For a while now there’s been talk of Google favoring secure HTTPS pages in its results. We just noticed this week that any Google searches for content on our web site now return secure HTTPS URLs instead of HTTP:

It’s not clear when this happened but a quick check on our web server shows that nearly 75% of all connections were HTTPS:

Only a year or so ago HTTPS connections only made up about 10% of all connections. The percentage of HTTPS URLs being used is only going to increase as more people find HTTPS based results on Google and then share them in web pages, emails and social media.

So if your site supports based HTTP and HTTPS then HTTPS is now the most important in terms of optimising performance. The good news if that HTTPS isn’t necessarily much slower than HTTP and may be even faster if you support SPDY.

UPDATE July 7, 2014: There’s been a lot of interest in this post and some people have been jumping on the SEO implications of this. We’re not implying that your site will get ranked higher than other sites if you have HTTPS. What we’re saying is that if your site has both HTTP and HTTPS versions of the same content that Google will now return an HTTPS link. The biggest implication is that if you support HTTPS most of traffic will now be using HTTPS rather than HTTP.

UPDATE August 6, 2014 – Google has confirmed that HTTPS will be used as a ranking signal in Google Search.

You can check SSL/TLS configuration our new SSL test tool SSLRobot . It will also look for potential issues with the certificates, ciphers and protocols used by your site. Try it now for free!

The small screens of the iPad and iPhone don’t lend themselves to in-depth development tasks, but their mobility and convenience can be useful when tracking down problems in the field or providing support when you are out of the office.

Here’s a list of apps that you may find useful if you are involved in development or tech support: (Please let us know in the comments if there’s any we’ve missed)

Networking & Web

HttpWatch – of course this has to be on the list! Our app is the ultimate browser based HTTP sniffer for iOS. (Paid & Free)

iNetwork Utility – scans your network showing device types and network addresses. It also supports Wake-On-Lan and can browse services advertised with Bonjour. (Paid)

System Status – shows in-depth information about the state of your iOS device including active network connections, memory and CPU usage. (Paid)

SpeedTest – tests the speed of your internet connection using servers close to you or at chosen locations (Free)

Pingdom – view the status of sites and services that you are monitoring and receive alerts if downtime occurs (Free)

IPMI Touch – view the hardware status of IPMI supprting servers on your network including temperature, fan speed, etc. Servers can also be remotely powered on/off or restarted (Paid)

Prompt – a Telnet and SSH client for your iPhone or iPad (Paid)

Jump Desktop – a remote desktop (RDP/VNC) client for Windows PCs and Servers (Paid)

Editing and File Handling

Textastic Code Editor  – a fully featured code editor with syntax highlighting (iPhone Paid & iPad Paid)

Dropbox – iOS 7 doesn’t have a public file system for sharing files between apps. Dropbox is the best alternative until improved sharing features arrive in iOS 8. You can save files from Mobile Safari or Mail and then open them in other apps or PC/ Mac (Free)

iOS Development & App Management

AppCooker – prototype iPhone and iPad apps on your iPad (Paid)

iTunes Connect – view the sales and download data for your app on iOS (Free)

Crash Manager – view and manage crash reports from your Crashlytics account (Free)

Learning

Stack Exchange – access Stack Overflow, Super User and Server Fault from your iPhone or iPad (Free)

NewsBlur – a blog reader app that synchronizes with your NewsBlur account (Free)

WWDC – download and view videos from Apple Developer conferences (Free)