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If in recent months you have finally got around to purchasing an iPad or iPhone to help you build (and test) mobile sites and the like, you are most likely now also thinking about ways to turn your Smart Device into an external drive. Well, some of us anyway.

One great app that shows up regularly on our radar is aptly called Air Sharing, developed by a company called Avatron, which regularly rates highly on reviews from Macworld and Gizmodo.

The app allows you to view files from anywhere, eliminating the need for flash drives. It integrates very quickly with some well-known cloud systems including Dropbox (recent bugs have been fixed!) and Google Docs.

You can even configure FTP settings inside the app to upload and grab files from any client project you are working on.  The app also allows SSH and access to attachments in your favorite pop server or IMAP application.  And, no WI-FI is required.

The app allows you to perform some key file operations including browsing zip archives and printing documents.  The app works with Windows XP, Vista and of course, all MAC OS systems.

“Air Sharing has been one of my go-to apps for years, especially for cloud storage and SSH. When it comes to file manipulation across a variety of servers, Air Sharing, in my opinion, is the app to beat,” said one enthusiastic review on the App directory.

According to Dave Howell, Avatron CEO, over 1 million people downloaded the app in its first two weeks in the App store.   Mr. Howell selected Lighttpd as their web server since its memory footprint and CPU demands were ideally suited to a mobile architecture than say for instance Apache, which is typically used for traditional web hosting at companies such as AN Hosting.

Mr. Howell also mentioned that he has some direct and indirect competitors in this space including iStorage, Print n Share, PrintCentral, JotNot Scanner and a bunch of others.

The Air Sharing app retails for $9.99 and is categorized as a productivity tool on the App directory.  It has been featured as the App of the Week by Apple in the past and labeled extremely easy to use by The Chicago Tribune.

If you are experimenting with ways to create wireless hard disks and mount remote file servers, this app will probably do everything you need, and more.

A professional version also exists which allows you to drag-n-drop files from your computer to your iPad using their app interface.

Source: Avatron – Apple App Directory

Filed under: Industry Trends by creeves
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Well, well, well. Google never ceases to amaze us with regards to its capacity to horizontally scale services beyond basic search for small business websites.

This time it appears to be paying homage to a new feature found in Google Search, called Google Instant. This enhancement gave users the ability to display results as you typed your keyword into Google.

Google research showed this could possibly save you 3 seconds on average when conducting your search. Globally, it could save users about  3.5 billion seconds  a day.

Basically, the marketing subtext for this product development indicates that Google considers page speed to be a critical metric when it comes to indexing a website for a particular keyword.   This means if your website loads slowly, you could be losing out on a great ranking in Google.

This theory is borne out by a indirect reference or quote from one of their software engineers, Sreeram Ramachandran, in 2010.

“The most popular sites could eliminate more than 8 HTTP requests per page if they combined all scripts on the same host into one and all stylesheets on the same host into one,” said Mr. Ramachandran.

Google seemed to silently acknowledge that most smaller sites were  not going to follow their advice and we doubt that many SMB website owners have the time, money  or capacity to do this.

However, not only did Google present you with a new problem for your website, it also gave you another way to solve it. This is one is much simpler and painless.

It’s a relatively new release called Page Speed Service, which is designed to speed up your existing website by fetching your content and applying rewrites to your pages via globally distributed Google servers.

Yes, it does bear a slight similarity to a CDN although Google’s version is for the time being free and less mysterious to a website owner.

You can run a FREE test right now at the Google Page Speed Check Point. The test involves rendering your website on the selected browser by directly visiting your site, and repeating the same test by proxying your site through Page Speed Service.

Ok, there is a catch (sorry!) to the above. Once you have run your test and discovered that Google can shave, on average, up to 25-60 percentage points off your current load time you will need to qualify for the limited webmaster beta.

“Page Speed Service is currently offered free of charge to a limited set of webmasters during this trial period. Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later,” said Google.

Google offers tangible proof to the benefits of its Page Speed Service via optimization examples of sites that have successfully tried it. You can view the Google Gallery of Faster Websites to get a sense of what’s possible.

Our suggestion is you that you sign up for the service and see if Google can allocate you an available spot. At the very least it’s a service worth keeping an eye on!

Filed under: Industry Trends by creeves
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Arguably the single most important event in the development of Photoshop over the years has been the introduction of layers.  If anybody reading this article has used Photoshop, Flash or just about any other high-level image or animation package, they will acknowledge the key role it plays in separating out visual objects as if they were a picture painted onto separate layers of an onion or a thin, plastic transparency.

It’s hard to imagine a graphic design process that could exist without layers but once upon a time it did.   Most of us take this feature totally for granted and are largely unaware of it’s origins in the Photoshop development timeline or the fact that it was not actually invented by the makers of Photoshop in the first place.

Its insertion into Photoshop can be traced back to version 3.0 in 1995 when together with clone stamping and warping,  graphic designers  now had new super powers to construct engaging visual assets for advertising agencies and publishing houses.

Source: Gawker Assets

It would influence all rival software and animation packages that would come thereafter.   Photoshop itself had been the result of a magic alliance between two brothers, Thomas and John Knoll, one an Engineer doing his PhD on image processing at the University of Michigan, and the other working at Industrial Light & Magic founded by George Lucas.

The collaboration turned into something permanent, a commercial application called ImagePro that was eventually licensed to Adobe as Photoshop.

While there are many twists and turns to the Photoshop story, the make and break moment came in 1995 when they introduced a new feature called layers to their product.   This was akin to the “God Particle” in physics and made Photoshop the world champion of all image manipulation programs.   But, the idea was not theirs.

On this point, history seems to give credit to two different companies, depending on what you read.

According to Computer Arts,  an enterprise called HSC (later MetaCreations) had just brought out an image-editing app called Live Picture that featured the use of layers for the first time.  While rated excellent, the product was too expensive leaving Photoshop the opportunity to pounce and corner the market with layers inside a more affordable package.

Conversely, Wikipedia via Reign of Toads states the origins for layers lies with a company Fauve Matisse, which was originally purchased by Adobe.

In any event, while Photoshop would become bloated with features most us don’t really use (or have time to learn), layers remains the core piece of functionality that drives graphic design and in tandem influences the direction of front-end web design.

Filed under: Industry Trends by creeves
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It’s happening all around us. Some of the biggest, smartest software systems on the planet are being intruded, compromised and monitored by hackers who crave the challenge of peering inside a secure network.

With each new breach, the good guys put up new walls and fences, before being breached again. Not all hackers are bad, although some are.

In no particular order or sequence, here are three jaw-dropping hacks that highlight the necessity to select a web host that takes security — your security — ultra-seriously and has walls high enough to give hackers a run for their money.

Hack 1: “I’ve got a prompt, I’ve got a prompt”

Steve “The Woz” Wozniac loves him. His name is Kevin Mitnick, often labeled America’s most dangerous hacker of all time. In Mitnick’s book Ghost In The Wires he describes his penchant for social engineering, a way to make people inside organizations give-up valuable security information adjacent to launching a programming hack.

Around 1987, he set his sites on hacking the Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) VMS operating system. DEC is widely regarded as having built the worlds FIRST mini-computer, the PDP-11 often called the “SuperMini”.

Standing between two pay phones with two receivers held to each ear he established a phone conversation with a sys admin in the VMS development team while his friend, Lenny, on the other line, sat in front of a computer.

By knowing enough “background” information about the VMS dev team (and the way they operated) he coaxed the DEC sys admin to type in a “show users” command while Lenny connected to the dial-up modem at the DEC department.

Within seconds Lenny shouted into Mitnick’s ear: “I’ve got a prompt, I’ve got a prompt”. With full admin privileges Lenny located a dormant account on the DEC system and proceeded to give the two hackers full admin privileges.

Over the next several weeks the hackers proceeded to data mine and exploit the entire DEC network including downloading the massive VMS operating system. The DEC team suspected a breach but could not pinpoint the source. Some of the brightest minds in America working at DEC were comically induced to believe that they were the victims of an international hacking outfit. Mitnick did this just for the hell of it.

Hack 2: Cloud power drives Wireless Security Breach

Think twice before putting all your eggs in the Amazon cloud cradle. While a big name in cloud computing, you may be safer selecting another web host with secure dedicated servers, colocated boxes or shared infrastructure residing in Tier-3 data centers.

The reason: Towards the beginning of 2011 a research hacker found a way to use the Amazon cloud platform to break the password protection for wireless networks.

Reuters UK reported that Thomas Roth needed only 20 minutes to test 400,000 passwords per second, before he gained access to business and wireless networks using cheap, available Amazon networks.

Roth wanted to convince skeptical network admins that a commonly used method for scrambling data that travels across Wi-Fi network passwords is not strong enough to keep persistent intruders from compromising networks.

Ok to be fair to Amazon, the above does not necessarily indicate a weakness on their system but it does point out how their servers can be used maliciously if so required.

The takeaway point is to regularly check-in with your web host to see what steps they are taking to elevate their security systems. For instance, Anhosting offers rock-solid firewalls on all hosting packages to prevent database hacks, viruses and other threats to your website. They also offer industry-leading anti-spam software and round-the-clock support from Engineers whose only job is to make sure your server stays up and remains safe.

Hack 3: Tim Thumb leaves WordPress door open

If you regularly read our blog you probably already know about the recent Zero Day vulnerability that left millions of WP blogs and Content Management Systems at the mercy of hackers.

Exploiting vulnerabilities in the TimThumb image resizing utility used by gazillions of WordPress blogs, hackers were able to upload executable files and hack .htaaccess files that redirected to Russian URLS.

This malware intrusion will surely not be the last as WordPress continues to challenge Joomla and Drupal as one of the top Content Management Systems.

However, leading web hosts like Anhosting are ever vigilant in their methods to protect your data and ensure all software is patched and up to date.

Rules of the game

Experts generally agree that no system is safe from a determined hacker. Even the Pentagon and Sony are have been hacked.

However, just like locking your door offers some level of security, so does adding extra protection in the form of an alarm system or security company. Follow the same principles in selecting a web host.

If you run your own servers to host your website in-house you are even more vulnerable. Consider these possible exploits (as compiled by the Anhosting security team):

• IP Spoofing
• Denial of Services (DOS)
• Exploitable Port Ranges
• MSSQL and MySQL Exploitation
• Remote Administration tools

While intimidating, reputable web hosts deploy hardware firewall protection that’s maintained, upgraded and monitored 24/7, 365 days per year. Anhosting, for instance, secures data on shared Linux servers inside Tier-3 data centers.

Here is a granular list of measures employed by the Anhosting security team that help protect your data and website files:

• Redundant power sources
• Multiple network carriers
• On-site professional staff
• SAS 70 Type II compliant
• Tier 3 classification
• 30″ raised floor
• Advanced canopy cold row cooling
• VESDA smoke detection system
• 24×7 security and digital video surveillance

Filed under: Tips & Tricks, Web Hosting by creeves
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