Android, the world's most popular mobile platform

Android

Android powers hundreds of millions of mobile devices in more than 190 countries around the world. It's the largest installed base of any mobile platform and growing fast—every day another million users power up their Android devices for the first time and start looking for apps, games, and other digital content.

Android gives you a world-class platform for creating apps and games for Android users everywhere, as well as an open marketplace for distributing to them instantly.

Global partnerships and large installed base

Building on the contributions of the open-source Linux community and more than 300 hardware, software, and carrier partners, Android has rapidly become the fastest-growing mobile OS.
Android’s openness has made it a favorite for consumers and developers alike, driving strong growth in app consumption. Android users download more than 1.5 billion apps and games from Google Play each month.

What is Android (video)

Android Vs Ios (video)

With it's partners, Android is continuously pushing the boundaries of hardware and software forward to bring new capabilities to users and developers. For developers, Android innovation lets you build powerful, differentiated applications that use the latest mobile technologies.

Powerful development framework

Android gives you everything you need to build best-in-class app experiences. It gives you a single application model that lets you deploy your apps broadly to hundreds of millions of users across a wide range of devices—from phones to tablets and beyond. Android also gives you tools for creating apps that look great and take advantage of the hardware capabilities available on each device. It automatically adapts your UI to look it's best on each device, while giving you as much control as you want over your UI on different device types. For example, you can create a single app binary that's optimized for both phone and tablet form factors. You declare your UI in lightweight sets of XML resources, one set for parts of the UI that are common to all form factors and other sets for optimzations specific to phones or tablets. At runtime, Android applies the correct resource sets based on its screen size, density, locale, and so on. To help you develop efficiently, the Android Developer Tools offer a full Java IDE with advanced features for developing, debugging, and packaging Android apps. Using the IDE, you can develop on any available Android device or create virtual devices that emulate any hardware configuration.

Growth of Android

Open marketplace for distributing your apps

Google Play is the premier marketplace for selling and distributing Android apps. When you publish an app on Google Play, you reach the huge installed base of Android. As an open marketplace, Google Play puts you in control of how you sell your products. You can publish whenever you want, as often as you want, and to the customers you want. You can distribute broadly to all markets and devices or focus on specific segments, devices, or ranges of hardware capabilities. You can monetize in the way that works best for your business—priced or free, with in-app products or subscriptions—for highest engagement and revenues. You also have complete control of the pricing for your apps and in-app products and can set or change prices in any supported currency at any time. Beyond growing your customer base, Google Play helps you build visibility and engagement across your apps and brand. As your apps rise in popularity, Google Play gives them higher placement in weekly "top" charts and rankings, and for the best apps promotional slots in curated collections. Preinstalled on hundreds of millions of Android devices around the world, Google Play can be a growth engine for your business

What is HTML5

What is HTML5, and Why Should You Care?

What is HTML5?

We're sure by now you've heard the term "HTML5" thrown around by the likes of Apple and Google. This is the next evolution of HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language, which forms the backbone of almost every site on the Internet. HTML4, the last major iteration of the language, debuted in 1997 and has been subsequently poked and prodded so that it can handle the demands of the modern Web. 

Why is it such a big deal?

HTML 4 has been tweaked, stretched and augmented beyond its initial scope to bring high levels of interactivity and multimedia to Web sites. Plugins like Flash, Silverlight and Java have added media integration to the Web, but not without some cost. In search of a "better user experience" and battery life, Apple has simply dropped support for some of these plugins entirely on mobile devices, leaving much of the media-heavy Internet inaccessible on iPads and iPhones. HTML5 adds many new features, and streamlines functionality in order to render these processor-intensive add-ons unnecessary for many common functions. 

Assuming content providers sign on (and many are), this means you won't have to worry about installing yet another plugin just to listen to a song embedded in a blog or watch a video on YouTube. Similarly, this is a big deal for platforms that either don't support Flash (e.g., iPhone and iPad), or have well documented problems with it (e.g., Linux). It will be a particular boon to those smartphones for which supporting Flash has proven problematic.

So what exactly can it do?

HTML5's most touted features are media playback and offline storage. With HTML4, sites usually have to reach for Flash (or Silverlight) to simply show a video or play music. HTML5 lets sites directly embed media with the simple HTML tags "

The other major addition that has garnered media attention is the ability to store offline data for Web apps. One of the major roadblocks in the march to replace traditional desktop apps has been that the Web-based ones are useless without an Internet connection. Google developed a stopgap solution with Gears, but that product has been retired as the company is shifting its focus to HTML5. This will mean being able to create files in Google Docs or draft e-mails when away from an Internet connection. These changes would be automatically synced the next time you're online.

HTML5 also adds new interactivity features, like drag-and-drop, that have already found their way into Gmail.

How can I take advantage of it now?

Most likely, you're already taking advantage of it without knowing. Safari (both mobile and desktop), Google Chrome and Firefox 3.6 all support at least some elements of HTML5. (Internet Explorer 8's support for HTML5 is very limited.) And many Google products already use some features of the next-generation protocol. If you're using Safari or Chrome, you can check out an experimental version of YouTube that makes use of HTML5's video features. Gmail and Google Reader have adopted parts of the standard, as well. Additionally, any site listed here as being "iPad ready" is making extensive use of HTML5, including The New York Times, CNN and CBS. The latter of which recently announced it would be phasing out Flash in favor of HTML5 for all video content. If you want to dig a little deeper, you can check out a series of experiments from Mozilla that show just what HTML5 can do, and these design roundups show off what it brings to the table for designers and typographers.

Flash won't be going away anytime soon, of course; it's still widely used and supported, and those Flash-based games that we love so much are impossible to recreate using HTML. But it's important to know that when you hear people tossing about the phrase "HTML5," it isn't just some meaningless buzz word; they're talking about the future of the Internet.

Create Your Own Online Proxy Server

How To Create Your Own Online Proxy Server In Minutes

I had quite a lot of trouble last week with a company’s browsing restrictions. It used an extensive directory of ‘forbidden websites’ that kept out all but a few popular sites. In effect, no games sites, no personal email, and no MakeUseOf.
None of the conventional proxy servers worked, and even Google Translate failed. My hopes were down until, yesterday, I discovered that one of my personal domains could be accessed.
Back on my home computer, in a matter of minutes, I had set up my own functioning proxy server. With the instructions below, so can you.

Prerequisites
If we want to pull this off there are a few things you need.

Web Host
In theory, any webhost will do, if they comply with the other requirements; an old computer in your basement, or even a free online webhost.

PHP5 or greater and cURL
Look for this on the website of your webhost. If it’s paid hosting, you can almost count on it. Especially cURL is a feature that’ll be disabled on most free webservers.

Permission
That’s right. Some webhosts will explicitly forbid you to create a proxy server (or a chat room, for that matter) in their terms of content. And you can expect them to find out.

1. Download and Install GlypeProxy

GlypeProxy is a free, standalone PHP script. That means it’s lightweight and incredibly easy to configure. You can download it from their website.
Next, upload the files to a sub directory on your webserver. If you see a folder called ‘www’, or called after your domain name (e.g. domain.com) create the sub folder in there. You need to avoid using the word ‘proxy’, because some companies pick up on it. Instead, use ‘web’ or ‘surf’.
There are a few different ways to upload your files. If you already know this, skip to the next paragraph. Here they are arranged from the least to the most effort.
Upload and unpack ZIP
Look in the filemanager for an ‘unpack’ or ‘extract’ option. You can then upload it in one take. This is not always supported.
FTP access
Use an FTP application to access your webhost, and let it transfer the files while you fetch some more coffee. Most often supported.
Manual upload
You really don’t want to do this – are you sure the previous two alternatives are blanked out? Your last resolve will be to manually upload all the files and folder structures. Or start looking for a different host – it might not be such a bad idea.

2. Ready For Use

There’s no real set-up needed. Just point your browser to the directory where you put all those files (ex. domain.com/surf) and GlypeProxy will pop up. If you don’t like the logo, you’ll have to replace it manually. But if you want a proxy server for personal use, some little branding won’t matter.
Users can enter any URL and, after expanding the options, choose to encode the URL, the page, allow cookies, scripts and objects. Encoding the page can help you access some sites that are still being picked up and intercepted, but might give you a corrupt webpage at times.

3. Admin Preferences

Although Glype is a powerful proxy script, the admin tools are obviously the backing power. You might not know this, but a lot of online proxy tools are powered by Glype, just like the one you just set up. The admin preferences leave room not only for customization, but for improvement. You can assign site-specific code for trouble-giving websites, and change user-agent and proxy lists.
Most useful to novice users will be the caching tools (pictured above), logs, and blacklists. The caching tools can help you improve the browsing speed by storing some files from all, or some of the already visited websites. Logs are off by default, but might have legal importance in the future, depending on who uses your proxy server. Always explicitly mention you’re keeping these logs. Finally, the blacklists will allow you to block (all but) a few sites, or users.
To access your admin panel, point your browser to admin.php on your webserver (e.g. domain.com/surf/admin.php).
Are you setting up your own personal proxy server? Do you have any other tips or experiences on the issue? Let us know in the comments below!

Why You Should Make Your Own Server

Why You Should Make Your Own Server

You’ve probably heard at some point that servers aren’t only for those that have a lot of money. In fact, anyone who has a spare box sitting around somewhere in their house can have their very own server, slaving away at whatever whims you may have. Although it sounds very cool, it does take some effort and a little know-how to get it all set up.

So, before you get all sad and throw that spare box in the dump, here are five reasons why you should take the effort into making your own server.

1. You Control Your Data

If you’re an avid user of the Web, you probably have all kinds of information spread out over multiple servers and websites. For example, chances are you use Dropbox. Although it’s extremely convenient, your files are ultimately stored on their servers, so that means they control your data. You can protect yourself through different methods of encryption, but the storage location stays the same. You can change that by setting up your own server to hold your data. That way, what’s yours stays yours, and it will stay that way as long as you run your own server. With good security, other prying eyes won’t be able to see what you’re storing on your own server, so privacy is included.

2. You Build Your Own Services

With your own server, you can do whatever you want with it. Run an email server to handle all your email (although saying goodbye to Gmail would probably be the hardest thing known to a geek), a proxy, FTP server, and many other combinations. You could even run your own version of Dropbox with enough help, or create your very own services that you may be in need of. The possibilities are endless, and you get to choose.

3. No Surprises

Since you’re in control (this is pretty much the main idea), there won’t (or at least shouldn’t) be any surprises when it comes to your server. Aside from the small possibility of hardware failure, nothing in terms of the services that your server offers should suddenly change without you doing anything. While third party services may change the way their services or products work, yours won’t. You configure it to exactly how you want it, and then it stays that way until you change it again to meet your needs.

4. Have Fun With Your Server

In the spirit of control and adding whatever you please, why not install some game servers in the meantime? There are so many different games such as Minecraft and Urban Terror that have software for servers that you can run to host your very own games. These games can have their own rules and customizations, making it even more fun for you and all your friends. Again, the possibilities are endless, and you can run as many different game servers as your RAM will hold and your CPU can handle.

5. It’s Pretty Inexpensive

The costs of running a server are actually pretty insignificant, especially when you don’t need it at all times of the day. Your server will more than likely need to be connected to the Internet, but unless your regular Internet connection has major limitations that can’t let you successfully run your server on that connection, you can use the Internet connection that you’re using for your desktop or laptop right now. You can also get a free DNS name from a few different places like DynDNS if you don’t have a lot of needs for your server so that you can connect to your server without having to remember an IP address that might change occasionally.
The software should be free in most cases, and the operating system will more than likely be Linux (it’s recommended, anyways), so no costs will appear there. In the end, it’s really just the cost of electricity, which can be managed if say the server doesn’t have to be on while you’re asleep.
Conclusion
Running your own server brings many advantages that could make your life a lot easier and less stressful. After all the work in getting it set up, you can pride yourself in the fact that you have your very own server that you can do whatever you want with. In the end, it should be well worth it, with a spare box well used. If not, you can always check out this MakeUseOf guide to giving that old box new life.

HTML5 vs Flash

HTML5 vs Flash – How Does It Affect You?

The manner in which most videos are currently played through browsers these days is through a Flash plugin. This works pretty well but Flash unfortunately requires a lot of computing power. A new web standard HTML5 is trying to change that.

HTML5 has been designed with audio and video codecs which should take less processing power than an equivalent Flash player. Independent tests have shown that this is generally so although not entirely across the board. As with most new technologies, things are not always clearcut.

However even with improvements in processing efficiency from HTML5, it should not be assumed that it will completely replace Flash or even have a significant impact, especially on rich web content. Flash still has many advantages such as:

~ Better sub pixel resolution and anti aliasing
~ It’s good excellent developer tools (far more extensive than HTML5)
~ Flash has a vast array of good looking and impactful fonts

At this point, graphic artists and game developers still love Flash. And though they certainly like the idea of being able to operate with less computing overhead, they want to get the most control and ability to generate outstanding results.

However for many simpler video playback application such as in YouTube, HTML5 has the ability to quickly surpass Flash as the video/audio player of choice in browsers. At this point, the development of the YouTube HTML5 supported player is still in its early phases and a lot more tweaking and refinement must be done.

It also needs more support to work properly with other browsers and extensive testing to work out instability and incompatibility issues. However since it’s on an open platform, there are many people working through these issues so it is just a matter of time.

But many people feel that this process could easily take years. There are still many issues to work through. This gets down to some parts of the HTML5 specification which are viewed to be controversial by many critics.

And the fact still remains that HTML5 is not compatible with all browsers and many users are resistant to changing to another browser. As far as the average computer user is concerned, if it works ok for them they are not interested in moving to another browser.

For example, Intenet Explorer is largely criticized for its instability and security flaws. Yet many people steadfastly hold on that browser and are very reluctant to change to something like Firefox or Chrome.

So be aware that even with the potential efficiencies which HTML5 can bring, don’t expect rapid deployment or changes away from Flash.

Search Engine Optimization All-in-one Desk Reference for Dummies

Download Search Engine Optimization 

All-in-one Desk Reference for Dummies

If you have a business, you want your Web site to show up quickly when people search for what you’re selling. Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies has the whole story on how to build a site that works, position and promote it, track and understand your search results, and use keywords effectively. And it includes a $25 credit on Google AdWords, to get you off to a good start!

Ten handy minibooks cover how search engines work, keyword strategy, competitive positioning, SEO Web design, content creation, linking, optimizing the foundations, analyzing results, international SEO, and search marketing. You’ll even learn some geeky things like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, or how to match metatags and keywords to page content.

    Book I explores how search engines work and which ones offer the best exposure
    Learn to develop a keyword strategy and be competitive with Books II and III
    Book IV helps you design an SEO-friendly site, while in Book V you learn to create content that lures your audience
    Tips in Book VI show how to line up relevant links for a better search showing
    Book VII shows how to get more from your server and content management system
    Discover how to measure your site’s success in Book VIII
    Book IX helps you globalize your success by marketing in Asia, Europe, and Latin America
    Use SEO and Book X tips to build your brand

With all this information and a Google AdWords gift card worth $25, Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies has what you need to make your site a hit with search engines.

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Perl Scripting for Windows Security

DOWNLOAD Perl Scripting for Windows Security

Book Description

Publication Date: December 26, 2007 | ISBN-10: 159749173X | ISBN-13: 978-1597491730 | Edition: 1

From Author:

I decided to write this book for a couple of reasons. One was that I've now written a couple of books that have to do with incident response and forensic analysis on Windows systems, and I used a lot of Perl in both books. Okay.I'll come clean.I used nothing but Perl in both books! What I've seen as a result of this is that many readers want to use the tools, but don't know how.they simply aren't familiar with Perl, with interpreted (or scripting) languages in general, and may not be entirely comfortable with running tools at the command line. This book is intended for anyone who has an interest in useful Perl scripting, in particular on the Windows platform, for the purpose of incident response, and forensic analysis, and application monitoring. While a thorough grounding in scripting languages (or in Perl specifically) is not required, it helpful in fully and more completely understanding the material and code presented in this book. This book contains information that is useful to consultants who perform incident response and computer forensics, specifically as those activities pertain to MS Windows systems (Windows 2000, XP, 2003, and some Vista). My hope is that not only will consultants (such as myself) find this material valuable, but so will system administrators, law enforcement officers, and students in undergraduate and graduate programs focusing on computer forensics.

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