Charles Denault III

With the release of the new Prada Smartphone produced by LG, I’m confident that all of the rich and fabulous donning nothing but the most expensive and exotic clothing and jewelry, will be first in line to get their hands on it. It’s nothing special. It’s a phone. It’s no better than any other smartphone on the market. It doesn’t have breakthrough features, it isn’t a thousand times faster, nor does it run a new OS. It’s simply an android phone. Yet they’re trying to pull a fast one on consumers with deep pockets. They’re trying to throw a brand on an ordinary item and make it more valuable. Nearly every company in the world is guilty of doing this at some point… Polo, Lexus, Armani come to mind. The products may be built to slightly higher standards, but in fact they’re just rebranded with a name that is associated with status. It’s a psychological marketing trick.

Whether or not it will work this time around is up to LG. The interface is a poor monochromatic display of a childish graphic designer trying their hand at simplicity. The phone, sans Prada branding, looks identical to any other Android powered phone on the market. And what really gives it up is the big LG plastered on the back of the device. If they really wanted to create a brand, they wouldn’t annex their own line. They would give Prada all of the pride. You don’t see Toyota underneath the logo of every Lexus on the face of the planet, but anyone in the industry knows that’s who manufactures the cars. People don’t care who makes the phone. They don’t care what company is bottling their cologne. They’re buying the product for its functionality, and sadly its name. Slap Tiffany on any WalMart bracelet and a girl’s heart will melt.

LG could have underlying intentions as well. Prada is almost certainly attempting to create a desirable phone, but LG might be trying to improve its own image. LG is known for making some subpar products. Their TVs and other electronic devices grace the shelves at low cost big box stores, and people have come to associate them with creating inexpensive, nearly disposable products. Their move to partner with Prada could be a subtle attempt to begin making consumers wonder if their products are actually of much higher quality. After all, why would Prada parter with a company such as LG unless they were creating high-quality products.

We’ve seen this before LG. Time to hang it up.

When I first started coding PHP, my source files looked like an aggregate of languages. I had inline CSS wrapped with PHP and a crude mixture of XHTML and HTML bouncing around the file like a bilingual child with ADHD. I took a little hiatus from coding for the past 8 months and returned to find an old website in shambles. Everything still functioned perfectly fine, aside from a score of permission problems, but the code was impossible to read. I began the immense task of “porting” the code over to a more readable, functional, and modular layout. I didn’t just code. I sat there and looked at it, examining every single class, function, and echo that produced the web app. I realized how easy it would have been to do this from the start, and I’m pretty disappointed with myself (considering I’m so concerned with having a solid set of standards to abide by).

This is what I’ve started doing, hopefully it will become habitual soon:

• All classes are organized with a clear nomenclature and file location. For instance, all classes are as follows: /public_html/site_root/includes/classes/class.core.php It’s important to not use custom extensions (.inc, .whatever) as it could create huge security problems.
• Without losing a significant amount of performance due to the heaviness of a framework (I still prefer to write all of my classes) I chose to avoid templating systems by this: I have your standard page.php file (right in the site root) with the necessary JavaScript and CSS (see below) file calls in the head. I write the layout using HTML5 and style it exclusively with a stylesheet. ZERO inline styles. The necessary programatic logic (that cannot be simply included) is written into the file (with heavy comments). The main logic of the page is included in a separate file, stored like the following: public_html/site_root/includes/page_name.descriptor.php
• All CSS and JavaScript are in their own respective directories, such as /public_html/site_root/includes/css etc.