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  • Google Android Traction Statistics

    Google Android Traction Statistics

    Here is a visual representation of the latest information regarding Android’s “traction” in the 18 months since it debuted.

    The charts are from the AndroidTapp.com website and the data was provided by Google Inc. at Google I/O 2010.

    Google Android Traction Statistics by AndroidTapp.com

  • Things that I learnt holding my first competition

    I’ve never run a competition before and, thanks to Creative, my first opportunity has just concluded.

    And what did I learn?

    Well, a lot. First of all, the questions I should be asking the prize providers. Instead I kept badgering them as I kept asking some pretty basic questions…

    • When do you want the competition to start?
    • How long do you want the competition to run for
    • Are the prizes all for one person, all a “first” prize, or staged (first prize, second prize, etc)
    • How long until delivery
    • What will you provide if a product is no longer available?

    Whilst running the competition I kept an eye on the entries to ensure that I wasn’t receiving multiple entries per person or household. And, after only 24 hours, I appeared to have found a problem – 3 people, each with an AOL email address, and the same IP address. Suspicious? It looked like it to me.

    However, the fact that AOL is their ISP is the key here – they use a proxy-based system, meaning that many users may share the same IP address. Wikipedia has discussed such an issue before on their own site.

    The database I created to hold winner details held a name, address, email, competition answer and IP address. Based on the AOL problems I now realise that I should also store a time stamp and user agent. I’ll be making these changes for next time.

    I did a lot of work on the competition coding to ensure SQL injection problems. None-the-less I realised a few days ago that although the competition entry form disappears after the closing date, the code to submit the form details into the database still exists. This means that a third party script could inject entries (although not anything that would affect security) after this time. Again, this will now be fixed for future.

    Lastly, I had so many entries that just trying to keep track of “rule breakers” became a lot, lot harder – more work on flagging such things at the point of competition entry will be useful, and I feel an automated email coming on!

    Meanwhile, I have contacted the 3 winners and am just awaiting a confirmation of their postal addresses before details are announced.

  • Choosing a video editor for the home amateur

    Now updated to include Corel VideoStudio Pro X3.

    It was my youngest daughters 1st birthday recently and I took the opportunity to record various videos during the day. What I now need to do is to splice them together and make some basic enhancements (one of the videos, for instance, was recorded in low light so I’d like to improve that). Oh, and it’s in MOV format. That latter fact rules out my usual video editor of choice – Windows Movie Maker.

    Like, I suspect, most people I don’t need anything too fancy when editing videos. Yet, that’s precisely what most provide – they’re either incredibly basic (Windows Movie Maker) or incredibly overly complex for the average home user.

    So, I needed something that would perform this task but not be so basic that as soon as I want to create another video, with slightly different requirements, that I’m looking for another editor again. What I wanted was something with the capabilities but simple enough for basic, home use.

    After much searching, I downloaded and tested 4 trials – Adobe Premiere Elements 8, Pinnacle Studio 14, CyberLink PowerDirector 8 and Corel VideoStudio Pro X3.

    Now, this isn’t an exhaustive review – like many of my reviews, I’m going to cut to the chase and give you the conclusions

    Adobe Premiere Elements 8

    A huge download which also runs extremely sluggishly on my PC. I own a copy of Photoshop Elements and I must be the only person who doesn’t like it – I find it over complex (swapping between different applications for browsing, editing, etc) and confusing. Premiere Elements is exactly the same.

    I quickly found the option to improve the low-light video but I was given so many options that I was overwhelmed and upon trying to modify them later became very confused as to exactly how to do it. Just importing the videos in the first place was a chore.

    Now, most of these trials restrict use for so many days and add watermarks to the videos. Which is fair enough – it lets you try out the editor without affecting its use. Except Adobe feel the need to splash a band across the video display in the editor, showing the fact that this is a trial, so watching your created video is made rather difficult.

    Pinnacle Studio 14

    An even bigger download and, well, I failed to be able to work out how to do even basic changes, such as the low light enhancements. The help file only refers to “brightness” in relation to editing it when capturing and what the word actually means.

    After deciding against this product I tried to uninstall it, but the plugins refuse to.

    CyberLink Power Director 8

    A much more reasonable download size and, I think, the easiest to use. I was able to make the changes I wanted quickly and easily. The power appears to be there – indeed, one review of this product states it to be more for the professional than the other two (I’d disagree!). On top of all this, it’s the cheapest product to buy – just £32.99 (non-oem). That’s not to say all was roses – upon first run the updater program crashed and I never saw it run again.

    Uninstalling it later was simple – just a single program to uninstall (it had installed something else at the time, and asked me if I wanted to remove that as well) with no files (that I could see) left behind.

    Corel VideoStudio Pro X3

    Again, a reasonable download size but it took an age to install (and uninstall) and was generally sluggish in use. I was able to do what I needed reasonable easily but struggled, once I’d applied a brightness filter, to work out how to change the settings. Also, I had no audio – it appears you have to import the audio seperately to the video (each come from the same file though but its a seperate process).

    More worryingly, my video appeared to run a little quickly, even though VideoStudio insisted I was running it at normal speed – my camera takes picture in the NTSC format, rather than PAL, and I wonder if this had something to do with it.

    Conclusion

    CyberLink won out and I’ve purchased a copy – I’ll let you know how I get on.

    However, I was disappointed at just how difficult these popular products are to get started with. There’s a definitely a gap in the market here – we seem to go straight from basic to professional video editors, with nothing in-between. Ok, some of these try with “wizards”, but most people don’t want some automated process creating a video for them – they want to drag and drop, trim, and make enhancements themselves. But they want this to be simple and don’t want it hidden behind an array of buttons and more advanced options.

    Or have I missed a product on the market?

    I’d just like to add one thing – getting hold of these trials. The Pinnacle one wasn’t easy to find and I had to do a trawl through Google to get there.  Both Pinnacle and Abobe, possibly due to the size of their downloads (both over 1GB – Pinnacle was near 2GB), use a Java downloader. Adobe insist you have an account with them – I do, but before proceeding needed to know my home address. Not sure why, but why not? Except the country was down as the US and I wasn’t able to change it. So I just told them I live in Beverly Hills 90210. That worked.

  • Adding information to your WordPress dashboard

    Dashboard Screenshot

    If you wish to add a widget to your WordPress dashboard then that’s a different, and longer, discussion. Instead I’m going to show you how to add a simple message, of your choosing, to the “Right Now” box.

    How could you use this? You could use a database lookup beforehand, for instance, to report on useful blog/theme information. I’m using it right now to report on how my competition is running – I’m performing a count on the table and reporting the output back (see image to the right).

    First of all, you need to add an action for activity_box_end pointing to your new function. All of the code discussed here should be put in your theme’s functions.php file. In this example I’m pointing it to a function named show_admin_message… 

    add_action('activity_box_end','show_admin_message');

    Within your function you then simply need to output the HTML. Here’s a complete piece of code that you can use… 

    add_action('activity_box_end','show_admin_message');

function show_admin_message() {
   $output_text = "Put your output message here";
   echo '<div style="border: 1px solid #ffd700; margin: 10px 0 0; padding: 5px; background: #ffffba; color: #000;">'.= __($output_text).'</div>';
}

    This will display the text “Put your output message here” in a yellow box, with a darker yellow border. The text will be in black.

  • Vote BNP? They can't even run a website!

    If (for whatever insane reason) you stumble onto the BNP website today, you’ll find it’s a single page “temporary” site. Temporary? On the day of the general election?

    Maybe visiting one of the other site pages, as indexed on Google, would shine some light…

    A message from Simon Bennett due to the volume of phone calls and emails I am receiving:

    This website and domain are no longer in my control. I have not sabotaged it. The domain name has been pointing to the new BNP server since last night (5th May) which is completely out of my hands. If your Emails are affected, again this is completely out of my hands and control.

    If you are reading this message it is because they have set up their server incorrectly and this needs to be resolved by the new webmaster.

    It is important to note that I have been working hard to negotiate a seamless switchover of the website, but for reasons unknown to me the leadership have chosen to force the domain from me, steal my work, data and systems and go it alone rather than paying for it. I will continue to work hard to try and resolve the situation quickly, professionally and amicably. This is in the hands of Nick Griffin and Jim Dowson, not me.

    It should also be noted that they have decided to put a personal grudge against me before the interests of the party and its members. This was not a fight of my choosing.

    I guess that’s what happens when you get involved an organisation such as this. Screw your own people over? Yep.