Wynnefields Web World

Learning C on the Mac: Wave I

Wynnefield — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 05:10:44 +0000

Excited about my new Macbook Pro, received as a birthday present from my wife and children, I wanted to jump right in and start coding some useful plugins. However, I was a bit premature jumping into an Objective-C and Cocoa world before having the solid foundation of a C development background. Although Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, Third Edition, is an excellent book and gave me several pointers in the correct direction, without the proper OOP background and Cocoa C development experience, I found it a bit challenging to navigate my way through the Mac development environment.

Published by Apress: Learn C on the Mac, by Dave Mark

I decided to slow down a bit and purchase the most recent book I could find on the subject, Learn C on the Mac, by Dave Mark. Just published last month by one of my favorite publishers, Apress, this text appeared to be the most up to date on the topic for my purposes. A quick scan of the first three chapters proved me right. A simple, straightforward writing style, allows readers to have fun, rather than feel like they’re working.

Chapter One highlights the book’s intended audience and “lay of the land.” The free Mac programming tools, the download and install instructions are covered in Chapter Two. XCode is Apple’s free suite of programming tools available for download from the Apple Developer Connection. After creating an ADC Account, downloading and installing the XCode tools, you will be ready to begin programming. After starting up XCode, the author walks the reader through the simple task of creating the standard “Hello World!” program (without writing a single line of code).

For readers entirely new to programming in any language, Chapter Three reviews the basics of application programming from creating source code and compiling it into machine language, or object code, the computer can understand. The linker creates the final, runnable application by linking all the project’s object code together. Syntax or semantics; source and object; these are the beginnings of C programming on the Mac.

… I cannot wait to see what Chapter Four has to offer.

25th Anniversary of Macintosh 1984 Commercial

Wynnefield — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:25:58 +0000

As most football fans (more so as a diehard Pittsburgh Steelers fan), I am preparing for next weekend’s game with great anticipation of possibly the first team in NFL history to win six Superbowl Championships. However, as most Mac fans are also aware, this year represents the 25th Anniversary of the George Orwellian 1984 Macintosh Commercial aired only once during the 1984 Superbowl.

Considered by many to be the best (certainly the most famous) commercial aired on television, Apple’s Macintosh was conspicuously missing from the advertisement. No company dared risk excluding their product from an advertisement prior to this event. We discussed this issue and a number of other points during the 10th Anniversary Year in my Visual Communications curriculum at the University of Florida.

I consider this commercial no less than a compelling artistic achievement. This advertisement confirmed Apple as an innovative leader in the competitive field of personal computers. Refusing to “run with the pack”, the majority of loyal Mac customers share the non-conformist ideals presented during the ad, unwilling to be hypnotized like so many drones bombarded from all directions.

With the airing of the I’m a Mac campaign during the past two-plus years, it has now become “cool” to many new computer customers to own a Mac. The secret is finally out … some of us have been in on the secret much longer than the last two or three years … or even twenty-five …

Typography and the Internet

Wynnefield — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:01:31 +0000

Punctuation aside for a moment, a critical distinction between writing for the web and on the printed page is understanding the difference in reading styles between web surfers and magazine readers. It takes a new style of writing to keep readers attention while pouring through line after line of unbroken sentences whilst scrolling down a monitor.

Web readers tend to scan for highlights or relevant topics denoted by several methods:

Headings and/or Subheadings to provide breaks or shifts in topic;
Formatting discussion points in ordered and/or unordered lists;
Placing tags of emphasis or weight on key topics;
Denoting relevant topics—punctuation marks—with mdashs or other separating marks.

I consider myself a typophile and was rather interested in the topic of disappearing glyphs and other punctuation characters during the transition from traditional print media to the web and social networking. However, I found it quite a struggle reading through line after line of continuous narrative with no line breaks or what I might call scannable text, in addition to following even half of the relevant hyperlinks.

Considering the topic, Typography and the Internet, I would expect the writing style to be more appropriate to the medium. Wrestling with this very issue on my own weblog, in addition to accessing the Wordpress support forums to learn the formatting shortcuts, my primary source of reference for Web Accessibility and Usability is the Nielsen Norman Group.

I attended their international conference, Usability Week 2008, earlier this year and it was one of the educational highlights of my career. I recommend their biweekly Alertbox, which is a complimentary newsletter covering all areas of web usability, accessibility, page authoring and other topics to improve the online customer experience.

Search Engine Optimization

Wynnefield — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:23:50 +0000

The realm of search engine optimization can be a confusing world of mystery to most business owners and marketing executives, who are responsible for attracting visitors to the company Web site (and converting those visitors to customers). The old adage “Build it and They Will Come” no longer holds true unless significant time and consideration are given to proper SEO techniques. We hope this section of our weblog provides an education of the key elements involved with these techniques and encourage anyone with questions or contributions to please join in …

The key elements of any successful search engine marketing campaign are based on identifying relevant keywords and keyword phrases related to the product or service provided by the Web site. Having identified relevant keywords, the four most critical areas to apply these words and/or phrases are the following:

The Web site domain name;
The Web site page titles;
Inbound text links to the Web site pages;
The most semantically relevant content on the Web site pages.

The domain name commands the most relevant keyword placement of any area of a Web site. Although strong domain names are difficult to secure these days, if at all possible register a name including your identified keywords. For SEO purposes the importance of “.com” versus “.net” suffixes are not relevant.

After the domain name, the second place search engines consider relevant is the Web page title. This page title is placed between opening and closing title tags, e.g. Search Engine Optimization Techniques, Internet Marketing Strategies, in the “head” section of the page code. This title also appears in the top most area of your internet browser when viewing the page.

Inbound text links from relevant Web sites have become increasingly critical to search engine relevance. A number of companies offer a page of image links (usually the company symbol or logo mark) for customers to publish links back to the company site. Text links rich with keywords related to the company product or service would provide the company site with much higher relevance where search engines are concerned. There are a number of strategies for creating inbound link campaigns, although none are as effective as when others link to your site because it is just good reading, or reference material, they wish to share with others.

Last and certainly not least, the more keywords published as semantically relevant page content, the higher the company’s organic, or non-paid, page ranking will be for those keywords and/or keyword phrases. A page created with semantic markup follows a page structure, or hierarchy, with some tag combinations ranking higher than others. For example, keyword phrases in heading tags:

;

; etc. are seen with more relevance by search engines than keywords published in simple paragraphs.

Search engine optimization techniques will continue to change as often as search engines manipulate and shift their algorithms for indexing and ranking. We can only react to those changes and hope our research is accurate enough to provide us the tools to rank our pages higher than the competition.