AMT Blog

AMT Family wishes all our readers a Merry Christmas & a Prosperous New Year. We take this opportunity to thank all our partners, clients and well wishers for the overwhelming support and trust.

May Peace be your gift at Christmas and your blessing all year through!

photo © 2008 Cal Evans | more info (via: Wylio)

PHP

Implementing the Singleton Pattern in PHP 5

As you probably know, in software engineering there is a set of design patterns that are universally tested, approved and accepted as advanced recipes for programming. One of these patterns is the Singleton design pattern, which is based on the mathematical concept of a singleton (a set with a single element)...read more

A Nice PHP image resizer class

For the longest time I had been using a function I wrote some time ago to handle resizing of images through PHP. I decided it was time to convert it into a class and give it it's own special place in my application workspace. It works so well I figured the least I could do is share with the world....read more

Everyone Loves PHP

This isn't an article about HipHop and how awesome it is, though. What I'm trying to convey is our love affair with PHP. Take a look at the top hundred sites by traffic, size, or whatever other metric you fancy, and there is a high chance that they're using PHP....read more

Building Mobile Apps with PHP

we now have a convergence of new technology that makes building web apps-mobile and otherwise-much easier. jQTouch, Sencha Touch, and more recently, jQuery Mobile take a lot of the pain out of writing cross-browser JavaScript for mobile browsers....read more

Mobile Web

5 Pitfalls to Avoid When Developing a Successful Mobile App

The way that people choose, buy, access and use mobile apps is, in many ways, fundamentally different from the way they behave on the traditional web, and so the rules have to change. The issue is that there isn't yet the same level of widespread understanding about apps that there is about web design...read more

Programming Apple Push Notification Services

One of the key limitations of the iPhone is its constraint on running applications in the background. Because of this, applications cannot keep running in the background when the user switches to another application. So, applications that require a constant state of connectivity (such as social networking applications) will not be able to receive timely updates...read more

SEO

Landing Page Optimization Tips (Study)

After having analysed 50+ sites to find out what increases sales and conversions, A SEO Expert shares with us his thoughts on the four most common issues that affect conversion rate and sales...read more

Solving 6 Common Ecommerce Problems in Google Analytics

If you use Google Analytics for your ecommerce business, Google Analytics: Understanding Visitor Behavior by Justin Cutroni (blog) is a great resource (provided you already have a general understanding of basic web analytics). It covers a broad range of applications including creating an implementation plan, how to use profiles and filters, marketing campaign tracking, CRM integration and enterprise implementation...read more

PHP

10 PEAR Packages for Every PHP Developer's Toolbox

An interesting article written by Jason Gilmore on PHP Extension and Application Repository, better known as PEAR, and in this article he tries to shine the spotlight just a bit brighter on this fantastic community resource by highlighting 10 useful PEAR libraries (better known as packages) that has become an indispensable part of his programming toolkit.

PHP as a data source for Flex applications

If you have a RIA as the user interface the server no longer needs to mix the data with the visuals. This means PHP coders no longer need to worry about styling data, surrounding the information with tables, divs and tons of other tags. The only thing they need to do is send the data back in some usable format, and luckily XML is supported by Flex. Let's take a look at some code needed to start communicating Flex with PHP...

Web Design

Create an Elegant Patterned Web Design in Photoshop

This web design tutorial on Design Instruct walks the learner through the creation of a beautiful and trendy web layout using Photoshop. The web design is best used on a personal portfolio site.

A Study of Trends in Mobile Design

The aim of this article is to showcase the variety of methods in which some of today’s most popular websites provide an interactive and (hopefully) useful mobile experience for their end users. There are plenty of big names which were analyzed, such as Facebook and Amazon, and you’ll see plenty of useful graphs to draw some inspiration from. With statistics and some really interesting revelations on the diversity of modern design, you can be excited about the future of mobile Web design!

UX

Designing for the mind

Design is powerful because of the way our brain processes visuals. We might think of vision working by our eyes pulling in images and projecting them in the back of our mind. If this were the case then there would no be design or art. There are in fact 30 areas in the back of your brain that process different aspects of the image. The various vision processing areas of the brain are individually recreating the design. So, in a way, the viewer is also an artist...

Applying Lessons from UML to UX

Software Engineering is typically much more formal than User Experience in they way they model an application before development begins. After pseudo code, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is probably the most widely used modeling language among software engineers. It has...

Is Realistic UI Design Realistic?

When Apple introduced the iPad, along with it came a set of Human Interface Guidelines. The HIG encourages app developers to “delight people with stunning graphics” and to “add physicality and heightened realism…The more true to life your application looks and behaves, the easier it is for people to understand how it works and the more they enjoy using it.”

jQuery

Quaid - JavaScript Library

Quaid is a JavaScript library that works with jQuery to help you write cleaner, more-robust code. You can think of it as a little framework with which to easily build widgets and other stateful jQuery plugins. Quaid provides two main services: a more modular way to write complex JavaScript applications with jQuery, and a robust way to handle errors from async server requests. Also included for convenience is multi-level, cross-browser logging with failover, a small framework for data formatting, and form handling utilities.

How To Organize a jQuery Application with JavaScriptMVC

Jupiter Consulting, a development outfit and the creators of the JavaScriptMVC framework, has posted a guide on organizing jQuery applications with JavaScriptMVC 3.0. Justin Meyer, the author of the post, felt that other guides to organizing jQuery applications failed to emphasize a crucial aspect: breaking up applications into separate and testable components. "The secret to building large apps is NEVER build large apps," Meyer writes. " Break up your applications into small pieces. Then, assemble those testable, bite-sized pieces into your big application."

WordPress

Beginning WordPress Development: A Look at Common Functions

WordPress is a great blogging and CMS platform. It’s easy to use and customize, and there’s basically nothing you can’t do with it. If you haven’t used WordPress, give it a try by installing it on your own computer using a web server package like xampp or WampServer. You’ll need access to WordPress in order to follow along with this guide.

Using TextMate for WordPress Code Cleanup

A Useful Post written by Ian Stewart a professional designer and WordPress enthusiast, on using TextMate commands for cleaning up wordpress code.

New Features in WordPress.com : Linking, Sorting & Paging

It’s that time of year again, when the folks over at WordPress.org start putting the finishing touches on the next version of WordPress (in this case, version 3.1), and the lucky users of WordPress.com are automatically included in the beta testing, giving you all access to new features about a month before they are officially released...

PHP Development

8 Experts Break Down the Pros and Cons of Coding With PHP

An Interesting & Insightful article which originally appeared on Mashable Network, on the strengths & weaknesses of coding with PHP. Check out the Opinion of these experts on questions like these: "What makes PHP a good language? What are some of PHP’s drawbacks? And what are the best apps or cleverest hacks you’ve seen made with and/or for PHP?"

10 Productive PHP Tools for Testing and Debugging

Despite the general notion that programming is a profession steeped in discipline and rigor, members of the programming community tend to be rather finicky folks who can be very particular when it comes to tooling. Thankfully PHP developers have a great deal to choose from when it comes to testing and debugging tools, and in this article I'll highlight 10 of my favorites.

PHP snippets to interact with Twitter

Twitter is an awesome tool for website owners, and you should definitely integrate it into your website if you want to attract more traffic and new visitors. Today, let’s take a look at some PHP snippets to interact with Twitter.

MYSQL

10 Command-line Time savers for MySQL Tasks

Although several great GUI-based MySQL clients exist, among them phpMyAdmin and SQLYog, I've always preferred to use the native mysql command-line client. It does take some time to get acquainted with using a command-line interface (CLI), particularly if you don't regularly work with an operating system offering a robust CLI environment. However, after some practice you'll be able to manage users, navigate your databases, and perform other tasks with incredible ease.

Top 10 MySQL Mistakes Made By PHP Developers

A database is a fundamental component for most web applications. If you’re using PHP, you’re probably using MySQL–an integral part of the LAMP stack. PHP is relatively easy and most new developers can write functional code within a few hours. However, building a solid, dependable database takes time and expertise. Here are ten of the worst MySQL mistakes I’ve made (some apply to any language/database)…

Web Design

520 Grid System: HTML/CSS Framework made for Facebook Page Developers

Nowdays there are milions of Facebook Pages almost about everyting. Facebook Page creators try to impress first-time-visitors but also fans with atractive and useful content in custom made FBML tabs. Because I am one of them also, I always need some quicker and more efficient way to make my FBML content and show it as soon as possible to fans of my Facebook pages.

Three Fresh CSS Frameworks

CSS Frameworks are those marvelous and innovative tools that will speed up your web development process by taking care of the multitude of repetitive processes you would have to cover for every project, and on top of that, they (mostly) take care of any cross-browser compatibility issues. They have also never been as popular, with new frameworks cropping out from week-to-week.

5 Design Trends That Small Businesses Can Use in 2011

In the past 12 months, we’ve seen a lot of changes in the world of web design. Growing popularity in the mobile device space — including smartphones and tablets like the iPad — have refined the way many users access and interact with content. Likewise, the formal adoption of web standards like HTML5, web fonts and CSS3 by browser makers means that more and more users are now able to take advantage of the latest and greatest features on the web.

UX

Decision Architecture: Helping Users Make Better Decisions

"What is it that makes a Web site great? In answering this question, it’s sometimes valuable to take a step back and consider anew why we create Web sites. … For the most part, we create Web sites to get users to do something…."

jQuery

50 Useful jQuery Plugins to Enhance your Forms

Here we present some useful plugins and tutorials that will let you create awesome forms for your websites — whether it’s a sign up form or contact us form. You can enhance its functionality and usefulness with these plugins. Since these forms are used by the visitors of your website to interact with you, they are of great importance and for this reason you cannot just ignore them as they play an important role in the success of your website. So here we have gathered a bunch of jQuery Plugins, Tutorials and Resources which will help you in improving the effectiveness and beauty of these forms

jQuery’s Data Method – How and Why to Use It

jQuery’s data method gives us the ability to associate arbitrary data with DOM nodes and JavaScript objects. This makes our code more concise and clean. As of jQuery 1.4.3 we also have the ability to use the method on regular JavaScript objects and listen for changes, which opens the doors to some quite interesting applications.

All the Indians across the world is celebrating the "Festival Of Lights".
Spend this holiday season with your family, relatives and friends. Wishing All our readers A Very HAPPY Diwali!
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Onam is the harvest festival in the Indian state of Kerala. It falls during the first month of the Malayalam calendar which is Chingam (August–September) and marks the homecoming of the legendary King Mahabali.

One of the celebrations during Onam is by laying the traditional ritual of Pookalam (floral carpet).
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