Archive for December, 2009

File Under: Browsers, UI/UX
Dec
23
2009

Help Mozilla Improve Firefox’s New ‘Home’ Tab

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If you’ve got ideas about how the Firefox home page should look, now is the time to let Mozilla know. The company is hosting a new design challenge focusing on how to improve the home tab for Firefox 4.0.

The current plan for Firefox 4.0 is to move the home button down into the tab bar as a standalone and always-accessible tab. If that’s not to your liking, you’ll still be able to disable the home tab, or simply set it to a web page as you might be doing now, but Mozilla is hoping to make the home tab a bit more powerful.

Pulling the “home” concept out of the menu bar and putting it in its own tab means that the page can access much more than just the web. It could, for example, filter through your history, add-ons, bookmarks — or pretty much anything stored in Firefox — and present that data in novel ways. What sorts of novel ways is the part that Mozilla is leaving up to you.

While some browsers are using the blank “new tab” page to display a gallery of thumbnails of favorite sites or recently visited pages — Chrome, Opera and Safari do this — the dedicated “home tab” is a new twist on browser interfaces.

One thing worth mentioning: Mozilla isn’t looking for a My Yahoo or iGoogle-style start page. That use case is pretty well covered by iGoogle and its ilk. Instead Mozilla is interested in seeing what a browser start page can do with full access to your browser.

One example cited in the Mozilla Labs post is the About:Me extension, which shows you trends in your browsing habits — which sites you visit the most, where you spend most of your time and so on. As the Labs post says, “unlike mainstream portals like Yahoo and MSN, the locally hosted Firefox home tab can potentially offer users an experience that is innately personal.”

If you’ve got ideas and would like to participate in the challenge, create a short video explaining your idea(s). Be sure to include some sort of a mockup showing how your idea works — a wire frame, an image mockup, even a doodle on the back of a napkin. Once you’ve got your idea on video, upload it somewhere on the web and submit your entry using the design challenge submission form.

More details can be found on the Mozilla Winter ’09 Design Challenge site. The deadline for submissions is Feb. 14, 2010. Winners, both “people’s choice” and those picked by Mozilla, will be announced in March 2010.

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File Under: Blog Publishing, Visual Design, Web Services
Dec
23
2009

Typekit Now Offering Custom Fonts For WordPress Blogs

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Typekit, a web service that helps designers use elaborate typefaces in their web projects, has announced an easy way to use custom fonts on WordPress.com blogs. That means your WordPress.com hosted blogs can now take advantage of Typekit’s font library in just a few clicks.

Typekit is like a YouTube for fonts. Browse through Typekit’s library of available fonts, pick one you like and cut and paste some code into your site. As we noted when we first looked at Typekit earlier this year, the service is one of the easiest ways for web designers to use creative fonts without sacrificing web standards or violating font licenses.

With the new WordPress.com features, you don’t even need to know HTML or mess with any code to take advantage of Typekit.

To use the new Typekit features, just log in to your WordPress.com dashboard and click on the Appearance menu in the left-hand navigation menu. On the Appearance page you’ll find a new option, “Typekit Fonts,” with a place to add your Kit ID.

To get your Kit ID, you’ll need to create an account at Typekit.com and select the free option. From there, you can paste over the code and chose from any of Typekit’s fonts.

Not using WordPress.com? No problem, there are already two plugins that make it easy to integrate Typekit into a self-hosted WordPress blog. If you’re on another blogging platform or custom site you can still use Typekit — see our earlier hands-on review of Typekit for details on how to use Typekit on your site.

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File Under: Browsers
Dec
22
2009

Opera Looks to the Future With Latest Browser Preview

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Opera has pushed out a pre-alpha build of the next version of its flagship desktop web browser. For Opera 10.5, as the next version will be known, the focus is on speed, and while this pre-alpha release is a long way from done, the speed boost is already noticeable.

This pre-alpha release is currently only available for Windows and Mac OS X users. Opera says a Linux version will be released soon. If you’d like to test out Opera 10.5, download links can be found at the bottom of the Opera Labs announcement page.

Much of Opera 10.5′s speed improvements come from the revamped JavaScript engine, known as Carakan, which Opera claims is up to seven times faster than the engine in the current shipping version, Opera 10. It’s worth noting that the Mac version is not nearly as far along as the Windows release, so Mac users may not notice a dramatic speed boost in this early release.

Also new under the hood is support for CSS3 transitions and transforms, which means that the cool CSS 3 transform tricks we told you about last week will work in this version of Opera (note that you’ll need to add the Opera flag to your CSS code, for example, -o-transition-property).

The pre-alpha release of Opera 10.5 also features a new graphics engine that can take advantage of hardware acceleration (when it’s available) to render SVG graphics. Given the possibility of very complex graphics thanks to HTML5′s canvas tag, we expect to see more emphasis on graphics engine in the coming year (think of hardware-accelerated graphics as a sequel to the JavaScript engine contests of recent months).

Opera is also one of the last browsers to jump on the private-browsing-mode bandwagon, but it is finally here in this release.

While the speed boosts in Opera 10.5 are noticeable, particularly on JavaScript-intensive sites and web apps, Opera 10.5 is very much a work in progress and lacks some very basic features — like printing in the Mac version. Also missing is support for Opera’s Unite web server tools.

As you would expect from the pre-alpha designation Opera 10.5 is also somewhat unstable, but if you’d like to test out the latest release, head over to the Opera Labs page and grab a copy.

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File Under: Browsers
Dec
22
2009

Browser Stats: Firefox 3.5 Is More Popular Than IE 7 or IE 8

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Firefox has finally achieved one of its main goals, surpassing Internet Explorer as the most popular web browser.

This latest shift is illustrated by a new batch of browser share stats from analytics firm StatCounter, which is making the rounds on tech news blogs Tuesday.

There is, however, one big catch to StatCounter’s numbers — to arrive at the conclusion that Firefox is bigger than IE, you have to break down both Firefox and Internet Explorer’s share into separate version numbers.

Firefox’s popularity among web evangelists sometimes leads to overly-optimistic press, and StatCounter’s latest numbers are no exception. Which isn’t to say that StatCounter’s numbers are wrong, merely that, as Mark Twain said, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

StatCounter’s data shows that Firefox 3.5 had 21.93 percent market share at the end of last week, compared with 21.2 percent for IE 7 and 20.33 percent for IE 8. That’s certainly good news of Mozilla, but if you ignore the versioning, IE still wins with some 55 percent of the web, while Firefox can claim around 32 percent.

The fact that all the browsers need to be split by version number for Firefox to come out ahead obviously means that, in the real world, IE is still winning the browser wars.

The good news, from a web developer’s perspective is that IE is losing market share overall. Adjust the slider on StatCounter’s graph to look at the last year and you’ll find that IE’s combined stats have fallen from 68 percent to 55 percent.

Furthermore, IE 8′s growth appears to be cannibalistic, that is, as IE 7 drops, IE 8 grows, meaning that IE 8′s growth is largely from upgrades, not brand new users.

Because much of the future of the web depends on HTML5 and other tools absent in all version of Internet Explorer, IE’s loss in market share means that more people are now using a browser that supports web standards and more of the latest and greatest the web has to offer.

And that’s a good thing, no matter which numbers you want to throw around.

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File Under: APIs, Social, Web Services
Dec
21
2009

Twitter API Is Becoming Far More than Just an API for Twitter

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Twitter’s API has spawned hundreds of mashups and third party software apps, but now it’s growing even further — outside sites have begun mimicking an API to piggyback on Twitter clients.

It started last week with a clever hack by WordPress contributors which allows WordPress.com users to post and read their WordPress.com blogs through third-party Twitter apps like Tweetie 2 for the iPhone.

Now Tumblr has joined in on the fun, allowing you to post and read Tumblr blogs through any third-party Twitter app that allows you to change the API endpoint.

The last bit is key, since while both WordPress and Tumblr have mimicked the Twitter API, you still need to make sure your Twitter client can be manually pointed to the correct URL, i.e. tumblr.com or wordpress.com, rather than twitter.com.

We tested both the WordPress and Tumblr clones of the Twitter API using Tweetie 2 for the iPhone and had no problems setting up and connecting to either service. There are, however, some shortcomings — for example, if your WordPress of Tumblr stream is primarily photos, you won’t see much through the Twitter client. Also, because WordPress and Tumblr both offer infinitely more posting options than Twitter — for instance, uploading photos — the experience of either through a Twitter client is sub par. Still, if you’ve been looking for a good way to blog quick links or short posts on the go, the new API support combined with a mobile Twitter client makes an excellent option.

Dave Winer recently called the development third-party support for the Twitter API an open standard in the making. While we think he might be right, we’re not sure it makes it a good candidate for a de facto standard yet.

For one thing, Twitter is a private company with its own goals for its own API. In order to really become a standard, Twitter would need to freeze its API, ensuring that it doesn’t change. Since Twitter has been doing interesting (and sometimes backwards-incompatible) things with it, like adding geotagging support and changing how replies are handled, and we don’t want to see that stop.

There’s also a very good chance Twitter doesn’t want to freeze its API, which leaves the web with a proprietary API that could change at any given moment — hardly a stable platform on which to build the future of microblogging. In short, WordPress and Tumblr’s recent clones of the Twitter API are just hacks. What Winer and others are hoping is that the hacks will evolve into something more.

It’s important to remember two things. This isn’t the first time an API has been cloned, nor is it the first time a proprietary API has been proposed as a good candidate for a de facto standard. Social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia cloned the Delicious API to great success (before Ma.ngolia went offline) and the OAuth protocol emerged out of a desire to create an open, cross-site authentication platform that mimicked Flickr Auth and other systems.

The web wants a simple, cross-site API that allows basic functionality common to many popular web services — posting, reading and following.

We e-mailed web standards advocate Chris Messina and asked where he thinks this is heading. He points out that there’s already OpenMicroBlogging, an open standard that allows different messaging hubs to route microblogging messages between users in a near real-time time frame.

Unfortunately, OpenMicroBlogging has thus far failed to catch on. Which is why the Twitter API is appealing, because it has caught on and enjoys a wide ecosystem of mashups, desktop apps and mobile clients. It only makes sense that other publishing services — like WordPress and Tumblr — want to be involved in that ecosystem.

As Messina points out in his e-mail, and as has been argued by Dare Obasanjo’s post on 25hoursaday.com, this creates an interesting moral dilemma for Twitter. The company can either embrace this new growth and continue to nurture the efforts of the community, and thus cede total control over its own API, or just ignore it and continue developing its API with aims on improving its own business, even if it breaks the tools built by outside developers.

Whether that ecosystem will remain closely tied to Twitter or perhaps grow beyond it to some kind of standard remains to be seen. But in the mean time, at least you have yet another way to consume your favorite WordPress and Tumblr sites.

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