This is exactly why the app ID is important, to the road ahead for your Mobile App strategy. This app ID will be the key to all future updates of the app, whatever future development cycles, new features or brand changes you app will go through.
Let’s say you are 6 months down the road, and have 100.000+ active installs on end-user devices, and you have to change your app completely. The change could be anything; re-coding, re-branding, re-design, feature changes etc., if you want your current 100.000+ end-users to receive the new version of the app, your app ID have to be the same, otherwise they wont get update notification in Apple App Store or Android Market.

Here is an example of an app ID:
com.brandname.appname

Your strategy might have multiple apps, standing side by side – but that still make the app ID important, to each individual app.

Let take for example Twitter, their app ID is: com.twitter.android, if they haven’t thought of a generic future proof ID and had to change this. They would have to re-market the new app, to all their current users, about uninstalling the current app and re-download the new app. All this because each app ID is treated as an unique product in Apple App Store and Android Market.

Take a look at the FourSquare app for Android as an other example. The app ID is com.joelapenna.foursquared, so who is Joe LaPenna? And what is his relation to FourSquare? Did he even work for them? No, he works for Google on their Latitude team… (get the story here). But I guess you get the point, FourSquare is currently stuck with an old app ID.

So you might think; whatever, that’s no big deal! If it works for FourSquare, I don’t care! But as a side node, I can mention that the name is visible, in the URL for your app in Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.joelapenna.foursquared

This whole app ID factor is mostly important to remember, specially if you outsource the development of your native app(s) to a subcontracting developer or company. Some subcontracting developers or companies, tend to put their own name, into the app ID, e.g.: com.subcontractorname.apps.yourappname

So my advice is always: treat you app ID as company brand- or domain-name! Be in control, make sure is generic and future proof! …even though I know it might be a geeky technical detail

This might spare you in the future from “closing down” an app, you already have in the market. To launch and re-market your new app, and possibly loose a huge amount of end-users, who would be stuck with the old version. Who haven’t tried this already…!

Note: App ID are also called Bundle ID in the App Store or package name on Android.

https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rabu.dk

Hope you can use it

<supports-screens
android:smallScreens="true"
android:normalScreens="true"
android:largeScreens="true"
android:xlargeScreens="true"
>

In your AVD (Android Visual Device) Manager, you have defined the visual device(s) for your Android Emulator. Here the “Skin” attribute defines the screen-size, you can select between: QVGA, WQVGA*, HVGA, WVGA* and WXGA.

To help you test the supported screen-sizes for you app, here is the mapping between the supports-screens element and the Emulator Skins attributes:

• smallScreens = QVGA
• normalScreens = WQVGA*/HVGA/WVGA* (depending on density)
• largeScreens = WVGA*
• xlargeScreens = WXGA

Read more about the supports-screens element in the Android Developer Guide.

1. Start your Android Emulator
2. Open your Terminal or Command Prompt (CMD)
3. Connect to the Emulator:

   telnet localhost <port>
   

   Note: You can see the port number in the title bar of the running Android Emulator

4. Enter the location coordinates you wish to test with:

   geo fix <longitude> <latitude>

Read more about user location in the Android Developer Guide

For Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rabu.dk
It takes the argument “u” for the URL you want to share.

For Twitter:
http://twitter.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rabu.dk
It takes the argument “url” for the URL you want to share.

Remember to URL-encode the URL parameter!

Both URLs should be opened in a pop-up or a lightbox.

I found my self looking and searching for help and resources in some of the same places over and over again, so that made me put a little help feature together. I have now created a little website, where you can search development resources from: appcelerator.lighthouseapp.com/projects/*, developer.appcelerator.com/question/* and developer.appcelerator.com/apidoc/mobile/latest/*. You can find this search helper at http://tms.rabu.dk.

I created this by using Google Custom Search Engine (CSE), if you have any feedback or input to additional resource sites the search should contain, please get in touch!

I hope your like it and find it useful: http://tms.rabu.dk/!

See more about the conference here
View my conference profile here

I hope to see you there.

This web applications gives you the ability, to explore your social graph on Twitter as well as find new friends to follow.

The app is still in beta, since I still have some additional features and performance optimizations to do. But please let me know what you think about it! Did it work for you, did you find some new interesting people to follow or is this just completely useless?

I hope you like it.

It was a close race!

But here it comes, is my personal SEO tips and checklist, primarily from a technical perspective:

• Make sure you have a nice and friendly URL strategy. E.g.: www.website.com/soft-drinks/coca-cola instead of www.website.com/product?id=23472347. If your website is country specific, e.g. if this was a Danish website, I wouldn’t use the word “soft-drink” – instead is would use the Danish word for it.
• Focus on your TITLE-tags. Like with the URL’s, it’s important that your TITLE-tags stay relevant – don’t just have the name of your company/website as the same title for all your pages, make sure the title relates to the individual page: <title>What goes here, is very important!</title>
• Be strict around your HTML code, keep it clean, and don’t make to much noise! My recommendation is to use xHTML and CSS, it’s important to separate all the design and layout out, into your CSS file(s), this will hopefully leave your HTML code clean – stripped down as the best fat-free piece of meat you can imagine, ready for the search engines to eat (crawl)!
• And just to make sure you got the message: Use your HTML right! If you have headlines in your pages, use the proper H1-tag (<h1>Here goes the headline</h1>, don’t jump the fence and make it like this <span class=”myFancyHeadline”>My headline</span>), remember the search engine robots don’t eat design, they eat code! And don’t forget the H2, H3 etc. tags for your sub-headlines…
• I think all websites should have a sitemap, for the users to get an overview of the site. The same apply for the search engine robots: You should have a sitemap.xml file, to make sure all your pages are being exposed to the search engines – find more info at www.sitemaps.org. And don’t forget to make a pointer from your robots.txt file (if you don’t have one, make sure to make one, find more info at www.robotstxt.org) to your sitemap.xml file.
• Don’t forget your META-tags, the description and keywords are my top priorities of all the available META-tags.
• And back to the HTML again, don’t miss out on the important ALT and TITLE attributes on your images and links!
• Finally, registration of your website in DMOZ is also a good thing to do.

I hope it all makes sense. I know most of the recommendations above, primarily relates to the technical part of SEO. Of course there are a bunch of other perspectives and activities to go for, in the battle of a top spot in Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the other search engines… but in my world, this is the base you need to build upon.

One of the alternatives I have used my self, with great results – is landing pages. Landing pages are alternative pages you build, as a supplement to your primary pages. These pages are offent constructed around alternative words and synonyms, to the primary words and themes relating to your website/product. To get some insight, on what people are searching for, I can recommend Google AdWords Keyword Tool, this tool can quickly give you some pointers on what words and synonyms to focus on, in your landing pages – and hopefully this will generate some additional traffic to your website, you might never have gotten.

Finally I can also recommend an other tool from Google, their Webmaster Tools – this tool can give you some insight around what is happening behind the scene of your website as well as some stats on your placement in Google, on your keywords.

If you have feedback, comments or other good SEO tips and trick, please leave a comment.

Facebook

Nice and quick native access to Facebook, including a slick widget for your desktop.

Check it out in Android Market

Twidgit Lite

Nice and quick Twitter widget for your desktop.

Check it out in Android Market

Opera Mini 5 Beta

Opera have just released a Beta version of Opera Mini 5 for Android, if you wand a quicker browsing experience – this is the browser for go for on your Android phone!

Check it out in Android Market

Simple Last.fm Scrobbler

If you are a Last.fm user and listen to music on your phone, this is a must have app. It automatically post what you are listening to, directly to your Last.fm account, nice!

Check it out at AndroLib

Bubble Wrap Game

Want to clear your mind, spend 60 seconds to pop some bubble wrap – to see if you can beat your old record!

Check it out at AndroLib

Soccer Livescores

Out of range of a TV, but you still want to keep yourself updated on how your favorite soccer teams are doing – this is the app to go for!

Check it out in Android Market

If you have any Android apps to recommend, please leave a comment. Happy easter!

The advantage of Gravatar from the user perspective, is the ability to centralize and reuse the same avatar across several websites. This also gives the user the advantage of changing the avatar only once, then it will be automatically updated everywhere it has already been used.
From website owners perspective, the advantage is to “outsource” all the handling (uploading, hosting etc.) of the avatars to Gravatar. From a usability perspective, it also makes it more efficient for the website visitors, to reuse an existing avatar, instead of forcing the user to upload a new avatar on every website.

Gravatar can be used by any website or webapp, e.g. it is default in WordPress and available as a 3. party module to Drupal. If you don’t use WordPress or Drupal, you can integrate Gravatar into your site yourself, here is how it works:

The avatar is based on the users e-mail address, and as you know e-mail addresses are unique, but for security and anti-spam purposes the e-mail address is not used as the reference to the avatar, instead an md5 hashed value of the e-mail address is used. So e.g. for my e-mail address this will be the unique id of my avatar: 3fa4f64aa0eef0f1337da9288c238ccc

Here is a shot code-example, in PHP of how to generated the md5 hash and calling the web service (http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/):

<?php
$email = "someone@domain.com";
$hash = md5(strtolower($email));
?>

<img src=”http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/<?php echo $hash ?>” />

This is an example of a generated Gravatar URL: http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3fa4f64aa0eef0f1337da9288c238ccc
Note: It’s important to generated the md5 hash, based on the lowercased e-mail address!

This is just a very basic example, please visit Gravatars documentation on how the URLs should be constructed.

One of my questions regarding this, is why don’t more websites and webapps used this service? If you know of any big websites or open source projects using Gravatar, please leave a reply!

Personally I think it would be fun, to see site like DailyBooth integrating with Gravatar, so users could use their daily photo as their avatar. Or even Twitter and Facebook, could integrate with Gravatar – for users, to use their avatar as their profile picture, or the other way around!

Since the Android emulator is simulating the entire underlying Linux based OS, localhost/127.0.0.1 is already used internally on the Android emulator, so for you being able to access the webapp at your localhost/127.0.0.1, you must replace localhost/127.0.0.1 with 10.0.2.2!

So all in all:
localhost/127.0.0.1 at the Android emulator = 10.0.2.2

First of all you will need a Google account, if you don’t have one yet – start by creating one right now! When you have your Google account ready, then you need to create a Google AdSense account.
After signing up and logging in to Google AdSense, then navigate to “AdSense for domains”, here you will be able to add all the domains you want to associate with AdSense.
Add the domain(s) you want to associate, then confirm. After the confirmation you will get an receipt displaying 4 different IP addresses, you will later need these to setup the proper DNS A records for the domain(s), you also get 1 unique Google URL, representing your personal pub-id, this will later be used as the DNS CNAME for your domain(s). Thats it for the AdSense part!

Now you just need to change the DNS settings for your domain(s). To do that, you will need to do the following:
First you need to setup 4 A records, using the 4 IP addresses provided by Google, you will end up with something like this:

And finally you need to setup a CNAME for the domain, ending up with something like this:

Note: It can take up to 24 hours before the DNS settings for your domain(s) get updated!

Thats it! Now when you login to Google AdSense, you can follow the stats and earnings of your domains.
If you want, you can optimize the ads displayed on the page(s) of your parked domain(s), by associating specific keyword(s)  to the domain e.g. relating the context of the domain-name.

It’s been a while since there has been some activity at my website. The last couple of years, it has been a fairly dead and static business-card like website, but now that has changed.

My new website and blog is now powered by the open source blogging and content management platform WordPress. It’s hosted at Surftown, on a Linux server running PHP and MySQL.
The social integration is powered by RSS feeds using SimplePie, and all the social icons used, is created by Komodo Media. In the blog comment section, the authentication is powered by RPX (created by Janrain) and the social sharing widget I have chosen to use, is provided by AddThis.

Please take a look around the website, and remember to add the RSS feed to your feedreader, to keep yourself updated around future activities and blog posts.

And please don’t forget to leave a reply or your feedback, I will be happy to hear what you have to say!