There are two types of mobile applications; the native applications and the Web Applications. Choosing the right platform for your applications can be tricky. Developing HTML5 technologies for example Canvas are tremendously responsive and boast of quite a few enhancements and features.

Opting between a native app and a web app isn’t a new technical decision; it’s a good strategic one. Based on various factors, you have to analyse both options and evaluate which approach produces greater value for your business. A rich user interface or a platform independent application with much greater user access?

This article supplies a comprehensive list of advantages/disadvantages from the two approaches, which you’ll be able to weigh against requirements of your respective applications to meet your online business objective/goal.

A native cross-platform app- Twitter

Performance: Native apps use more of your device resources and capabilities and therefore are faster than web apps.

User experience: User interface of any native app has extensive control on device hardware and produce a credit application, which is quite an eye fixed candy. On the other hand, user interface for your web app is restricted to the browser capabilities and experience can vary greatly. But a common misinterpretation is without a doubt that only native apps will deliver users an offline practical experience. Not true. With HTML5, Online apps can store details, store static resources such as images, CSS and JavaScript, and can share content via supported systems and work offline almost like native apps. You may well have an icon of this web page, just like of a native app.

Cross-platform Applications: When you develop native apps you will need to develop a version for each mobile operating system i.e. different version for Ipad / iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile etc. If you build a Web app, the fundamental code remains identical across all devices, also it’s much easier and faster to deliver exactly the required version to each device using device detection and content adaptation. Web apps are the simplest way to reach broadest audience with a lot less effort.

A Popular Web App- Basecamp

Time to Market: Your Web app can be accessed by many users on additional platforms, quickly and quite simply, than a native application. Single codebase is in progress across all platforms (quicker development) and there’s no need to go through any specific approval process.

Type of practical application / service: There are differences between kinds of content or service which fits best on web or perhaps native apps. For example, a racing car game work best as native app mainly because it will often use heavy graphics and really need to access the device APIs including accelerometer, location detection, and various advanced features which only a native app can do. On the other side, shopping (mCommerce) and products like inventory tracking, client relationship management, financial exposure, and business process automation are best supported via the web apps. For a lot of these services, web applications will be more versatile, portable and cost-effective when compared with their native counterparts.

So the word is finally out, and it’s not what many had expected. It is again an intermediate step between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5. Honestly, I always had this intuition that it’ll not be iPhone 5 but something in between what we happen to call now ‘iPhone 4S’. But who am I to say now that it’s out. Anyways, moving along; for those who are disappointed- don’t be, because in the same iPhone 4 body, it’s a remarkable combination of software + hardware. And that’s what I’m going to tell you.

Among the 200 new features as Apple says, here’s a list of 4 noteworthy elements of software and hardware combined that makes this device more powerful.

The Apple A5 Chipset

It has the same dual core chipset that comes in the iPad 2. Additionally, it has been improved even more. So all you folks out there who have already used the iPad 2 now know what performance to expect from iPhone 4S. And those of you, who haven’t used an iPad 2, believe me- it’s sweet. Even after running many applications in the background, the dual core chipset handles processes exceptionally well.

8 MP Camera with improved Optics

iPhone 4S comes equipped with a 8 Mega Pixel camera. But that isn’t anything new given the fact that many other smartphones have 8MP’s or more! Or is it?Again, it’s not just about the MP’s; it’s about the technology behind those MP’s which builds the image. And Apple has lived up to its reputation.

As you can see in the image, the camera has an added on 5^th lens which makes the image crispier. Plus the aperture size has been increased to let more light in. In effect, the image is neat, sharper and more detailed.

Apple Siri

This is a new technology introduced in the iOS 5* which is one of the key factors in pushing the benchmark of mobile operating systems even more. It acts like an assistant and responds and reacts to the commands given by the user. The smart AI behind it makes it even better.  It learns how the user interacts with the device and performs constant evaluations to its functioning.

Seeing the videos, it sure looks intelligent and very effective in voice recognition.

*The only downside is- that this service requires a significant amount of computing memory which unfortunately isn’t available on the previous iPhones. So people with iPhone 4 and 3GS will have to take it with a grain of salt or will have get an iPhone 4S.

The iCloud

It’s a service introduced in the iOS 5 which stores all your data from contacts, calendars, music, notes, apps etc. and synchronizes it to all your iOS devices over the air. So next time you won’t have to find your USB cable to dock you iDevice into your PC or MAC, it’ll automatically sync every item seamlessly as long as you are on the internet.

History repeats itself; we have seen this happening before. iPhone 4 was a breakthrough over iPhone 3GS which was trailed by iPhone 3G. Now putting iPhone 4 in the place of iPhone 3G and iPhone 4S in place of iPhone 3GS, the link extends to iPhone 5. At least that’s what I like to think. Going by this viewpoint, iPhone 5 (whenever it comes out), is going to be one beast.

Quick Facts:

• iPhone 4S touched 1Million pre-orders within 24 hours
• Although having a powerful processor, the RAM on iPhone 4S is 512MB only (Source: MacRumors)
• The camera on iPhone 4S can capture and save full 8MP image in 1.1 seconds and the next images within 0.5 seconds in rapid succession
• With the new processor, game and graphic performance increases by 7x on iPhone 4S

The iPhone 4S will start shipping this Friday onwards and iOS 5 upgrade to iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS rolls out tomorrow.

If you have any questions & suggestions regarding the article above, please leave a comment below.

Creating a native IOS application for your website will be a challenging task if you’re not familiar with Objective C. These are the few tweaks which will make your web application look-alike the native IOS application with existing HTML and CSS knowledge.

Adding a Custom Web Page Icon for IPhone/IPad Home Screen

Adding a website icon is easy, you can use any graphic to create icon of your website. The beauty with iOS is that you don’t have to think for the glossy finish and the rounded corners; it’s automatically added by the device.

However if you want to customize your icon your way, you can use a precomposed image.

This is the image of techcrank.com.

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png"/>
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="72x72" href="/apple-touch-icon-72x72.png"/>
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="114x114" href="/apple-touch-icon-114x114.png"/>

or for a precomposed image 

<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="/ apple-touch-icon-57x57.png"/>
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="72x72" href="/apple-touch-icon-72x72.png"/>
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="114x114" href="/apple-touch-icon-114x114.png"/>

Adding a Splash Screen-

Like native iOS applications web applications can also have a start-up image. By default, the splash screen shows the screenshot of the web application the user visited last time. For adding a splash screen you can add this to your code.

<link rel="apple-touch-startup-image" href="/startup.png">

Hide Safari Components-

If you want to hide the safari interface elements from your web application, just add the code-

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />

Preventing scaling-

If you want to disable pinch to zoom in your web application and prevent scaling use the viewport Meta tag:

<meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=no, width=device-width" />

Caching application files-

If you want to make your web application to work offline, or you want to improve its load time create a cache manifest file and link it to the main page of web. When a cache manifest is in use the web application launches with the last version.

With these techniques you can make your web application look alike the native iOS app. These tips would work for the home screen saved applications. Remember to use ajax in your web applications as without ajax oriented applications it would open any links in safari and you will lose any settings.

Carbyn is an HTML5 based OS that can be accessed with any modern web browser. Since it is built on HTML5 there is nothing to install at all, you just have to login into Carbyn and you’re ready to go! Carbyn runs on any browser except the older versions of IE.

The Carbyn OS lets you enjoy all your favorite HTML5 Applications from any device whether it is PC, MAC or tablet. The Carbyn Team is working to make it run on the various smartphones. “The smartphone version will be available soon” the team says.

Once you login into Carbyn and load up the OS, you can pin your favourite applications in the Carbyn dashboard (in the browser). Any HTML5 applications can be personalised from the ground up (using HTML5) or existing apps can use the wrapper in the Carbyn SDK. The team says that they can get any HTML5 application working on Carbyn OS in less than half an hour.

So in what way is this different from Chrome Web Store?  Well, that’s just a store for HTML5 applications while Carbyn is an OS to run these applications. What’s cool with Carbyn is that it supports multi-tasking, thanks to their SDK which allows different apps to communicate in a way that traditional apps can’t. “One app can tell, if it’s a phone app, let’s say Skype can tell the music app, ‘hey, stop playing I’m getting a call.’ So, it’s a true, OS one hundred percent in the browser.” explains the team.

In the dock menu you can see your running apps, favourite apps, and the other personalized applications categorized. Customizing the background wallpaper, sharing options, user account settings can be done easily with system preference option on dashboard.

The Carbyn OS is pretty much similar to the Chrome browser. Or even close to Chrome OS.

But the Chrome Web Store works on Chrome browser only. Carbyn is meant to run on any device supporting HTML5 delivering cross platform experience for Apps.

It’s been a while since we haven’t made any updates and tweaks to our blog. Neither had we much time incessant enough to do those. But finally, after a period of about 1.5 years, we sat down in harmony to reinstate what we had given up. And after a long-lasting analysis and research of more than a thousand blogs, we came up with this design.

More to that, we learned and fixed the slip-ups we made earlier, making the site more simple, faster and intriguing. We made a move to a new hosting and the elemental changes running along with it made the site 60% faster. And we’ll keep on making changes to speed it up even more.

That’s just not it; the site will now be running in versions. When we complete the benchmark of our assessment of the current version of the site, that is, from cross browsing compatibility to validations and everything in between, we’ll move to the next idea we have in our mind.

We’ll conduct occasional give-aways, and this time not just software’s but something more, umm, physical may be. So heads up! You have a lot of cool stuff heading your way.

Though we cannot assure that you’ll get articles everyday as it’s still a hectic job to deliver quality content when a network is slender, but what we can assure is that we will give a descent amount of quality updates and articles in a week. However, with time, we’ll work on to increase the frequency of updates.

We hope you’ll find the blog more helpful, if not, then entertaining.

Last but not the least, your feedback, is ultimately the key to our triumph. Be it good or bad, your response will always be appreciated.

We knew this day would come, we were warned. For generations, books and movies have been depicting Androids as the evil monsters of future ready to dethrone humans as superior species, kill them and take over the world.

And today it is coming true. However it’s quite ironical that this time, these Androids come from the company whose motto is “Don’t be Evil”. 

Following the epic win over Apple iPhone few months back, today Google’s total android smartphones sales in the last quarter of 2010 recorded a whooping 33.3 as compared to Nokia’s 31 million which cherished the no.1 spot for last 10 years. Apple had its place on the podium in third place with 16.2 million

Although some might see this comparison unfair to the Finnish giant Nokia, considering it makes its own handsets, while Google’s OS is shipped with a no of high and low end mobile manufacturing companies like Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony Ericsson etc.

And with Apple’s recent addition of Verizon as a carrier and Google’s announcement of Android 3.0 aka Honeycomb, we can only expect the competition to grow fierce over the coming days

Since the early days of civilization, man’s quest for finding a better way to communicate with his fellow humans and express his ideas has been a never ending journey. Thus from the cave painters to the works of great writers, the goal has always been to reach the masses.  But one could only succeed in making his work a piece of art if he is proficient and articulate enough in the  language he wished to ink his ideas in, something that required great time and learning.

So was the case with initial computer languages, where more emphasis was on the language than what it tried to express, and thus it demanded an artist to be a programmer writing hundreds (and thousands) of lines of code.  My fellow nerds who have overcome the daunting task of learning these languages like C, C++, JAVA etc might be sharing the sentiments right now.

So despite of how powerful these languages are, people needed to interact with computer like humans. And then came “Ruby”

Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It power lies in its simple syntax that is natural to read and easy to write. With a temperate learning curve, it offers web developers rapid development using agile development methodology. And “Rails” (called as Ruby On Rails or RoR) provides the application framework based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture pattern to organize application programming.

Since the early development by David Heinemeier Hansson in 2003, Rails ecosystem has been growing at a tremendous speed, outreaching more than 1,600 contributors.

Ruby on Rails emphasizes on Convention over Configuration (CoC) that means a developer only needs to specify unconventional aspects of the application that leads to less code and less repetition, thus prophesizing the principle of of Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) where information is located in a single, unambiguous place.

And to credit to its adoption and diverse usage, some of the web’s biggest giants are built on Ruby including Twitter, Basecamp, Shopify, Yellow Pages, recent news making Groupon, Get Satisfaction, Hulu, Jango … and the list goes on

So if you wish to implement your web application on RoR, there is a easy and fun way to start using Rails for Zombies! (Yes Zombies, not Dummies) .And the tutorial videos actually have zombies in it, so you know the team is really serious about the product!

Other useful links: Ruby Programming Language, Try Ruby in your browser, Ruby on Rails

Over the last few months you have noticed that only few sites gracing the bottom of some blogs like mashable. That’s because it was only available for few partners. On Dec 21 Meebo launched the plugin for every one, as they promised. The meebo bar is now available you can grab one for you. The Stylish bar creates a good focus on your blog. Download one for your blog now.

For those who are unfamiliar with meebo bar, it’s a JavaScript plug-in that sits at the bottom of Web pages. It enables a lot of different social integration such as tweets, promoting a Facebook fan page, as well as Stumbling or Digging the page.The Meebo Bar also allows users to chat with their friends through the IM platform that made Meebo famous.Additionally, the Meebo Bar enables easy sharing of content on the page through its very slick Meebo Share Dock.

The bar is extremely easy to set up on blogs, especially TypePad, self-hosted WordPress, Blogger, and Moveable Type, all of which have preconfigured solutions, built by Meebo. For those with other setups, the installation just consists of inserting a code snippit, something to which we have become very accustomed. Users can customize which features appear on their Meebo Bar all on Bar.meebo.com. The changes are then pushed out to the installation on your site in a matter of minutes.

Meebo Bar users get all of the features of the bar, as well as detailed sharing analytics to see how people are using it.

The Meebo Bar is a really great way of enabling a lot of different types of sharing and content interaction very quickly and easily. The sharing that results could, potentially, be a big driver of traffic back to sites. It’s really great to see this rich functionality being adapted into to a “self-serve” type of system. With so many more possible installs out there, the Meebo Bar should see a huge explosion in growth.

Sign up at meebo bar at Bar.meebo.com at get yourself one.

Well share your views, do add your comment here. Share the blog’s that you are running with Meebo Bar.

Want a Google Wave invitation?

Google Wave is a online tool for real time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both text and document where people can discuss and share in real time. Want a Invitation? Comment here.

I have some free Google Wave invitations. Please leave a comment here with you email and I will mail you the Invitation Code.

Note: As I have only few invitations, the invitation code will be given on first comment basis. Happy Waving..!

New Orkut : Skimmed

It’s been a while the new Orkut has been released. And as per the reviews, it’s totally amazing than the previous versions. The new look is very cool and the whole page is completely dynamic and fast. The features can, however, be compared to Facebook on the basis of dynamicity, but Orkut in itself is unique.

The layout now has all the links in one page. Almost all options are accessible from single home page and can be changed or modified without the hassle of redirection from pages. All reminders, alerts and updates are displayed in a drop down tab which expand and collapse on the page itself. New scraps are instantly notified still with no need to go to a new page. Some pages are still the same. For example, the page that manages friends is still the same but its okay as it’s one of only few things which aren’t dynamic.

The home page color scheme can be changed from the buttons provided on the upper left side of the profile. The page has five color schemes:

Blue Green Orange Pink Black

Looking at the performance, new Orkut is definitely faster and consumes less resource.  The scripts do not stuck like sometimes on Facebook. Though the scraps are instantly notified, but the increment of number of scraps is not displayed until you click the refresh button (not the browser refresh, but a button located on the page itself). It allows video chat as well as web chat on the main home page which is fairly good.

One big flaw in the new version is that it does not allow middle click scrolling i.e. when you press the middle mouse button then scroll the page by moving the cursor up or down with respect to the starting click point. Hope this would be resolved with future developments of the Orkut.

Another thing is that it’s not publicly available. Well it’s a sad thing to hear but there are ways by which you can get yourself an invite:

1. You can join the official new Orkut community and you’ll be given an invite in a few days. It’s a matter of luck cause there are a thousand others who are waiting for the same and you’ll be chosen on what grounds is not known to anybody.
2. People with new Orkut have few invites with them. So you can ask them for an invite. This is the way I found myself one… J
3. Simply wait till the new Orkut is publicly available. This will be the most simplest of course.

On the broader view, new Orkut is completely cool with new features and great user interface and is been appreciated all over. I personally found it very good and was very impressed the way Orkut team worked on its development making it so amazing.

Feel free to comment about the new orkut, and do give us a feedback.