Archive for August, 2010

File Under: Browsers
Aug
31
2010

Browsers Turn Their Backs on Old Macs

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Word is out that Firefox 4, when it ships at the end of October or thereabouts, will probably not include support for older, non-Intel Macs.

Mozilla’s director of Firefox Mike Beltzner hinted at the change on a Mozilla developer mailing list last week: “I am gathering data on the number of PPC users we have, but the likely outcome is that we will not be supporting PPC for Firefox 4. More on that as I get the data.”

PowerPC Mac users have precious few options for modern web browsers these days. Firefox 3.6 will likely be the last Firefox option for PowerPC Macs, and Google Chrome only runs on Intel machines. Apple is still supporting PowerPC Macs with Safari releases, but the latest version, Safari 5, requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later — users still running 10.4 (Tiger) can only run Safari 4.1, which has many of the features found in Safari 5, but is likely the end of the line. Opera 10 runs on older PowerPC Macs, but it struggles. Opera 9 is more reliable, but has fewer features. Slim pickings, and getting slimmer.

Of course, the problem could be solved by upgrading. And we have — most of us already have second or third machines at this point.

Our aging computers, especially laptops, are often put into service as dedicated devices for streaming music, checking e-mail or browsing recipes in the kitchen. In today’s cloud-based world, you need a good web browser to do most of those tasks.

An old machine that still runs but doesn’t have a decent browser is basically worthless.

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File Under: APIs, Social
Aug
30
2010

Twitter Moves to OAuth: The OAuthcalypse Is Nigh

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Twitter is killing support for basic user authentication in third-party apps on Tuesday morning, the company says. Instead, Twitter will now require all third-party app developers to use OAuth for user authentication.

This is a planned move Twitter first announced in December, and the company has posted a help page on its developer site with some resources meant to ease the transition to OAuth.

The Twitter API team has been dialing down the number of requests an app can make using the basic authorization method. That number will hit zero at 8AM Pacific time Tuesday.

Some bloggers have given the event the catchy name, “OAuthcalypse” — a bit of a mouthful, but so is “user authentication protocol” — the implication being that when basic authentication is switched off, it will break old software and leave users in the dark. But since Twitter has given developers ample warning of the change, the switch will only lock out a small number of apps.

Twitter’s move mirrors a broader trend on the social web, where basic authentication is being ditched for the more secure OAuth when services and applications connect user’s accounts.

In basic authentication, a website or app will say, “Hey, do you want to share whatever you’re doing here with your friends on Twitter? Give me your Twitter username and password and I’ll hook up your accounts.” By passing along your info, you’re giving that app or website unlimited access to everything in your Twitter account. Pretty dangerous, and not secure.

In OAuth authentication, the website or app will send you to Twitter where you sign yourself in, then Twitter will tell the website or app “Yeah, they are who they say they are.” The website or app only gains the ability to do certain things with your account — post, read, reply, search — while staying locked out from the more sensitive stuff.

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File Under: HTML5, Multimedia
Aug
30
2010

Google and Arcade Fire Get All HTML5y

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The good folks at Google have published a very cool multimedia showcase for what’s possible in HTML5. Using music by Arcade Fire (the 21st century hipster equivalent of ELO), filmmaker Chris Milk has made an interactive video of sorts that spans multiple browser windows.

Eliot Van Buskirk has a full write-up, including an interview with Milk, over on Wired’s Epicenter blog.

“The Wilderness Downtown,” features HTML5 native video and audio, canvas-animated birds that fly away from your mouse clicks, interactive SVG fonts, and photo panoramas from Google Maps Street View. You enter in the address of where you grew up and it pulls the images for that neighborhood. The neighborhood of my childhood home wasn’t available, so I opted for the section of Burlington, Vermont I lived in throughout college. It was creepy to see my old house in an Arcade Fire video.

Being Google-produced, the experiment works best in Google Chrome, of course. It had problems playing back properly in Firefox 4 beta.

If you have Chrome and can watch it, it really strikes a chord. It goes beyond all the HTML5 vs Flash dogma and presents what’s possible with these new technologies in a way which resonates on a level that’s more emotional and immediate than nerdy and intellectual.

So who do I talk to at Google about getting them to do one of these things for my band?

This post was updated at 2:45 PDT. The original incorrectly said it was a YouTube experiment. The site was created by the Google Chrome team, not YouTube.

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File Under: Frameworks, Programming
Aug
30
2010

Ruby on Rails Steams Ahead With 3.0 Release

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It’s been two years in the making, but Ruby on Rails 3.0 is finally here. You can grab the third generation of the popular web framework from the official website, or update via the command line with: gem install rails --version 3.0.0

Rails 3 is a major overhaul for the framework and merges the Rails and Merb frameworks to create a single lightweight code base for web applications written in Ruby.

The goal for this release was to make Ruby on Rails faster and more modular. Developers can now mix and match libraries, swapping out their favorites for Rails’ default choices.

If you’d like to know what’s new, what’s changed and why you might want to upgrade to Rails 3.0, head over to the Ruby on Rails screencast page, which has videos covering the biggest changes in the new release, as well as a number of smaller, but very useful new features.

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File Under: Browsers
Aug
30
2010

Chrome 7 Shows Off Hardware Acceleration, ‘Tabpose’

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Google’s Chrome web browser will soon gain hardware-accelerated graphics — the latest trend for web browsers that has already shown up in early builds of Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4.

Hardware acceleration allows the browser to offload intensive tasks like image scaling, rendering complex text or displaying scripted animations to your PC’s graphics card. It has the benefit of freeing up the PC’s main processor and speeding up page load times.

Today’s faster graphics cards have created a new playing field for hardware acceleration. Microsoft has been trumpeting IE9′s accelerated capabilities since the first developer preview was released, and Firefox 4 will also take advantage of the new technology. Both of those browsers should be released before the end of this year.

Chrome 7, which is currently available in developer build form, is the latest browser to take advantage of hardware acceleration. Chrome’s tightly sandboxed rendering model — which prevents web pages from interacting directly with the OS — means that hardware acceleration is a little more difficult for Google than it is for IE or Firefox.

Of course it may be some time before any of these features make it to the stable release of Chrome. Chrome 5 is currently the shipping version and Chrome 6 — which features a considerably revamped interface — is currently in the beta channel. Thus far Google has not confirmed any release dates for Chrome 6, nor when Chrome 7 will move to beta status.

But If you’d like to test the early builds of Chrome with hardware acceleration, you can do so now. Grab the latest developer build of Chrome 7 and launch it from the command line with the new --enable-accelerated-compositing flag.

As with Firefox, the hardware acceleration features in Chrome are only available in the Windows version.

Hardware acceleration isn’t the only new trick up Chrome’s sleeve. The Mac version of the browser is also experimenting with something Google calls “Tab Overview” or Tabpose. Tabpose is similar to Mac OS X’s Expose; it allows you to visually pull back and see all your tabs as thumbnails and quickly switch between them.

Some early reports have compared Tabpose to Firefox 4′s new Panorama tab organizer, but Firefox’s version is considerably more sophisticated, with extra features like drag-and-drop organization and the ability to group tabs and switch between groups. If you’ve used both Panorama and Tabpose, the differences are obvious.

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File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Aug
27
2010

Firefox Mobile Alpha Lands on Android

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The first official pre-release version of Mozilla’s mobile Firefox browser for Android devices has arrived, the company announced Friday.

Curious users with phones running Android 2.0 and above, or with Nokia N900 devices, can download and install it right now.

Codenamed Fennec, Firefox mobile is based on the same code as the big daddy desktop version of Firefox. It supports the same web standards and it even accepts add-ons. It also syncs up with your other versions of Firefox, so your history, Awesomebar searches, auto-fill form data and passwords will be the same as you move from desktop to mobile and back again throughout your day.

One of the strokes of genius design in the Fennec browser is the unique side-to-side swipe action, which brings up menus for things like tabs, bookmarks and settings. It minimizes the browser chrome and leaves more screen real estate for web pages. This new version has the sync features as well as pinch-to-zoom browsing.

We’ve seen pre-release versions of Fennec running on Android in the past, but they were patchy and bare bones. This is a real-deal alpha release. It may not be entirely stable yet, but it’s come a long way since its meager beginnings.

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File Under: Visual Design
Aug
27
2010

Find Design Inspiration in Pattern Tap’s Minutiae

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The web is littered with design galleries showcasing beautiful websites, but most such galleries focus on the site as a whole — where do you turn if you just want some inspiration for a navigation menu or a really slick sign-up form?*

We stumbled across Pattern Tap, which is a design gallery of sorts. But it breaks the showcased site down into specifics, like sites with awesome navigation menus, great looking web forms or really eye-catching typography.

In some cases, the overall designs of the featured sites are great. In other cases, not so much. But that’s bound to happen with you start breaking a design down into tiny components like great-looking code snippets or often neglected aspects of web design like sites with really good copy.

Pattern Tap also emphasizes the social stuff by offering “user sets” — if you find something you love, you can easily see who posted it to the site and what else they’ve contributed.

If you’re looking for some inspiration for that weekend web project, head to Pattern Tap and narrow your search. Just remember, Pattern Tap is a site for design inspiration, not your ticket to wholesale design theft.

* Yes, such a thing exists. Like pornography, you’ll know it when you see it.

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File Under: Programming
Aug
27
2010

Write Your README Before Your Code

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Every programmer wants to write better software, whether that means writing cleaner, faster code, sticking to best practices or documenting your work for long-term upkeep. But if your code doesn’t serve the needs of your users then it’s worthless, no matter how great it may be. So how do you make sure your beautiful code isn’t just an abstract work of art, but actually serves the end goal of making your users happy?

Tom Preston-Werner, the co-founder of Github, has some advice: write your README first.

That is, sit down and write out exactly what you want your software to do before you start writing any code. “Until you’ve written about your software, you have no idea what you’ll be coding,” Preston-Werner says.

Some developers may recall the days of the Waterfall model, a design and coding practice that advocated detailing all the minutiae of, well, everything. Today’s buzzword- systems like Agile Development are in many ways a deliberate attempt to move away from the complexities of the Waterfall Model.

Preston-Werner isn’t advocating a return to it. He carefully points out that the Waterfall model is overly complex, but “there must be some middle ground between reams of technical specifications and no specifications at all.”

That the middle ground is the good old README.TXT file. It’s typically much shorter than full-blown documentation driven development, but still forces you to go through an abbreviated, but very helpful part of development — making sure everyone, including you, is clear on what you’re trying to do.

Treat it like a mission statement: “[The README] document should stand on its own as a testament to your creativity and expressiveness. The README should be the single most important document in your codebase; writing it first is the proper thing to do,” writes Preston-Werner.

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File Under: HTML5, JavaScript
Aug
27
2010

Trick Out Your Images With PaintbrushJS

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HTML5′s canvas tag is a blank slate that allows you to manipulate all sorts things with JavaScript — everything from complex animations to interactive infographics to videos.

For those that want to trick out their images — including background images set in CSS — developer Dave Shea has released PaintbrushJS, a lightweight image processing library that can apply various visual filters to images on your page.

Behind the scenes, PaintbrushJS uses the HTML5 canvas tag to apply its effects, automatically inserting canvas tags based on class names. You can set effects and control the amount by adding attributes to your tags.

PaintbrushJS works in any modern browser — so, of course, IE 8 and below won’t see the effects.

PaintbrushJS can blur images, add a sepia tone, overlay colors or add noise. For a full list of the effects available, check out the documentation or head over to the demo page to see it in action. If you’d like to experiment with the effects, you can grab PaintbrushJS from its home on Github.

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File Under: APIs, Browsers
Aug
27
2010

Jetpack Edges Closer to a Starring Role in Firefox

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Mozilla Labs has announced an update to its Jetpack extensions system that makes it easier for developers to write browser add-ons that more closely interact with a person’s computer desktop.

The new Jetpack SDK is version 0.7. It is quickly reaching the level of maturity required for it to become a standard feature in Firefox.

Jetpack is a new extensions framework for Mozilla’s browser designed to offer developers an easier, faster way to build browser add-ons using common web development tools like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The Jetpack extension framework will not replace Firefox’s existing framework, which uses heavier code. But Mozilla expects to see many developers switch to the new framework once it’s complete.

While Jetpack was innovative when Mozilla first announced it, Google has since added an extension system to its Chrome browser that works on the same principles as Jetpack — using web-based tools like HTML and CSS. More recently Apple joined the fray by adding a similar extensions system to Safari 5.

Firefox’s lightweight extension framework has spent a long time in development. Jetpack graduated from Mozilla Labs (though the project is still hosted there) in March of 2010, but, while there was some speculation that Jetpack might end up in Firefox 4, that appears unlikely.

Still, the developer SDK is now at version 0.7 which brings three new APIs for developers to test. The panel API creates floating modal popups that appear on top of web content and browser chrome and persist until dismissed by users or programs. There’s also a clipboard API for interacting with the OSes clipboard and a notifications API which mimics the look of Growl to display messages to the user.

The Jetpack roadmap calls for another SDK release near the end of September and then Jetpack should hit 1.0 sometime in the fourth quarter of 2010. Once Jetpack 1.0 is stable look for it to begin working its way into Firefox.

In the mean time, if you’d like to test out Jetpack and see what the fuss is about just install the Jetpack add-on, which allows Jetpack to work within current version of Firefox. Yes, it’s a little weird, but for now Jetpack is an add-on that you use to install add-ons.

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