Mar102010
File Under: Events

Webmonkey Goes South, Then West, for SXSWi

sxsw2010logo

We’re headed to Austin, Texas tomorrow along with the crew from Wired’s Underwire blog to attend South By Southwest Interactive. The week-long nerd fest starts Friday, and we’ll be reporting from the trenches.

If you’re headed down to SXSWi, here’s what Webmonkey will be checking out. If you’re not going this year, you’ll be able to follow along from home here on the blog and everywhere else on the intertubes using the hashtags #sxsw, #sxswi and #sxsw2010.

The Wired Party, of course. Monday, March 15th at 5pm.

Molly Holzschlag from Opera leading a discussion about the current issues surrounding web browsers. Saturday, March 13 at 12:30pm.

The ActivityStrea.ms crew talks up their data format, which aims to let real-time status updates work across the entire social web. Saturday, March 13 at 9:30am.

The Beauty in Web Design panel, where designers will contemplate what it takes to move beyond usability and into real beauty on the web. Friday, March 12 at 2pm

New Publishing and Web Content, Jeff Zeldman’s panel about the use of web standards in e-books, e-magazines and the future formats of digital publishing. Saturday, March 13 at 5pm.

The Mozilla Party, happening right after the e-publishing panel. Saturday, March 13 at 6pm.

The SXSW Web Awards on Sunday night.

Google’s Hackathon, a hands-on app-building workshop. Sunday, March 14, all day.

Evan Williams’ keynote. We think he’s going to talk about Twitter or something. Monday, March 15 at 2pm.

Fun with HTML5 Video. As messy as the landscape is, there’s still some cool, creative stuff being done on the bleeding edge. You’ll see some of it here, Sunday, March 14 at 3:30pm.

Google Talks About Gmail and Buzz on Sunday, March 14 at 5pm.

The Bigg Digg Shindigg, with a live Diggnation broadcast and a live set from The Walkmen. Saturday night at Stubb’s BBQ

Scott Gilbertson will be holding down the daily coverage on the blog while I’m attending these (and other) fabulous SXSW events. I’ll also be tweeting as @webmonkey whenever anything interesting happens, which should be often. So stay tuned!

Mar102010
File Under: Browsers, HTML5, Multimedia

Shocker: New Study Shows Web Video Is Still a Mess

Flash: quick or dead?

Flash: quick or dead?

A new study released Wednesday pits Flash Player’s video performance against that of native HTML5 video playback in several different web browsers.

The verdict? Flash is a CPU hog in some cases, and native H.264 video is a CPU hog in some cases. That’s right — both options threw strikes and gutters.

Video playback in the browser has been a central issue of discussion in the tech world of late. The forthcoming HTML5 spec allows for native video in the browser. But with patent issues causing squabbles between browser vendors over which codec to support, and with Apple rallying against Adobe’s Flash Player — which none of Apple’s mobile devices, including the iPad, will support — there’s been a great deal of debate over what the future of video on the web will look like.

Continuing that debate, Jan Ozer of the website Streaming Learning Center has posted a study of the performance differences between Flash video player and H.264 video playback in Safari and Chrome on both Windows and Mac.

H.264 video playback through HTML5 performs admirably on Mac Safari, but was neck-and-neck with Flash on Chrome for Mac. On other platforms, Flash outperformed native H.264 video. Ozer notes the latest version of the Flash Player is actually quite efficient at video playback on platforms where it can access hardware acceleration. On systems where it can’t, it tends to gobble up resources just like Flash Players of old.

Flash Player 10.1 can access a system’s GPU on Windows, giving a large boost to performance. But Mac OS X users are left out, because Apple doesn’t allow browser plug-ins to access the proper APIs. So, as Ozer argues, “the ball is in Apple’s court” to fix that limitation.

This study essentially backs up the arguments we’ve been making since the debate began — that the current crop of web browsers are not ready for native video playback and that Flash isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

However, there’s one troubling omission here: Ozer’s study leaves Firefox out. He chose YouTube’s HTML5 demo pages to do his testing, and YouTube is currently pumping out H.264 videos on those pages, which Firefox can’t view. Firefox only supports videos in the Ogg Theora format. He does include Firefox in the study, but only uses it to measure Flash performance.

It doesn’t help that the author keeps referring to H.264 video as “HTML5″, when they are certainly not the same thing. H.264 is a patent-encumbered video format, so it’s disingenuous to treat the format as a fair test subject for measuring native video performance across browsers.

This isn’t ignorance on Ozer’s part, just an oversight — the man has written numerous books and articles about video codecs, after all. It’s an interesting study, but be aware that it doesn’t provide a complete picture of where native video playback is today.

[via Read/Write Web]

Mar102010
File Under: Software, Web Apps

Google Launches Web Store for Cloud-Based Apps

Google Apps Marketplace logo

If you have Google Apps running on your domain, now you can install third-party apps that fully integrate with Google’s apps.

Google has debuted the Google Apps Marketplace, an online store where Google Apps users can browse different cloud-based applications and add the ones they like to their suite of online tools. The apps can share data with the standard Google apps like Gmail and Docs on whatever hosting environment you’re using. Basically, you get to build your own web-based productivity suite.

The apps currently in the store (Google launched with 50) are skewed towards the business and education customers, which make up the vast majority of hosted Google Apps users right now. If you browse the store, you’ll find gobs of apps for things like project management, customer retention and administration. No games just yet, sorry.

There’s a significant amount of buzz around Manymoon, one of the handful of companies that demoed at Google’s launch event Tuesday night and currently the most-installed app in the store. It’s a team collaboration app that divvies up tasks, sets project goals and tracks the progress of team members. The browser-based image editing tools from Aviary are cool, too.

Personally, I’m most fond of eFax — certainly an app with its eye on the future of communication.


Continue Reading “Google Launches Web Store for Cloud-Based Apps” »

Mar92010
File Under: Location, Social

Facebook Finds its Place in the Location-Sharing Landscape

Photo by Mr Ush via Flickr/CCThe biggest social network on the web — that’s Facebook, by the way — is getting ready to unveil a location sharing service of its own, according to a report Tuesday.

Citing unnamed sources, The New York Times’ Bits blog says there will be two components, “a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends,” and a set of APIs other location-sharing services can employ to allow Facebookers to update their location info using outside services.

NYT’s Nick Bilton says Facebook will shed light on the new service at the company’s upcoming f8 developer conference in April.

Facebook has certainly taken its sweet time getting in on the location-sharing game — services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude and Yahoo Fire Eagle have been blowing up over the last year. But the whole idea of “check-ins” raise new privacy concerns for many social network users. Some view it as over-sharing, others have concerns about invasion of privacy or cyberstalking — which is why all of the most popular location-sharing apps have extensive privacy controls built in to their opt-in services.

Earlier this week, reports surfaced that Google is experimenting with rolling location-based features into Buzz activity streams, and that the company is even working on a new location-based ad format.

Photo: Mr Ush/Flickr/CC

Mar92010
File Under: APIs, Location

Google Gets a New Geocoder

localmap

Google has announced a new geocoding web service app authors can use to better plot locations on a map.

The new Google Geocoding Web Service includes some enhanced capabilities that not only make it possible for app developers to provide more accurate and granular locations in their apps, but it also lets them increase the performance of their apps through precaching.

First off, the new service employs the Google Maps JavaScript API version 3, which has a handful of improvements over the previous versions. Users will get more well-formed and easier to parse data from each request. The service can return full names as well as local-language abbreviations for countries, states and territories. Users also have the ability to apply multiple tags to each address component.

Second, the new service lets apps precache data. From the announcement on the Geo Developers blog:

The Geocoding Web Service is intended to enable precaching of geocoder results that you know your application will need in future. For example, if your application displays property listings, you can geocode the address of each property, cache the results on your server, and serve these locations to your API application. This ensures that your application does not need to geocode the address of a property every time it is viewed by a user. However we do ask that you regularly refresh your cache of geocoder results.

It’s important to note that the new service must be used in conjunction with a Google Map, generated either by the Google Maps API or the Google Earth API.

Mar82010
File Under: Browsers

Amazon Is Building a Better Browser for Kindle

Browsing the web on one of Amazon’s Kindle e-readers is like taking a step backwards in time. It’s clunky and has only limited support for web standards, and bare-bones JavaScript capabilities.

But now Amazon may be looking to add browser engineers to the Kindle team, according to the job listings on the company’s website.

A job posting for a browser engineer at Lab126, the division of Amazon that develops the Kindle, indicates the company is looking for somebody to develop “an innovative embedded web browser” for a consumer product.

The role at Lab126 includes designing new features for a new browser while supporting the existing code. Job requirements include familiarity with current web standards and web rendering engines, as well as experience with Java and embedded Linux, both of which the Kindle runs.

The Kindle’s current browsing experience is notably subpar. It’s good enough to check your e-mail, post to Twitter or read Wikipedia, but it doesn’t handle images or more complex web apps particularly well. It certainly doesn’t live up to the same vision of the mobile web being outlined by the iPhone, or Android phones like the Droid or Nexus One. And with the coming of the Apple iPad and other threats to Amazon’s dominant e-reader, which should behave on the web about as well as (if not better than) the iPhone, the Kindle had better improve its browser if the device is going to continue to compete with these more capable devices.

Amazon recently launched a beta program for third-party app developers who want to build software for the Kindle.

Apparently, the job listing has been up for a month, but I only became aware of it once CNET’s Stephen Shankland tweeted about it.

Calls to Lab126 and Amazon on Monday morning went unreturned. I’ll update this post if and when I get more information from Amazon or anyone else.

Meanwhile, if you have any advice about improving the Kindle’s browsing mojo, leave it in the comments.

Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Wired.com

Mar82010
File Under: Browsers, Events, HTML5

Meet the Winners of Webmonkey’s Google I/O Giveaway

We’re giving away a pair of passes to Google I/O today.

A little over a week ago, we kicked off our contest, encouraging you to send us any HTML5 web apps or Google Chrome browser extensions you’ve built. Alternatively, we asked you to tell us how you’d describe a web app to your grandmother. We got a heap of submissions, but we worked our way through the field and picked two winners.

Abraham Williams and Mike Cantelon will be heading to Google’s premiere developer event, which takes place May 19 and 20 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, free of charge.

Here are the winning apps, chosen by the Webmonkey staff, along with a couple of honorable mentions:

Winner: Intersect by Abraham Williams

Williams came up with this cool extension for Chrome that shows additional information about a user’s followers on Twitter — in particular, it shows where you and another user’s social graphs overlap. Install the extension and visit somebody’s Twitter profile page. You’ll see additional grids loading below their stack of followers. You see which of your friends are also following that user, which friends you have in common and which followers you have in common. It’s an excellent social discovery tool for Twitter power users, and the best extension for Twitter’s stock web interface we’ve seen yet. Congrats, Abraham!

Winner: Blood Funnel by Mike Cantelon

Cantelon created this funky little game called Blood Funnel using JavaScript and HTML. It’s basically Space Invaders, except with flying, demonic Goldman Sachs bankers standing in for the buglike aliens. The paranoia is amped up by an awesome, thumping techno soundtrack — served up as an ogg file, of course. Check out Cantelon’s JavaScript source, it’s elegant. Caveat: Blood Funnel is nimble in Chrome, but it’s slower in Firefox. Congrats, Mike!


Continue Reading “Meet the Winners of Webmonkey’s Google I/O Giveaway” »

Mar82010
File Under: Browsers

Browse the Web as it Looked in 1993

github

Github user Alan Dipert has posted the source code for NCSA Mosaic 2.7 on the code-hosting website.

You can download it and run it on any modern Linux installation. It seems to run on Ubuntu just fine, though PNG support is a little wonky. The good news is that the folks on Github are actively submitting patches.

Mosaic was the first graphical web browser. It was born in the early ’90s, created by a small team headed by Marc Andreessen. The same crew would go on to found Netscape Communications and build the Netscape browser, which would eventually lead to the Mozilla browser, and finally to Firefox. So, running Mosaic is basically taking the browsing experience all the way back to its roots.

Dipert acknowledges the work of two other coders who ported the old code to run on the modern Linux: Sean MacLennan and Alan Wylie. As MacLennan says on his site, “If you are going to run a 10-year old protocol (HTML), you might as well use a 10-year old browser.”

I first started using Mosaic at the beginning, in 1993. We had it running at my college radio station, and we DJs would use it to download the news wires we’d read on air at the top of every hour. I also used it to browse Wired’s gopher server and read the magazine articles on my computer in my dorm room. About two years later, HotWired arrived on the web proper, and I used Mosaic to browse it.

OK, I’m getting misty. Somebody cue up some Pearl Jam.

Screenshot and hat tip from Tomayko.

Mar52010
File Under: Monkey Business

Welcome to the All New Webmonkey

monkey_newpaint

As you may have noticed, we’ve given Webmonkey an entirely new coat of paint.

The visual design has been refreshed — something we’ve been doing every couple of years since we launched in 1996 — and we honestly think the site has never looked better. It took a lot of hard work by everyone on the Wired.com technical and design teams to pull it off.

As pretty as it is, there are other changes behind the scenes that we feel are just as important. We simplified the site navigation and upgraded our search tool, making it much easier to find blog posts and tutorials around specific topics. We also upgraded our publishing system, which will allow us to use photos, screenshots and galleries in more interesting ways in our reviews and tutorials.

Most notably, however, this latest redesign of Webmonkey brings to an end a two year experiment. In May of 2008, we moved all of the tutorial content on the site (over 500 articles and reference pages) to a wiki. We asked all of our readers to chip in and help improve our educational content by contributing edits. Many of you jumped in, offering updates, tips, links and corrections. Certain communities really made a difference — in particular, our Django tutorial, our Python tutorial and our series on JavaScript frameworks all benefitted greatly from reader edits. We sincerely appreciate all of the work that everyone put in to improve our content.

But the wiki experiment didn’t pan out. Spam became a huge problem, and despite our best efforts to automate our defenses, keeping spam bots and vandals off the site put serious strain on our small team. Also, while MediaWiki is great software (we’ll continue to use it on Wired’s How-To Wiki), fully incorporating the wiki content into the rest of Webmonkey, which was and still is running WordPress, proved to be a challenge. Search, site navigation and content discovery were suffering because of it.

In February, we froze edits on the wiki and began porting everything into WordPress. All of the legitimate edits and updates that were made by our readers while the wiki pages were open to the public have been preserved in the WordPress versions. We also found some time to update some of the older articles, too.

Now, the tutorials easier to find. They look better (thanks to Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter) and the multi-page lessons are easier to navigate. And while the spam bot armies are locked out for good, the tutorials are open for comments just like blog posts. So if you spot something that needs updating or fixing, just leave a note and we’ll attend to it.

There’s still some work to be done. Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll continue updating the content library, beefing up the number of templates in the Reference section and building out the directories. In the near future, we’re going to install Disqus to handle comments, so you will be able to log in using OpenID, Facebook Connect, your Twitter or Yahoo credentials, or an existing Disqus login if you want to leave a comment anywhere on the site.

So for now, click around the site. Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook if you haven’t already. And of course, please let us know what you think of the new Webmonkey in the comments.

Mar22010
File Under: Browsers, HTML5

Microsoft to Double Down on HTML5 With Internet Explorer 9

With the latest releases of Opera, Google Chrome and Firefox continuing to push the boundaries of the web, the once-dominant Internet Explorer is looking less and less relevant every day.

But we should expect Microsoft to go on the offensive at its upcoming MIX 2010 developer conference in Las Vegas, where, it has been speculated, the company will demonstrate the first beta builds of Internet Explorer 9 and possibly offer a preview release of the browser to developers. Several clues point to the possibility that the next version of IE will include broad support for HTML5 elements, vector graphics and emerging CSS standards. If Microsoft plays its cards right in Vegas, IE 9 could be the release that helps IE get its groove back in the web browser game.

The biggest clue comes from the scheduled sessions for MIX, which takes place mid-March. There’s a two-part talk scheduled on HTML5, entitled HTML5 Now: The Future of Web Markup Today, by Opera Software’s Molly Holzschlag.

Indeed, Holzschlag tells Webmonkey she expects Microsoft to step up HTML5 support in IE9. “Look especially for Microsoft to be working on browser storage and other HTML5 features,” she said in an e-mail.

There’s also a session on IE and SVG, the vector graphics tools supported by pretty much every other browser. IE Senior Program Manager Patrick Dengler is scheduled to present on the Future of Vector Graphics for the Web.

Couple these clues with a post from the IE team on its official blog late last year about increased JavaScript rendering speeds and CSS support, and the team’s recent push to provide better support for SVG graphics and animations, it looks like IE 9 will present a huge step forward for Microsoft into the realm of HTML5, CSS 3 and other modern technologies that drive the most forward-thinking web apps.

Such a shift in thinking would be welcome. Picking on Internet Explorer Explorer is like fishing with dynamite — it’s just too easy to be fun anymore. In fact, many prominent forces on the web have stopped arguing against IE and simply started waving their hands in dismissal. It started with a few developers, but recently even Google has turned up its nose at IE, referring to it as a “non-modern” browser when talking about web standards and releasing its Chrome Frame plug-in to enable IE7 and IE8 users to run more advanced web apps. Worse, third-party developers have started to one-up Microsoft by hacking features into IE, like giving it the ability to display HTML5 video playback when none existed.

The current release, IE8, which shipped on every Windows 7 desktop in 2009, caught Microsoft up to where other browsers were in 2007 with support for CSS 2.1 and a couple of token HTML5 tools — most notably the offline storage elements. But that’s where its support for emerging standards ends.

At PDC09, Microsoft’s last big developer event, president of the Windows division Steven Sinofsky promised that Internet Explorer 9 was going to offer a “more modern” (there’s that word again) browsing experience and emphasized coming improvements in performance, JavaScript rendering, support for existing web standards and support for HTML5 and CSS 3.

But Sinofsky tempered his statements by saying Microsoft will continue to be “responsible” about how much it supports HTML5, so that “we don’t generate a hype cycle for things that aren’t there yet across the board for developers to take advantage of.”

While Microsoft is technically correct when it keeps saying that HTML5 isn’t finished, its failure to offer broad support for the new markup language has held IE back from the web’s cutting edge. The company has traditionally been reticent to support emerging standards, viewing them as a moving target and choosing only to concentrate on standards that have been ratified by the W3C, the web’s governing body. But delays at the W3C haven’t stopped the competition from forging ahead with HTML5, and if IE doesn’t start embracing the new laws of the land now, the browser’s dominance on the web is going to continue to crumble.

We contacted a Microsoft rep for this story, but they chose to save any further talk of IE9 until MIX.

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