Design for the web.

Yes, they are both VERY different companies, but still overlap in many areas and thus are compared quite frequently. However, I have always maintained that Google really knows how to innovate, while Apple really knows how to make and market a product. I have been getting the feeling that Apple has peaked. Meanwhile, Google has really been impressing me in the last year and appears ready to dethrone the ever-popular fruit branded tech giant. So when I say “the new Apple” I suppose I mean the new tech company that everyone is talking about. Apple was in a bit of a lull for a while before its meteoric rise from the iPhone 1 (2007) to iPhone 5 (2012). Maybe its now Google’s turn to blow everyone away for 5 years straight.

Apple, being so huge and without Steve Jobs, has lots is innovation momentum. To use another physics term, their sheer size means there is a lot of inertia when it comes to developing , innovating and rolling out new products in a profitable manner. Apple needs another killer iToy to generate some interest without cannibalizing sales from its other products. It is quickly losing market share to Android and they don’t seem to be breaking into any new sectors or areas of specialization. At this point, they are a 1 trick pony with the iPhone. It needs a successor.

Google on the other hand, has a wide array of innovative products and services coming down the pipe on top of their already diverse portfolio of existing products.

• Google’s driverless car
• Google Fiber
• Google TV

The driverless car is the one that has me the most excited. There was a good article in Forbes recently about it. Since the computer-driven cars are so efficient and can coordinate with other driverless cars:

• reduce traffic accidents by 90%
• reduce wasted commute time and energy by 90%
  • allowing cars to go faster, operate closer together and choose more effective routes
• reduce the number of cars by 90%
  • A driverless vehicle could be shared, delivering and parking itself when and where it is needed

The potential here is massive!

Google Fiber looks quite promising too. It is only in Kansas City right now, but offers unmatched speed and pricing. As someone who strongly dislikes Rogers, I believe the industry is in need of some good competition. Whether it will make it into Canada is another story, but they are certainly raising the bar.

Anyways, Google seems to really be pressing forward and working on really great new ideas that could be quite profitable too, while Apple continues to simply trot out flat screen displays of varying sizes with diminishing fanfare. Since I love seeing what Wall Street thinks of these companies, a quick check on Google Finance shows that in the last 3 months, Apple is down almost 30% while Google is up almost 12%.

Google recently tied Apple with 700,000 apps available to users. According to CNET, this a pretty big milestone because “The number of apps offered for an operating system is an important factor for driving user adoption.” This brings to mind a term I learned in the investing world called channel stuffing. It is when a retailer produces more than is being purchased in an attempt to inflate their future sales figures (accounts receivable) and then boost the stock price. However in this case, they would be inflating their app count to reassure investors and pundits that they are in fact winning the mobile war. Regardless of whether this is happening or not, when it comes to the app count, one must consider the old adage of quality — not quantity.

I have professed my favoritism of Android over its competitors, however I have to concede that the number of apps is a poor metric when there are so many awful and/or redundant  apps. I know that Apple screens their apps much more thoroughly than its competitors before releasing them into the wild for their users but there are still a surprising amount that make the cut.

I wanted to look at a couple of, what I would consider to be, standard apps, and how many their are for each OS. By no means would this be a scientific study, but rather a quick summary of my search results. Unfortunately I found that you cannot effectively search the iTunes store on the web. So I downloaded iTunes and then found out that they do not give you a total number for your search results. Rather they are paginated indefinitely leaving you to speculate just how many pages of results there are and how does one get their app to the top of the list? Anyways, I digress.

Below are my results for Android. I can only assume Apple would have similar results. I was hoping to prove that Apple has fewer apps per search term (or functionality) due to their screening process, meaning Google’s 700,000 tally is somewhat irrelevant when pitting the two tech giants against each other.

Then they are other considerations such as how many of these apps are free versus how many are $0.99 versus how many are $2.99 etc.

My point is that users are absolutely flooded with options when choosing an app to download. This can be a bit overwhelming and leave you just picking the most popular app based on download count or rating. This becomes a self perpetuating situation as more and more users do the same thing and then you end up with many many apps that just collect dust on page 5 of the search results while 1 or 2 others rein supreme at the top of page 1. So what is the point of using apps as a comparison metric when 99% of people all use the same one. It made me wonder if there is any sort of SEO for Apps (ASEO?). Well, not too surprisingly there is.

In conclusion, I do expect Google to eventually surpass Apple in its number of apps — and with much fanfare. This will be touted by pundits as another important milestone in the battle between the two companies. And they may be right, but remember this the next time you spend 10 minutes perusing thousands of results trying to find an app that is supposed save you 10 minutes.

Anyone who has done an extensive amount of CSS work can surely agree that there is a lot of room for improvement in the language. The newest version, CSS3, adds some nice features such as rounded corners and box shadows, however the syntax of doing so could be a lot better. One of my biggest complaints for CSS is the total lack of any programmatic abilities such as variables and mixins. Enter SASS.

The SASS website itself gives a pretty succinct description of themselves, so I will post it below verbatim.

Sass makes CSS fun again. Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables,mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It’s translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.

Sass has two syntaxes. The new main syntax (as of Sass 3) is known as “SCSS” (for “Sassy CSS”), and is a superset of CSS3’s syntax. This means that every valid CSS3 stylesheet is valid SCSS as well. SCSS files use the extension .scss.

We first discovered SASS when we were looking for good mobile-friendly themes for Drupal. We arrived at AdaptiveTheme and more or less have not looked back.

In our development environment, we run a process called Compass that monitors the SASS directory. If any of the files are modified, it re-compiles the SASS code into wonderful, browser-readable, static CSS. Wooo!

The nesting of CSS selectors is probably our most commonly used feature of SASS. A selector nested inside the brackets of another selector results in the concatenation of those selectors in the CSS files.

For example, suppose you want to select a span in your sidebar. One would normally write something like:

 #sidebar .mydiv span

but suppose all the elements listed above need some styling. You might end up with:

#sidebar { float:left; }
#sidebar .mydiv { border:1px solid red; }
#sidebar .mydiv span { color:blue; }

The above, in SASS, would look like this:

#sidebar {
    float:left;
    .mydiv {
        border:1px solid red;
        span {
            color:blue;
        }
    }
}

So it saves you form having to keep typing out the entire selector chain. Wonderful!

Another great feature is the use of variables. This is great for any colours or dimensions that you are reusing. One only has to change the colour code in one place to see it effect all the elements using it.

The mixins, although we haven’t been using them a great deal, are useful too as they allow you to define, reference and reuse whole sections of CSS.

The learning curve for SASS is quite small because its very similar to plain ol’ vanilla CSS, and the nesting and variable features are quite intuitive for anyone with a programming background.

Sass has made for much more rapid CSS development and we are looking forward to leveraging it much more in our future projects.

With smartphone usage increasing every year, the platform battle continues to rage on between the big 3: Microsoft, Apple and Android. Here at GiantGoat we usually test our sites in Android and iOS. Windows Phone seems to be eating some dust while proclaiming “me too! me too!”.

Recently, Microsoft started a new ad campaign called The Windows Phone Challenge, aka “Smoked by Windows Phone” in which patrons of the Microsoft Store can compete against the new Windows phone on a variety of task-based speed tests. The idea is simple: if your phone does the task faster, you win $1,000!

When I first heard about this I had 2 thoughts:

1. That is quite the bold wager
2. This will backfire very soon

With the mobile market being so competitive, this type of advertising certainly is not new. However, as a new owner of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, I don’t really believe the new Windows phone is in fact faster (just an assumption). I mean the Nexus is just so…fast…and awesome. How can the Windows Phone compete with the dual core Nexus? Our office is almost exclusively Android users so perhaps I am a bit quite biased. Nevertheless, I was happy to see Microsoft doing this because I like the attempt at objective transparency in a marketplace bursting with flashy, misleading ads and uninformed consumers.

The reason I thought it would backfire is that developers love a challenge. Especially if its pitting you against Microsoft. Surely Microsoft realized that eventually someone would fine-tune their hardware-unlocked, over-clocked Android (or something to that extent) to win.

Well it was not long before the inevitable backfire. No surprise the Nexus took the prize – and it was done without any super geek magic too! MS decided to split some hairs regarding the fine print for the contest and deny the patron his prize. Well that did not go over well with the blogging community and MS quickly issued an apology.

Overall, I do like heads-up comparisons they are trying to get consumers to do. However, they should take a lesson from Apple and just stick to comparisons where they know they will win. Or better yet, be a good sport when you lose your own challenge.