Google

Building and designing energy-efficient mobile websites

by  on  in Google, Mobile, Performance, Uncategorized, Web apps

I was introduced to an excellent paper at the Future Insights Live in Las Vegas this year during a talk I attended and really liked by @glan.

The paper is called “Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption” and was presented at WWW 2012, the Mobile Web Performance Conference, France, in April 2012.

For anybody who is passionate about & interested in mobile performance and wants to know what actually kills the battery life on a mobile device when browsing the web, this is a must-read!

A few take-aways

  • Many sites are poorly optimized for energy use and rendering them in the browser takes more power than necessary.
  • Rendering images takes a significant fraction of the total rendering energy.
  • Some sites like Youtube spend around 1/4 of their rendering energy on images.
  • Javascript is one of the most energy consuming components in a web page.
  • Using generic Javascript libraries simplifies web development, but increases the energy used by the resulting pages.
  • Rendering JPEG images is considerably cheaper than other formats such as GIF and PNG for comparable size images
  • …more below in slideshare presentation

If you don’t have time and rather want a summary, you can flip through the slideshare presentation I created for an internal working group meeting at my current company.

[slideshare id=14347830&w=427&h=356&sc=no]

Link to paper: http://www2012.org/proceedings/proceedings/p41.pdf

google gadgets for YOUR site

by  on  in Google, Interesting

another google entry here, but this one is a really fun one: google gadgets can be used and integrated in your personalized google page: nice and wonderfully useful thing: i have been using the personalized google start page for a long time now, i have my calculator on it, my toronto webcam, some weather data, and so forth (see screenshot).

google personalized homepage

but now, google announces to use these gadgets also for your own website, using a simple <script/> tag.

That’s so much fun, so you can include now all kinds of funny gadgets into your page: calculators, world clocks, games, web cams, searches and so forth: check out the gadget collection

 

do the math with google, huh?

by  on  in Google, Interesting, internet

so, google is one of THE most powerful search engines in the world, google also just started offline advertising, it has a good stock market position, and now google can even slowly be used as a multi-functional information tool. while browsing the technology section of the new york times, i came across an interesting article about google shortcuts.

  • did you know that you can use google as a calculator? well, try it out: type into the searchbox: 12+12, as a result, it will suggest the mathematical solution as a sum of 12 and 12.
  • did you know that you can search for a fedex package by typing in the fedex number: it will give you as the first result, it will give you a shortcut to the tracking information for your package.
  • do you need a correct and fast definition of a word: well, then type it: define: [word] and it will give you all the definitions it finds on the web.
  • and the the one that most of us have seen already before: when typing in an address, it normally shows as a first result the map of a city the address is related to.

more google shortcuts are here

and this google cheat sheet is worth to be printed out and put next to your computer desk, it has the most useful search terms included.

google can recognize certain codes typed in or numbers into the search box and eases your way to your result.
try it out…it’s fun.