Archive for July, 2010

File Under: Fonts, Web Apps
Jul
29
2010

Test Drive Your Type With Google Font Preview

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Google launched a new web-based tool Wednesday that helps you configure, test and easily embed one of the company’s free fonts into your web pages.

The Font Previewer lets you pick one of the open source fonts from Google’s Font Library, then tweak the size, spacing and decorations using simple sliders and buttons. Once you have the type the way you like it, just copy the provided code and paste it into the CSS.

It’s so ridiculously easy, even I was able to use it to change the h1 style on my personal site in about 2 minutes. I chose Pablo Impallari’s Lobster.

Google first took the web font plunge back in May by releasing the Google Font API and publishing a collection of free, open source fonts anyone can use in their designs for free. It also joined up with Typekit (who released an API today) to put together a JavaScript library for designers to control how and when their fonts are loaded.

The fonts in the Font Previewer are the same ones available through the Google Font API. They are quite nice, with a range of script, serif, sans-serif and monospace typefaces. The various typefaces used on the Android devices (Droid), and the old-timey one from Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 site (IM Fell) are part of the package.

Here’s Google’s announcement with some more info.

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File Under: APIs, Fonts
Jul
29
2010

Typekit Gets an API

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Font startup Typekit introduced an API Thursday that lets web programmers generate kits from the Typekit library behind the scenes.

The company has previously only offered the option of picking fonts and generating kits using the web-based tool on its site. But by releasing an API, it’s giving people the option of building Typekit into their own apps or simply extending the way they use the service.

Writing on the Typekit blog, Paul Hammond says: “The Typekit API gives you the ability to programmatically create, modify and publish kits. It also allows them to fetch metadata about all the fonts in the Typekit library.”

Here are the documentation pages. As you can see, the Typekit API returns data in a few different flavors (JSON, XML and YAML)

There’s an example page set up on Github, and while there isn’t much there yet (just a kit generator for Ruby) we can expect more soon.

If you haven’t yet explored Typekit’s service for including fancy fonts in your site designs, you should. Especially handy is the WebFont Loader, an open source library of scripts that Typekit developed to help eliminate the “flash of unstyled text” that happens when a page loads. The WebFont Loader offers a number of JavaScript events which allow developers more control over when and how their fonts are loaded onto the page.

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File Under: Web Standards
Jul
28
2010

W3C’s Unicorn Validator Checks Multiple Standards at Once

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Want to find out how magically terrible your web code is? Just ask the Unicorn.

The web’s governing body has launched a new validation tool called Unicorn that checks the quality of your website’s code against multiple web standards at the same time.

You can find the new Unicorn “all-in-one validator” on the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) website at validator.w3.org/unicorn/.

The W3C maintains a number of free web-based tools for checking whether your web code is valid, and Unicorn makes several of these tools available under a single interface. Just plug in a URL and you can see your results for all of these tests on a single page:

  • HTML/XHTML markup validator
  • CSS validator
  • Atom or RSS feed validator
  • mobileOK, which tells you how friendly your site is to mobile visitors

When you visit the Unicorn page, you’ll see a dropdown menu where you can choose what to check. The default is a “General Conformance Check,” which runs all the validators at once and is particularly unforgiving. Your site may validate as strict XHTML, but your syndication feeds and mobile accessibility might be a mess. It’s almost impossible to rack up a perfect score, so be prepared for a lot of red ink.

You can also select one of the individual validation services in the dropdown. Each of the individual validators also continues to run on its own service, and the W3C confirms they aren’t going anywhere.

Unicorn will continue to roll in more validation options over time. There’s already a wiki where you can learn how to write additional modules.

The wiki is also where you’ll find links to the Unicorn code. You can run your own instance of the validator to test your own pages, or you can set up a public Unicorn server for others to use.

Every time we post about one of these validation tools, we get a small flood of comments pointing out that our own web pages don’t validate properly. We know, and we’re working on it. So, just to save you the trouble, here’s Webmonkey and Wired. You’ll notice that our RSS feeds are perfect — Unicorn’s only quibble is that we put Flash-video-object embeds in our syndicated posts. Big whoop.

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File Under: Browsers
Jul
28
2010

Apple Updates Safari, Turns on Extensions

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The new Safari browser with the Twitter toolbar extension installed

Apple released an update to its Safari web browser Wednesday.

Safari 5.0.1 is available from Apple as a free download for Windows and for Mac OS X (Leopard or better). Mac users can also find it in Software Update.

This is an incremental upgrade, but it comes with one big new feature: Safari now has a real platform for third-party extensions, a feature that Firefox and Chrome have had for some time.

Safari 5 arrived in early June, and in addition to dozens of other enhancements (including the much-discussed Reader feature) it included a new architecture for creating lightweight browser extensions that enhance and personalize web pages and web services. Wednesday’s update now lets you install and run those extensions. Apple has also launched a new Extensions Gallery where you can browse the available extensions and download them.

All the major browsers — Safari included — have had a variety of plug-ins, add-ons and toolbars available for years. But Safari’s new extension architecture is much closer to the format recently adopted by Google Chrome and Firefox. This new breed of extensions can be written using HTML, JavaScript, CSS and other web standards. It makes for a much gentler learning curve for potential developers, and for an experienced web programmer, the effort required to create and distribute a standards-based extension is almost trivial. For users, these extensions are easier to maintain and less likely to slow down the browser.

Mozilla calls its lightweight extension project Jetpack, and it’s being incorporated into the newest Firefox releases. The next version of Google’s browser will let users sync their extensions across multiple installations of the browser.

Go to extensions.apple.com to see the gallery of extensions being promoted by Apple. Also, keep in mind that anyone can create and distribute a Safari extension, so distribution isn’t controlled like the App Store. For safety’s sake, Safari extensions are sandboxed inside the browser and signed with a digital certificate so you know you’re getting updates from the same person who created the original.

Apple is promoting a few big-name creations in the gallery. There’s an official Twitter extension, which integrates a simple toolbar Twitter client into your browser, one from MLB that displays scores and headlines, and an eBay manager sidebar for keeping a close eye on your auctions. There’s one on the way from Instapaper.

Of course, the irreverent extensions are more interesting. There’s Defacer, which hides “Like” buttons and other Facebook cruft you find around the web. Shut Up hides comments by default on blogs. A Cleaner YouTube removes visual distractions from video pages, promising to turn YouTube into “a clean and tranquil place” as if that’s even remotely possible.

There are around 100 extensions to choose from right now, and since the new extensions framework in Safari is so simple to develop for, we expect the list to keep growing quickly.

There is one other notable safety enhancement to Safari 5.0.1 — the form auto-fill vulnerability has been patched. This fixes a vulnerability that hackers could exploit to grab personal information from a user by forcing the browser to auto-fill a hidden web form with locally stored data. So, even if you may not care for extensions, you should upgrade Safari for this reason alone.

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File Under: Browsers
Jul
27
2010

Second Beta Release of Firefox 4 Arrives

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The second beta release of the next version of Firefox is now available.

Download Firefox 4 Beta 2 from Mozilla and test it out. Windows, Mac OS X and Linux builds are available in multiple languages. We were originally expecting it to arrive last Friday, but the release was delayed a few days for quality assurance testing.

Keep in mind, this is a pre-release version of the browser, and it may not be entirely stable. But it should be stable enough for daily use, and it will give you a heads up on all the new goodies coming in Firefox 4 when it’s officially released this fall.

Tuesday’s release has a number of new features, including support for CSS 3 transitions, better handling of retained layers on pages and a new feature in the add-ons manager that confirms when an add-on has been installed. There are also the requisite performance boosts and stability improvements, so if you’re running beta 1, definitely consider upgrading.

The feature sure to generate the most chatter is something new for Mac OS X users: a new tabs-on-top interface. Windows users got the tabs-on-top look as the default interface in beta 1 earlier this month. With beta 2, the change arrives on Macs. The new beta also enables App Tabs, a similar concept that lets you miniaturize the tabs for common web apps — e-mail, your calendar or other apps you use multiple times a day — and store them in the tab bar for quick access.

The tabs-on-top setting on Mac OS X can be toggled in the browser's View menu.

The move to tabs-on-top is a growing trend among browser vendors. It was popularized by Google Chrome, which has shipped with top tabs as the default since its birth two years ago. Reaction has been mixed — Opera now puts the tabs on top, and Safari tried the same thing in a beta release thing before abandoning it. And there are some within the Firefox user community who fear Mozilla is making the switch just to chase the latest design fad.

Mozilla’s lead user experience designer Alex Faaborg defends the decision, saying it has nothing to do with fashion. By putting the tabs on top, he says, Firefox 4 will be better equipped to run web applications that sit in their own tab.

These UI tweaks turn the tab bar into something much closer to a dock or a task bar — a fitting change, since the browser is becoming something much closer to a GUI for an operating system. Of course, if you don’t like your tabs up top, you can always choose the old look in the browser’s View menu.

The final browser is expected in October or November, and you can read our preview of Firefox 4 on Webmonkey.

Illustration at the top courtesy of Mozilla.

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File Under: HTML5
Jul
26
2010

Play Pac-Man in HTML5

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Programmer Dale Harvey has created a playable version of Pac-Man using only web standards.

To rebuild the same gameplay found in the arcade classic using browser-native code, he’s relying on local storage, HTML5 audio, Canvas and @font-face. Harvey is sharing all the code on Github as well, so you can run it locally.

Reminiscent of Google’s recent Pac-Man port, Harvey’s attempt is yet another example of web standards being used instead of Flash to create animated, interactive experiences in the browser.

The Flash plug-in is still the most popular platform choice for browser-based games, and it has some advantages over HTML5. Most notably, a Flash game would work in any browser that allows the plug-in, but to play Harvey’s game, you’ll need to use a browser that supports the elements he’s using — Firefox, Opera and Chrome work just fine, but IE8 is a no-go.

On his blog post about the project, he notes some of the other stumbling blocks he encountered when porting the game. For instance, there’s no easy way to loop HTML5 audio, there isn’t a convenient tool for drawing Canvas shapes, and using Canvas/HTML5 for a game even this simple still puts more strain on your CPU than using Flash.

[via Hacker News]

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File Under: Browsers
Jul
26
2010

Next Beta of Firefox 4 Delayed a Few Days

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The second beta release of Firefox 4 won’t arrive until the middle of this week at the earliest, Mozilla says.

We were expecting Firefox 4 beta 2 last Thursday or Friday. But the Mozilla Wiki page for the browser has been updated with this statement: “Hi! We’re glad you’re interested in Firefox 4 Beta 2 – it’s not quite ready yet. Our candidate builds are still going through quality assurance tests.”

The new proposed release dates are July 27-29.

As we’ve pointed out many times before, Mozilla’s release dates are only targets and not hard-and-fast deadlines. No worries, we can wait.

The final version of Firefox 4 is still expected in October or November. It will ship with increased support for emerging web standards like HTML5 and CSS 3, a new look, and the usual speed improvements. We reviewed the first beta and gave a rundown of the new features. You can always download the most current beta release from Mozilla’s Firefox Beta page.

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File Under: Browsers
Jul
26
2010

Early Birds Will Dig Chrome Canary

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People who like to run pre-release versions of browsers in order to access the latest features have a new choice: Google Chrome Canary.

Canary has all the bleeding-edge features found in the developer and beta releases of Google Chrome. But unlike the other channel releases, Chrome Canary allows you to run the pre-release browser without overwriting other installations of Chrome on the same system. So, you can now run a regular version of Chrome and a pre-release, auto-updating version of Chrome on the same computer at the same time.

You can download Chrome Canary today, but it is a Windows-only release for now. We expect Google to follow with canaries for other operating systems soon.

Early adopters — mostly curious geeks and developers working with the latest web standards — prefer to run beta versions of browsers. Beta testing allows them to gain intimate first-hand knowledge of the new capabilities that will be found in the next versions of each browser. But beta versions and regular versions of the same browsers both access the same file resources on your computer, a restriction that prevents you from running two different versions side-by-side. Try launching a Firefox 4 beta while Firefox 3.x is open. You’ll see an error: “Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time.”

On the fence about running an unstable pre-release browser? Canary can help you take the plunge safely.

Chrome Canary side-steps this issue. As Google engineer Huan Ren explains on the Chromium-dev list, “the installer will install Google Chrome canary build to a separate directory with different default user profile, short cuts, and icons, i.e. everything should be separate from existing Google Chrome installation.”

With this release, there are now four versions of Chrome available. The others are “dev,” the least stable build intended for developers, “beta,” which is more stable than dev but not fully baked, and the regular Chrome release, the rigorously-tested version that’s the default option for the public.

On the same developer’s e-mail list, Google’s Mark Larson says Canary will be the most bleeding-edge of all Chrome builds. It will auto-update more frequently than any of the other versions available to developers.

“The canary usually updates more frequently than the Dev channel (higher risk of bustage), and we’re working on making it update as often as we have successful nightly builds. When something doesn’t work on the canary, I can just fall back to my Beta Google Chrome,” he writes.

Hence the name “Canary” — a reference to the canary in the coal mine. Google recently announced it would be speeding up the Chrome development cycle to push major milestone releases more often. This increased velocity means it will need to begin testing new features in the wild sooner and collecting feedback more quickly.

“The data we get back from canary users — especially crash statistics — helps us find and fix regressions faster,” Larson says.

Chrome Canary running on 64-bit Windows 7

Giving users the option to run a more advanced version of Chrome without having to fully commit to the dangerous lifestyle of an alpha tester should help increase the number of people willing to test the new browser.

Chrome Canary also has a different, all-yellow icon — instead of the multi-colored Chrome icon or the all-blue Chromium icon — so it’s easy to spot on your desktop. The beta, dev and stable channel builds of Chrome all use the same familiar rainbow icon. Also, the skin of the browser is blue, helping you tell it apart from other versions of Chrome, which use the same gray skin.

Canary photo: Haplochromis/Wikimedia/CC

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File Under: Databases, Other
Jul
23
2010

Big Data in the Deep Freeze: John Jacobsen of IceCube

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John Jacobsen works for the IceCube telescope project, the world’s largest neutrino detector, located at the South Pole. The project’s mission is to search for the radioactive sub-atomic particles that have been generated by violent astrophysical events: “exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars,” according to the project website.

Jacobsen is one of the people in charge of handling the massive amounts of data collected by IceCube. In the video, shot this week at the O’Reilly OSCON 2010 conference in Portland, Oregon, John explains how they collect a terabyte of raw data per hour, then send everything to IceCube’s remote research and backup facilities using a finicky satellite hook-up.

Antarctica is one of the least accommodating places on Earth to perform scientific research with computers. It’s the driest spot on the planet — atmospheric humidity hovers around zero — and bursts of static electricity threaten the integrity of IceCube’s data stores. The lack of humidity causes the server clusters’ cooling systems to break down. And if something fails, a spare might take six months to arrive.

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File Under: Browsers
Jul
23
2010

Firefox Offers a Taste of Tab Candy

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Are you one of those hyper-multitaskers (aka insane weirdos) who keeps a bazillion browser tabs open at once?

Here’s something for you, and for the tab-curious: Tab Candy, a new experimental feature in Firefox that groups tabs into topical clusters to improve your workflow. It’s made entirely with JavaScript and HTML.

Firefox creative lead Aza Raskin offers this synopsis:

With one keystroke Tab Candy shows an overview of all tabs to allow you to quickly locate and switch between them. Tab Candy also lets you group tabs to organize your work flow. You can create a group for your vacation, work, recipes, games and social sites, however it makes sense to you to group tabs. When you switch to a grouped tab only the relevant tabs are shown in the tab bar, which helps you focus on what you want.

Here’s a video of Tab Candy in action.

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Tab Candy has been kicking around as a pre-release for a while, but it’s just now getting to the point where the Mozilla folks feel it’s ready to be tested by a wider audience.

If you want to try it out, head to Raskin’s site where you can download a TabCandy-enabled build of Firefox. Note that this isn’t an extension, it’s a bleeding-edge build of Firefox with Tab Candy built in, so plan accordingly.

There’s also an FAQ, and a feedback forum you can use to get answers or submit requests.

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