Blogs

My colleague Narek Karapetyan blogged recently about Google's Android mobile operating system, suggesting the business model and development platform was more inviting to developers wanting to build mobile applications.

I remember reading it thinking "anything with such widespread developer, or geek, following, is bound to succeed in our industry".

This week, Nielsen has released data revealing that Google Android-powered mobile phones have outsold iPhones and Blackberrys in the United States of America over the last 6 months.

Importantly, the period in which this data was collected included a full month of Apple's release of its latest iPhone offering - iPhone 4.

The Nielsen report says:

Among all smartphone owners, Blackberry still holds the dominant share with 31 percent of the market, though its lead over Apple is declining. Twenty-eight percent of smartphone owners have Apple iPhones, compared to 19 percent who have Android devices.

I would like to come back to my point earlier and tie it in to Google's business model with the Android operating system.

If you win over the developer, or geek, community with your tech product, you are onto a winner.

Google made Android open to developers to build apps and easily make them available to potential or paying users. Critically, this came at a time when iPhone was taking record periods to approve iPhone applications as developers hung around for their good work to go live.

Blackberry owner RIM (Research In Motion) has even further restrictions on developers, and as a result, its app collection is the smallest of the Smartphone operating system giants.

Other than pleasing the geeks, Android does have other commercial benefits that iPhone and Blackberry do not.

Its 'open' policy extends to phone manufacturers to make phones with its intelligent operating system, with more apps than these hardware companies would ever imagine offering their consumers with their minimalist operating systems.

Motorola, HTC and Samsung are among the major phone manufacturers to adopt Android and as a result.

This 'open' model has Google on an upward trend with Android. It knows it is on a winner.

After a several years of Apple's iPhone apps domination, Google with Android is now establishing itself in the market with better offerings and freedom of usage.

The advantages of Google Android apps over iPhone apps are quite apparent as the app writer and the end user are not bound to technical or software limitations, as Apple did when it bound its hardware with iTunes.

Android is a Java-enabled platform which basically means it ensures easy access to phone features using fairly simpler coding and procedures.

XML- and Java-based coding processes allow for the creation and deployment of mobile apps into supported handheld platforms easier for humble starters.

With its more recent entrance, Android is already making dramatic changes and moves up the mobile market ladder, and the number of apps is growing fast as a result.

Keeping with this trend, I assume Android will eventually become a standard platform of choice for those serious about taking their businesses mobile.

We are all hooked onto this social networking phenomenon, especially with Facebook and I guess you are all wondering how some of your friends are posting icons along with their comments.

The answer is easy: they use HTML symbol entities.

Some characters (e.g. the less than and greater than signs) are reserved for HTML markup. In order to display these characters as text, you must enter the HTML entities in the source code.

For example, to display the less than sign (<), you need to enter < (entity name) or < (entity number).

Among the entity list, there are quite a lot of symbol entities that we can use in layout design. For examples: → ♥ • “ ⊕.

Continue reading this post to find more surprises.

The Advantages of Using Entities Rather Than Images

• It loads fast because it is text base.
• Scalable according to font size.
• Easy to change color and sizing.

Apostrophe & Quotation Marks

Most common typography mistakes found on the internet are probably the mis-uses of apostrophe and quotation marks. We often misuse the prime symbol ( ‘ ) as the apostrophe ( ’ ) and the double prime ( " ) as the quotation marks ( “ ” ).

To correct this, you can use the right single quote entity (’) as the apostrophe. Use the left double quote (“) and right double quote (”) for the quotation marks.

Arrows

I particularly find the arrow symbols useful because they can be used as direction arrows or breadcrumb separators.

 

Link Separators

My favourite entities for separating links are bullet • ( • ) and dot operators ⋅ ( ⋅ ).

 

Trademark, Copyright, Degree, and Currency

The other commonly used entities are probably the trademark, copyright, degree, and currency symbols.

Trademark ™ | © Copyright | Registered Trademark ®
Currency: ¢ Cent | £ Pound | ¥ Yen | € Euro

 

Symbols For Web Design

Here some entities that you can perhaps use for design layout:

⊕ ⊗ ∞ ♥

 

Miscellaneous Symbols

Here are some miscellaneous symbols that you will most likely never going to use (but they are cool):

♠ ♣ ♥ ♦

 

So there you have it, all of the HTML symbol entities I can think of and with this post I hope to help people put new and exciting icons across the web.