Author: agup

What version of Android do I target?

The version of Android that you need to develop against really depends on your customers and your requirements. If you are simply planning on aiming for the latest and greatest version of Android there are some facts you should be aware of:

Approximately 86% of Android users are running Android v2.2 – 2.3.7 (Gingerbread). Less than 5% are running v3.0 and above (Honeycomb and Ice cream sandwich). And, only 1% are using Android v4 (Ice cream sandwich)! It’s true, and you can check my stats from Google here.

To add some context, Android v3 was released in February 2011. Android v4 was released in October 2011, which was less than one year later. That’s two major releases in one year, and there’s already press on Android v5 being released in 2012. Most software companies have major release cycles over several years for a variety of reasons including allowing time for their customer base to adopt new technology. Of course, consumers and organizations are going to continue to trade-in their smartphones for newer versions. But, that’s going to take time as contracts expire and phones wear out.

So, if you plan on building an app within the next few months that is mostly focused on the newest, coolest features and hardware there may be many potential customers that can’t use it. It’s something to consider. My suggestion is to check your current technical requirements against the deprecated list in Android v4 and see if all your functionality is forward compatible. Then weigh any new features that are only supported on Android v3 and v4 against how many of your most important customers will be able to use it and be willing to pay for it.

It’s interesting and disturbing at the same time that Google is two major operating system versions ahead of the vast majority of their customers. I’m not 100% certain, but I think this is an unprecedented position in the software industry. My take-away is if your product is targeting a much wider swath of users than the bleeding edge adopters, then you need to be careful about what new features you implement.

If you spend too many development cycles building cool new features that your customers don’t need or can’t use for another six months to a year, then it’s potentially a wasted effort, or worse.  And, if your strategy is to be ahead of the curve and entice customers with new features, then don’t get so far ahead of the curve that customers can’t keep up or you’ll risk leaving them behind.

7 required improvements for the Web, HTML and JavaScript

Here’s my 2012 web developer wish list for improvements that I’d like to see happen in the web developer world. If HTML and JavaScript want to be considered enterprise ready for commercial-grade deployments then here’s some things that are needed today.

For clarity, I consider a commercial software deployment to be one that contains over one thousand lines of code, at least two custom .js libraries and involves at least two developers and some sort of code versioning system.

  1. Refactoring. Not having this capability continues to be a huge productivity issue for large projects. Try refactoring across six JavaScript libraries and 1200 lines of code using Notepad++.
  2. Even stronger scope enforcement in JavaScript classes. One wrong misspelling and you can spend fun filled hours (or days) tracking down a private variable that turned itself into a global variable.
  3. Built-in support for code comments. Visual Studio does a fine job, for example. But, it’s still kind of a hack to make it work. I’d like the built-in ability to create comments for methods and classes directly and then be able to access those comments via intellisense throughout any file in the project. Again, this is all about productivity by having this information accessible at your fingertips.
  4. Better built-in JavaScript checking for IDEs. I’d like to see built-in JSLint-like capabilities that have been updated to the latest HTML, JavaScript and CSS3 versions, and not some third party plug-in that’s optional.
  5. Best practice whitepapers. These would be whitepapers written by the browser vendors that provide guidelines on the correct patterns to use when building apps against their browsers. Seriously, it’s been roughly 21 years since we started using browsers and there’s no guidance at all from the powers that be.  Honestly, I’m stunned that these don’t exist. That would be similar to Microsoft publishing .NET and then not providing any conceptual help documentation.
  6. Official tools for browser certification and testing. The folks that build the browsers don’t give us a way to verify if we are building our apps in the best way possible. If these items existed, then quality could get a lot better, and we’d all learn a lot too.
  7. Slower browser release cycles. A slower release cycle for browsers and more improved security and stability. I already blogged about this here.

The 1 Minute Primer for HTML 5

HTML 5 is getting a lot of press these days and I get a constant stream of questions from many non-techies, as well as developers, asking me to explain HTML5 in layman’s terms. So here it is.

HTML 5 is really a combination of three things: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. When all three of these technologies work together in a web browser then you have an HTML5 application. Period.

Why should we care about HTML 5? HMTL 5 brings many long awaited enhancements that make it easier for web developers to build more complex applications. More importantly, HTML 5 is being adopted by the major browser vendors: Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple and this adoption is making it possible for developers to take advantage of the latest web technology that are built into web browsers.

How is HTML 5 “built into a web browser”? Web browsers have to interpret a web page first, and then display the content for you. Browsers contain logic that let’s them parse a pages’ code, and that code provides instructions for the browser to do certain things. Behind the scenes, in fact, the page you are looking at is built using code. It’s the browser that interprets the code and displays it in a way that makes sense to you. If you haven’t ever seen web page code then you can usually select View > Source on your browsers tool bar. Cool, right?!

HTML 5. HTML 5 is the latest version of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) specification which has been around in various forms since approximately 1991. HTML is a tag based language that defines the meaning and placement of elements of a web page. For example, a <button> tag defines a clickable button on a web page.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Cascading Style Sheets, or more specifically CSS version 3 (a.k.a CSS3), provide the ability to apply styling to HTML elements. An example of styling would be to change the color of an HTML <button> from grey to green, as well as defining where on a web page it will be visible such as the top left corner.

JavaScript. JavaScript, which is really the meat behind HTML 5, is a type of programming language that lets developers implement actions within a web page. An example of an “action” would be when a web page visitor clicks a button that loads a picture. So, HTML defines the <button>, CSS styles the button, and JavaScript handles the action behind the scenes by retrieving the picture and then telling the browser how to display it for the end user.

This all sounds great, are there any downsides? Yes. First, HTML 5 is a standards-based specification that is still a work in progress. The specification and all its’ associated parts won’t be finalized for some time, possibly years. The good news is that browser vendors are keen to adopt this standard as much as possible. Second, implementation across different browsers isn’t 100% consistent. The good news is that there are tools and online resources to help developers work around many of these problems. Last, older versions of browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 7 or 8, older versions of Safari, etc) don’t support HTML 5. There are strong campaigns under way to educate people to upgrade for security, performance and viewing experience.

So, there you have it. That’s a cursory pass at HTML 5 and I hope this post helps. I’ve added a few links at the bottom if you want to learn more about it.

Learn More:

 HTML5Rocks.com – includes information on features, tutorials and great slide decks.

w3Schools.com –  includes live “Try it” samples that let you explore the functionality.

W3C HTML 5 Specification –the World Wide Web Consortium is the group that writes the standards. If you are a techie, this is “the” specification that the browser vendors base their functionality on.