Since its launch, the App Store has enjoyed tremendous success. There are now over 100,000 Apps in the store, which logs over 10,000 downloads a day. But the market for smartphone apps is heating up. So let’s take a look at some of the contenders who are going to be snapping hard on Apple’s heels.

In terms of usability which App store comes out on top? In order to help you answer this question I look at what’s good and what’s not in each of the major App stores.

Currently most of the App stores are so similar in name, pricing and content that there is very little to tell them them apart. However, image is everything. Despite Blackberry’s tempting developer rates, Apple still manages to eclipse the competition with its media and marketplace dominance, as well as the sheer number of apps available.

It seems that, for now at least, despite there being a greater array of apps now with their own dedicated providers, it will be some time before someone manages to take a major bite out of Apple.

As quality assurance assistant and junior developer for Semantico I spend a lot of time developing and implementing QA tests. Testing an e-publishing website can be time consuming.

Even a simple test of search functionality has several steps; go to the designated URL, log in, search, verify the search results, check hit highlighting, start an advanced search, verify those results, check hit highlighting again, start another search with a different term… well, you get the idea. It’s repetitive. And there are many aspects to test, not just the search facilities.

After a while you might find yourself thinking that there should be a more efficient way to test your website. You can hire someone to do all your QA tests for you of course. But will they test your website in an efficient way? Will they follow your test cases to the letter; the tests you have spent hours designing, editing and documenting? If only there were an automated tool to do all this – and one which did not require a degree in Computer Science to operate.

Enter Selenium

At Semantico we do extensive testing. To get the most out of budgets and man hours we now use Selenium IDE for the repetitive tasks.

The official website describes Selenium as “a suite of tools to automate web app testing across many platforms”. You can think of Selenium as a little piece of software that does not mind doing your testing for you. It will test your website exactly the way you want it to be tested, as many times as you wish. You just need to tell it what to test and how. Selenium is a life saving tool and can cut out a lot of time, effort and money. It’s got no price tag (it’s free!) and is fairly easy to learn. It comes in different flavours but we’ll only talk about the Firefox add-on version here because that’s the version we know best.

Installation and tutorials

Download Selenium IDE and let’s get started. Install it on Firefox, restart your browser and you are ready. Selenium now lives in Firefox’s Tools menu and has a minimal interface. If you have ever recorded macros in an office suite of applications (like OpenOffice or Microsoft Office for example) then using Selenium will be a breeze. If you haven’t, it will only take you a couple of hours to learn how to use it efficiently.

I have found two very useful tutorials so far, one from the official Selenium Wiki and one from the Software Testing Geek website . Both tutorials require Flash to run. These are only a couple of tutorials from the many available on the web. A quick search on your favourite search engine should help you find even more.

After that, you are ready to start recording your test cases and then share them with your colleagues if you want, so that they can do some QA work when you are not available.

Using Selenium

Using Selenium is fairly straightforward. You start Firefox, fire up Selenium IDE and it is already in record mode. As soon as you start clicking on links, typing in text boxes and pressing buttons, Selenium will record these actions. The simplest thing to do when you first run Selenium is use it to run a search on a website. Once you have initiated the search and the search results are displayed on the page, press the ‘Record’ button to deactivate it. Afterwards, you can run the newly-created test case and Selenium will play it back on demand, repeating your actions in exactly the same order as you have taken them.

Translating your test cases

Selenium stores your commands in its own programming language. This language, called Selenese, uses English words and can be easily read by non-programmers. Once you’ve created your test cases you can translate them into Selenese and they are ready to be used whenever you need them. This is where you can realise the true power of this tool. You simply run Selenium and it will handle the rest. You can either run a test suite or individual test cases. If there are any errors, Selenium will report them, along with an explanation, in a log file which is directly accessible from the programme’s interface.

Selenium’s interface will not win any beauty contests. But it’s incredibly easy to use and, most importantly of all, is constantly giving you helpful feedback on what is happening. Brains over beauty. Simple.

Most automated tools we have tried in the past have had one common problem: they will not let you change the base URL. The base URL is essentially the URL of your website. But as all experienced QA testers know, the URL can change. One day you are testing something on a test environment, later that day you are testing something on the live site. Implementing your test cases multiple times for each URL can be time consuming and inefficient. With Selenium IDE you can choose not to store a base URL, which makes it very versatile and easy to use on different environments.

Sharing your test cases

Once you are happy with the implementation of your test cases and you have separated them in test suites, you are able to share them with your colleagues and across different departments. The files are small enough to email, or you can save them to a shared drive.

It is not a panacea

No matter how powerful a testing tool is, it will never entirely substitute the work done by a QA team. Selenium IDE is great for testing specific functionalities of your website and can deal with most of your test cases – but it is not ideal for checking presentation-related issues. You cannot use it, for instance, to test whether your website looks the same on a wide-screen monitor, or to check the text on a particular menu for correct alignment.

Also, it is a Firefox add-on. Unless you install the server-based version of Selenium, Selenium RC on a server, you can only check your website on Firefox. There are CSS issues between browsers that you also need to examine before you give the developers the green light to go live.

Lastly, if there is one area that needs improving it’s that Selenium is a bit weak on dynamic content. If, for example, one of your pages involves different sections that are presented in tabs with JavaScript, Selenium will not always work.

Recap

Using Selenium to improve your tests on your website has many benefits: you save time, money and resources. Your tests are done in a fraction of the time it used to take you to fully test a website. Your test cases become more flexible, more dynamic and of course, you never forget to test anything.

I’ve found Selenium to be an exceptionally useful tool when it comes to regression tests and rapid functional tests. It’s not here to replace testing done by humans, but it does a great job of assisting and complementing human testing.

It’s always suspicious (to a jaundiced marketing person’s eye) when a show organiser chooses to place a large seated cafe area at the centre of the exhibition floor.

There were some noticeable absences at this year’s Online Information exhibition at Olympia – no doubt the result of crunch-inspired budget caution – and the air of an industry bracing itself for further shocks.

Public sector cuts have come to be seen as one of the few predictable features of a scarily unpredictable outlook for 2010, but the recent news from Dubai has shown that the private sector may not have exhausted its store of nasty surprises yet. Meanwhile, closer to home, there’s one less book retailer on the high street this Christmas with Borders going down – and as print news sales continue in a similarly downward direction, Rupert Murdoch has sounded the retreat, enjoining other Publishers to follow his lead and dig in behind their paywalls.

Small wonder, perhaps, that the on-stand drinks parties spilling out into the aisles had plenty of space this year to spill out into.

Quality not quantity

When a show is in such a period of contraction it’s usually the organisers who like to bandy the phrase ‘quality not quantity’ about, but interestingly it was a Publisher we heard using it this year. A show like this is about conversations, and OK there were a few less conversations happening this year than last, but perhaps they really were more valuable ones. Certainly, there seemed a serious progression from last year in many quarters. Tech industries in boom are notoriously productive of hot air. Sometimes it takes a chillier climate to bring a greater air of reality.

Answers not results

The conference at Online Information is always an interesting one. We at Semantico were too busy with those valuable conversations, perhaps, to catch all the sessions worth seeing, but what we did see confirmed our view that, more than ever, Search is a critical issue for our industry.

Two extremes, perhaps, of the current landscape were visible here. The leading edge of semantic search was represented by Conrad Wolfram, who launched Wolfram Alpha earlier this year. Like all good things it is now available as an iPhone app. Wolfram’s assertion is that users don’t look for search results, but for answers. Being on the leading edge of search he of course denies that what he is doing is search: preferring to say that he is creating ‘knowledge environments’. One thing that really came across as distinctive in his approach is the emphasis on the presentational aspect of data.

At the other extreme, arguably, and at some remove from the leading edge, lies Bing. It is hard to gainsay the notion that Microsoft is playing catch-up with Google here, as in many of its recent offerings, and despite what it says in the marketing books about ‘fast follower’ being the more advantageous positioning in tech markets, surely this can’t seem a great place to be when you used to be … well, Microsoft. It’s hard to think that any sliver of useful innovation Microsoft manages to come up, any incremental enhancements to where we are now, won’t instantly be snapped up, and probably improved upon, by Google.

Which is not to say that Google doesn’t have its own catching up to do elsewhere …

Get real

There’s a lot of talk about real-time search at the moment, some of which was being purveyed at the conference by search guru Stephen Arnold. This interest largely results from the stellar rise of Twitter, and Google’s stated ambition to improve its game in this area. But real-time search is hard. At the moment, Google indexes certain sites hourly; however, there are many others that it indexes only three times per year. Keeping up with the global information stream, and prioritising exactly what should be kept up with, is an extremely challenging computational task.

Keeping up with the local information stream can be a challenging task too, even at a slightly downsized event such as this; so these notes are necessarily impressionistic. Over all, our impression is of a tougher, but perhaps slightly more real, marketplace for online publishing. Which bodes well for the upturn when it eventually comes.

We’d also like to thank all those who thronged our stand on Wednesday afternoon (and spilled out into the aisles) to help celebrate Semantico’s tenth birthday. Here’s to the next ten!

“I’m usually not a fan of reference books that are turned into e-products, but this one has been converted quite intelligently. Most important, the e-version transcends the print – you can find more there and do more with what you find. It’s a solid ten.”