where the users are.

As John notes this already happened in the early days of personal computing when we had a massive amount of operating system choices and they all whittled away as developers and users moved to the platforms with the most choice and users.

See where I’m going with this? Even if every PC manufacturer released an OS tomorrow, after a while we would end up with the vast majority of people using only 2 or three of those operating systems.

Everything is not in the cloud, nor should it be. The cloud is unreliable. Connections to the cloud are unreliable and the cloud can’t match the convenience or power of software running locally on your home PC or laptop.

WordPress Plugin Developers: Can We Standardize Where Menus Appear?

Confused and Frustrated?

Dear WordPress Plugin Developers,

I know you’ve spent a long time working on your plugin and I am very grateful for the work you have done. However, as someone who spends a lot of time trying out different plugins for use on a number of sites can I ask that you standardize where the menu for your plugin is going to be located.

Sometimes I install a plugin and find I have difficultly tracking down the link to the options page for that plugin. Sometimes it is in the Settings tab, other times it is in the the Plugins tab and quite often it has even created a tab all of it’s own on in the WordPress interface.

I must say that this is all very counter intuitive and disrupts the work flow for those of us who expect access to plugins settings to be located in an obvious place such as the “Settings” tab.

Hoping that you will all take that into consideration in the next release of your wonderful plugins.

Faithfully,

Paul.

P.S. Can you pass the word on to your theme developer friends as well, as some of them appear to be confused as to where the link for a themes options should be located. After all, what’s the point of a nice sidebar with everything broken into specific areas if we stick in links where ever we want?

Google Readers Secret Ninja Mode

Matt Cutts demonstrates Google Readers secret ninja mode Easter egg on the Google Webmaster Central Youtube channel.

I’m wondering if we should all start being worried that it features ninjas and love hearts?

I mean ninjas and love hearts don’t exactly go together. Not unless the ninja is stabbing you through the heart, or ripping your heart out for messing with his girlfriend or something! Right?

Windows 8 To Support 128-Bit?

128-bit Windows 8?

The Windows 7 launch parties are soon to be kicking off but Microsoft is already looking to the future and working on 128-bit architecture compatibility for Windows 8 and 9.

While the stomping boots of progress cannot be halted in their relentless path, am I the only one who believes that this is premature? Perhaps the effort should be spent on getting everybody onto 64-bit platforms first and fully exploring the potential of the 64-bit space.

We have to have a cut off point. When will Windows 8 come out? 3 years? I believe they’re aiming for 2012. You can’t seriously expect me to believe that everybody, especially the notoriously slow to upgrade corporations will have abandoned their 32-bit hardware. Are vendors and developers going to have to support 3 versions of their programs?

Or will things still be like they are today, except instead of people running 32-bit applications on 64-bit machines they’ll be running 32-bit apps on 128-bit machines?

Hack Sociable to work with YOURLS – Quick and Dirty

Code

Since we’ve created Scrw.us and started using our own custom short URLs for our domains we’ve run into a few issues with other WordPress plugins not working quite the way we would like them to.

The biggest issue we’ve had is with the awesome sociable plugin by Joost De Valk (now taken over by BlogPlay) which adds social bookmarking buttons to all your posts. It’s an amazing plugin and even allows you to use it with URL shortening service awe.sm, but of course we wanted to use our own service which runs on Yourls.

When I first made the modifications to Sociable I didn’t realized that some services, such as StumbleUpon, would throw a fit when they got passed the scrw.us URL. Essentially they were having problems with the 301 redirect, so I went back and did it a second time.

I didn’t want to strip out the awe.sm shortening functionality (in case I ever needed to fall back on it) from the script and wanted to be able to selectively decide which services to send a short URL to and which to send the original URL to.

My solutions isn’t exactly elegant and there are certainly other ways to approach it, but it works.

First working with version 3.4.4 of Sociable, open the file “sociable.php” in your favorite editor (I’m working in Dreamweaver) and find line 605.

Line 605 should look like this:

$permalink = urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID));

Replace it with the following:

$permalink = urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID));
$shortlink = urlencode(wp_ozh_yourls_raw_url());

Next find line 679 which reads:

$url = str_replace(‘PERMALINK’, $permalink, $url);

Replace line 679 with the following:

$url = str_replace(‘PERMALINK’, $permalink, $url);
$url = str_replace(‘SHORTLINK’, $shortlink, $url);

All that we’ve done here is create new variable called “$shortlink” which grabs the short URL via a call to the YOURLS API (more info on the API here) and allows us to place the short URL into the array which is used to construct the URL used in the bookmarks.

The array for constructing the URLS is between lines 62 and 552.  The section for posting to Twitter looks like this:

‘Twitter’ => Array(
‘favicon’ => ‘twitter.png’,
‘awesm_channel’ => ‘twitter’,
‘url’ => ‘http://twitter.com/home?status=TITLE%20-%20PERMALINK’,

As it is above, the twitter bookmark that appears on the bottom of your post will send the full URL of your post to twitter along with the title. In order to make it work with your short URL just swap out “PERMALINK” for “SHORTLINK”:

‘Twitter’ => Array(
‘favicon’ => ‘twitter.png’,
‘awesm_channel’ => ‘twitter’,
‘url’ => ‘http://twitter.com/home?status=TITLE%20-%20SHORTLINK’,

Now all you have to do is decide which services you want to send short URLs to and which you want to get the full URL and replace as necessary inside the array.

As a note, we’re using the short URL for Facebook, Twitter, Email and Friendfeed and using the full URL for Digg and StumbleUpon. You may need to test which ones work for you, depending on the services you use, as they don’t all accept the short URL.

What XP Netbook Manufactures Aren’t Telling You?

Your XP Netbook that you just bought isn’t secure. Nor will it ever be. It’s running an 8 year old operating system for which support has been discontinued since April of 2009. There will not be any new security patches or updates for your XP netbook. Not from Microsoft at least.

Microsoft announced on April 3rd last year ( 2008 ) that it had bowed to demand of manufacturers and would allow them to sell Windows XP Home for ULCPCs (ultra low cost personal computers or netbooks) will be until June 30, 2010, or one year after general availability of the next version of Windows.

Michael Dix, General Manager of Windows Client Product Management, also made it very clear in the same interview that just because OEMs could sell netbooks with XP on it, did not mean they were going to be supporting it beyond April 2009:

I should also note that there will also be no impact on our technical support plans—mainstream technical support will continue to be available until April 2009 and extended support will continue until April 2014.

Now I know some of you are baying for Steve Ballmers blood at this point and ready to blame Microsoft for this apparent “injustice” or trickery, but step back and think for a minute about who really is to blame on this occasion. Here’s a hint: It’s not Microsoft.

This all came to my attention today when I read that Microsoft would not be patching a bug in XP that it had already fixed in Vista, citing the age of XPs code as making it unfeasible and I ended up in a lengthy discussion on Twitter trying to explain why it was not Microsoft people should be mad at, but the manufacturers, the OEM’s.

The fact of the matter is that when the manufactures approached Microsoft, due to consumer demand, they entered into the arrangement knowing Microsofts support lifecycle and exactly when support for XP was due to end. Microsoft have never hid or even glossed over the fact that support for XP would be ending last April and I would hazard a guess that the OEM partners involved got a pretty good deal on XP due to that fact.

Yet, this knowledge in hand, the netbook manufacturers have sold and continue to sell and advertise machines that are running an operating system that will not be receiving an more support, bug fixes or security upgrades.

On the whole XP is a dead horse to Microsoft and their only interest in providing any support for it is at business level, which means businesses with XP Professional (and even they would like to bump those up to Windows 7 ASAP ). These are the only licenses that may qualify for extended support as XP Home is a consumer product and does not qualify as business or development software.

Microsoft are more interested in the imminent release of the excellent Windows 7 and erasing the memory of Vista while moving on to the next project.

So where does this leave you? It leaves you with a bone to pick with the company that produced your netbook and quite possibly with your retailer as well.

Questions have to be asked of both. Why weren’t consumers informed when purchasing these machines that the operating system was going, or at this point, is out of date and no longer supported?

Of course, I’m sure that the OEM’s and retailers alike will push the responsibility back on the consumer, stating that if they’re savvy enough to be looking for a netbook they should be savvy enough to do some research on the product they’re about to drop a lot of hard earned cash for.

Frankly I agree with the manufactures and retailers on that score, but it doesn’t eliminate the fact that they should have actively informed customers that this was the situation when they were purchasing the netbooks and included it in the advertising literature. After all, it’s a serious thing and a big deciding factor to know that the operating system is no longer supported.

One last thing, considering the OEM’s decided to go with XP knowing that the OS was about to end it’s support lifecycle, should they be held accountable to move into an paid support arrangement with Microsoft similar to what they have in place for business software?

Go C64 Retro On The iPhone

Manomio’s C64 emulator for the iPhone / iPod Touch has finally been approved by Apple and is available in the App store at $4.99.

As a long time C64 fan from back in the day, I’m über excited about this and looking forward to some old school gaming on the move.

It appears that Manomio will be selling game packs which can be purchased separately (besides the few that ship with the emulator) but I’m wondering if they will ever make some provision to upload your own?

I’ve got drawers full of old C64 games and disks, most of which have already been transferred to the PC (or just downloaded form emulator sites considering I have the originals) that it would be cool to have on the iPhone. Also, I’m sure that as diligent as Manomio may be, they’re be many titles that they just can’t find the original publisher for and that the community could upload.

We’ll have to wait and see what they’re plans are I guess.

Wolfenstein Official Launch Trailer

Wolfenstein 3D

I’ve been a Wolfenstein fan since the very beginning, way back in 1992, in fact I’m sure I still have the original knocking around here somewhere.

With that in mind, it goes without saying that I am very much looking forward to getting my hands on the new Wolfenstein when it’s released, which should be next Tuesday, August 18th.

You can check out the trailer for the new Wolfenstein below and i’f you’re feeling a little nostalgic you can download the original Wolfenstein 3D and have some “old skool” fun kicking Nazi butt!