Archive for September, 2010

File Under: Browsers, Web Services
Sep
30
2010

Xmarks Mulls Switch to Premium Service

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XmarksXmarks has had a change of heart.

The free bookmark syncing service had previously announced it was shutting down, but according to a new post on the company’s blog, there’s a chance Xmarks may soon be reborn as a paid service.

It was an outpouring of support from users that flipped the script. Xmarks has a small army of faithful fans, many of whom said they’d be willing to pay for the service after hearing Tuesday’s shutdown announcement. Based on the amount of interest, the company it decided it may be able to make a subscription model work as a sustainable business.

For now, Xmarks is asking users who would be willing to $10 a year for Xmarks to register their support on a new Pledgebank page. If you’d be willing to give Xmarks a few dollars to keep the service alive, you pledge your $10 over at Pledgebank (no credit card required).

There’s no guarantee that a premium version of Xmarks will happen. In fact, Xmarks CEO James Joaquin says company would need at least 100,000 pledges — five percent of their 2-million-strong user base — before Xmarks would consider a premium service. Even if all those pledges turned into real cash that would still only amount to half the $2 million Xmarks says it needs to break even each year. And as Joaquin points out, the conversion rate from free to premium users is typically more like 1 to 3 percent.

That’s a long way from Xmarks stated goals, but stranger things have certainly happened in the world of web startups.

Xmarks started as a Firefox extension for syncing bookmarks between your various Firefox installations, but soon expanded to work with Google Chrome, IE and Safari, keeping your bookmarks in perfect sync across all those browsers.

Unfortunately, despite an incredibly useful set of features and a 2-million-strong user base, Xmarks never found a way to make money. After failing to find a buyer and facing increasing costs with little or no way to recoup them, Xmarks announced that it would shut its doors in January, 2011. Over the following two days, Xmarks was inundated with users begging for a reprieve in the form of a paid version.

Now it seems the company is testing the waters to see how many of its enthusiastic users will actually put their money where their mouths are.

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File Under: HTML5, Web Apps
Sep
29
2010

HTML5 Telnet Emulator Conjures the Pre-Web Past

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Hey kids, wanna go back in time?

If you’re looking for a “lean back” experience, we’d recommend the YouTube Time Machine.

But if you’re looking for something a little more “lean forward,” check out the jsTerm telnet emulator from Peter Nitsch. There are a bunch of bookmarks to choose from in the drop-down, so click around and visit some far-off locales.

The project is based on Flashterm, but Peter has hacked it together in HTML5. It uses Canvas to render the graphics, drawing a new image every time you press a key, plus WebSockets and Node.js to handle the client/server connection. You can dig into the source on github.

Not as hardcore as PuTTY, but it’s a pretty unique use of HTML5 and Canvas, so it’s obviously cooler.

I was a telnet kiddie back in the day — it’s what we did in the 1980s before web browsers, and before you could read Wired magazine on a gopher server — so this really brings me back. It has me itching for some Doritos, a Mountain Dew and the first three Chili Peppers albums.

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File Under: JavaScript
Sep
29
2010

JS1k Contest Highlights Tiny, Powerful Code Experiments

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JavaScript sometimes gets a bad rap. Accusations of page size bloating, superfluous effects and failure to gracefully degrade are common gripes. But the truth is that none of those things are inherent in JavaScript, they’re just common in bad web design.

Take page size for example. Sure, JQuery is big, but even tiny scripts can do some pretty amazing stuff. Proving that claim is exactly the point of JS1k, a recent contest to see what developers could create in less than one kilobyte of JavaScript.

Among the rules of JS1k: The files size must be under a kilobyte, the demo must work in Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera and external libraries were forbidden — short scripts that reference 30MB worth of external scripts were disallowed.

The contest winners were announced Tuesday at the JSCONF event in Berlin. The experiments are really incredible given the files size restrictions. The winner Legend Of The Bouncing Beholder, is an old-school arcade game reminiscent of early Mario Brothers games.

Other winners include a Tetris game, a multiplayer pong game and our personal favorite Mother Fucking Lasers. Head on over to see the rest of the demos and be amazed at what you can do with just 1k of code. Be sure to view source so you can see how these tiny scripts work.

Note that, as of this writing, the site is experiencing ridiculous traffic, so if you get a 503 error, check back later when things have calmed down.

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File Under: Social, Web Apps
Sep
29
2010

ThinkUp Adds Color, Depth to Your Social Network Stats

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If you’ve ever wanted to archive your social network activity, store in your own database and pull all sorts of interesting visualizations out of it, then the new ThinkUp app is what you’ve been waiting for.

ThinkUp is one part metrics app — tracking which of your posts are most popular, for example — and one part cross-network aggregator. It offers features you won’t find on Twitter or Facebook, like a detailed “conversation view” of exchanges with other users. ThinkUp also acts as a backup for your social network data, pulling it into your own database. It even offers CSV files for creating your own spreadsheets.

Since it archives all of your activity, ThinkUp is an especially useful tool for those of us who like to maintain control over our own data. It takes stuff that would otherwise only live in the various networks’ silos and copies it to a database where we’re the administrator. So if we want to ditch Twitter or Facebook in some distant future where those companies start acting against our best interests, we don’t lose the massive stores of updates, links, photos and, most importantly, friend relationships we’ve already set up. And in the meantime, it lets us have fun with all the data it’s archiving.

Although ThinkUp is still a beta release, we took the code for a spin and found it to be stable enough to be useful. At the moment, it only supports Twitter and Facebook data, but ThinkUp plans to add additional social networks in the future, including LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and Google Buzz. If you’d like to try out the limited beta, head over to Github and grab the code. You may notice it’s a project published by Gina Trapani, the former Lifehacker editor who is now an independent author, blogger and programmer.

Continue Reading “ThinkUp Adds Color, Depth to Your Social Network Stats” »

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File Under: Browsers, JavaScript
Sep
29
2010

‘Kick Ass’ Bookmarklet Turns the Web Into Asteroids

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Thanks to his presence as a background image, W.T. Monkey is immune to ass kicking.

Sometimes you just want to kick the web’s ass. Destroy it with tiny dots blasted from your Asteroids-style space ship floating above all the paragraphs and images and semantically meaningless wrapper divs.

Or maybe that’s just me. But if you find yourself feeling the same way, well, you too can kick the web’s ass.

Kick Ass is a JavaScript bookmarklet created by Erik Andersson that turns the entire web into a game of Asteroids. Just head over to the site, drag the bookmarklet into your tool bar and start destroying stuff.

Kick Ass will add a triangular spaceship to any page. Use the arrow keys to steer and the space bar to shoot. And remember, like the site says, “it’s cooler if you make your own sound effects.”

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File Under: Browsers, CSS, Mobile
Sep
28
2010

Make a Big Splash on Tiny Screens With Media Queries

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MorotolaDroid2

Go out for a chai latte with your local technology soothsayer (or just study your Google Analytics reports) and it’s pretty clear that the mobile web is the future.

But let’s not call it the mobile web, let’s call it the smaller web. And by smaller, I mean a web with less available screen real estate than the desktop.

While the iPhone may have a fully-capable web browser, it still has a relatively small screen. Serving the desktop version of the your website is hardly the best way to deliver your content to iPhone owners.

And don’t forget that the iPhone people are the lucky ones. The latest devices — iPhones, iPads, Android phones — have relatively large screens by mobile standards, but these devices are in the hands of a very slim percentage of worldwide mobile users. There are some 3 billion users out there with older phones, or devices with crappy browsers and very small screens.

The point here is that you need something far better than the desktop-optimized version of your website to offer to mobile visitors.

Mobile Solutions

There are three popular ways to approach mobile sites:

  • Write good code, but do nothing special for mobile. This works fine if your audience is made up of iPhone, iPad and Android users with nice, high-speed 3G connections. That’s about 1 percent of the mobile market, but some sites with an abnormally large number of iPhone users (like an iPhone news site) can get away with it.
  • Detect the device in use and serve a separate mobile site. Something like m.flickr.com. While this approach works, it means maintaining a second website, plus constantly updating your device detection scripts as new gadgets come on the scene.
  • Build an adaptive site using CSS 3 media queries. Thanks to CSS 3 and the new media query syntax, you can build a site that automatically adapts its layout to fit the screen size of your visitors.

The later approach has received the most attention lately, with many designers moving to fluid grids that reflow content, resize images and nicely smoosh themselves down to fit any screen. Check out Simon Collison’s personal site, or designer Jon Hick’s website for examples of media queries in action.

Be sure to resize your browser window so you can see the content reflow as the browser width shrinks. That’s the gift of media queries — by precisely labeling your CSS, the presentation can be altered dynamically depending on the device’s screen width and height. Your content never changes, and neither does your CSS. The page simply adapts.

However, as nice as media queries are, before we dive into the syntax and how it can help, it’s important to realize that this approach is not going to magically solve all your mobile design problems.

Continue Reading “Make a Big Splash on Tiny Screens With Media Queries” »

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File Under: HTML5, Web Standards
Sep
28
2010

Modernizr Collects HTML5 Fallbacks for Older Browsers

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5You’ve been eager to dip your toes into the waters of HTML5 and CSS 3 for your next project, but you’re a little concerned about what older browsers are going to make of your newfangled markup. Fear not — there’s a pretty good chance that whatever you’re doing in HTML5, there’s some sort of fallback that approximates the same thing for older browsers, even those that can’t make heads or tails of HTML5.

There are dozens of workarounds. Like a short JavaScript snippet to help IE style HTML5 elements it can’t understand, or a way to make older browsers understand CSS 3 rules. People have already created a lot of these workarounds, and the only tricky part is finding them.

Enter Modernizr’s All-In-One Entirely-Not-Alphabetical No-Bullshit Guide to HTML5 Fallbacks. As the title suggests, the Modernizr team is collecting all of the shims, fallbacks and other tools available to help web developers ensure that modern websites and apps still work in older browsers.

The list covers nearly all aspects of HTML5, from canvas to the various APIs to simple scripts for styling the new elements. There are even a few solutions for CSS 3.

Unfortunately, not every new feature in HTML5 has a fallback for older browsers. For example, drag-and-drop functionality like what’s available in Gmail simply can’t be replicated in older browsers. Nor does the (little used as far as we can tell) new device element or some of the less common tags like <progress>, <meter> or <datalist>.

Still, while not everything has a workaround, Modernizr’s guide is the most comprehensive collection of fallbacks we’ve seen. Bookmark it for future reference. And if you’ve found something not listed on the site, be sure to let them know.

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File Under: Browsers, Web Services
Sep
28
2010

Popular Bookmark Syncing Tool XMarks to Shut Down

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xmarks tab syncThe free, cross-browser, cross-platform bookmarking sync service XMarks is shutting its doors. Despite some 2 million users, the company has never found a way to make money and can no longer afford to continue.

XMarks will continue to function for another three months — until January 10, 2011 — after which the service will pull the plug, the company says in a blog post. There is no real replacement for XMarks, though the company has set a up page to help users migrate away from from XMarks which lists a few suggestions, like Evernote and Sugarsync.

XMarks started as a Firefox extension for syncing bookmarks between your various Firefox installations. The company then expanded to work with Google Chrome, IE and Safari, keeping all of those browsers in perfect sync.

Earlier this year the company added another very useful feature that syncs your open tabs between browsers (and even your phone, thanks to the web-based interface).

Unfortunately, despite an incredibly useful set of features, XMarks never found a way to make money. Todd Agulnick, co-founder and CTO, writes on the company’s blog that XMarks was always “predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service.”

Agulnick recounts several of XMarks attempts to make a profit, including a smart search tool based on anonymized data from the over 100 million bookmarks stored on its servers. While the search tool “turned out amazing results” writes Agulnick, it only worked well for certain types of queries and was “terrible at finding facts.”

Sadly, a business model for XMarks never emerged and, faced with rising hosting costs and expenses, XMarks has decided to shut down.

Perhaps part of the reason for XMarks demise is that Firefox and Chrome have both added their own bookmark syncing systems to the browser itself, eliminating the need for an add-on. Mozilla has built its Sync service directly into the latest versions of Firefox (including the nascent mobile version) and Google Chrome can now sync your settings to any installation of Chrome using your Google account. Safari’s syncing is handled by MobileMe.

Now, if XMarks were to try charging for its services, it would be competing against free tools that don’t require any effort on the users part.

Of course, no browser vendor makes a syncing tool that syncs data between web browsers like XMarks did. That’s a feature, for those of us that used it heavily, that will be sorely missed.

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File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Sep
24
2010

Firefox for Android Is Growing Up Fast

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Fennec Firefox MobileThe newest nightly builds of Firefox Mobile for Android phones are fast, stable, and — unlike the previously released alpha we told you about last month — actually usable.

Development on Firefox for Android is progressing rapidly, and there are a lot of small tweaks and changes to be found in the new nightly builds. But the big news is that everything actually works now. The browser’s performance is much improved, especially in responsiveness, scrolling and zooming.

You can download it here. But be sure to read the release notes, which cover the system requirements (Android 2.0 and up) and the known issues.

This little browser called Fennec (as the mobile version of Firefox is still known at this point in its life) first arrived on Android phones earlier this year. I took it for a spin when the alpha was released in August, and while I noted it had already come a long way in a short time, I was both perplexed and disappointed after a spending a couple of days with it.

I was left wanting because, having seen just about every iteration of Firefox over the years, and having had a wonderful experience testing the Maemo Linux release of Fennec on a Nokia smartphone, I was used to Mozilla shipping alpha versions that were fast, innovative and left you really pumped about the final product.

Not so with this little guy. The first alpha version of Firefox for Android was slow. Really slow. And buggy. Zooming and scrolling were choppy. The Wired home page would mysteriously reload every 20 seconds, and some sites wouldn’t load at all. I double-checked my Nexus One’s system settings, thinking something must be wrong. Since it was alpha code, I planned to revisit it later and measure the changes.

Then I saw this tweet by Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner Friday morning, and I decided it was time.

This most recent nightly build of Firefox for Android fixes most of the performance issues. Wired.com still doesn’t fare too well (probably our fault), but surfing the rest of the web is much more pleasant in the new Fennec. Scrolling and the pinch-zoom gesture are about as fast as Android’s stock WebKit browser. Page rendering is a touch slower in Fennec than in the Android browser, but we can expect that to improve.
Continue Reading “Firefox for Android Is Growing Up Fast” »

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File Under: Browsers
Sep
23
2010

Chrome Frame Leaves Beta, All Set to Hijack an IE Near You

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Google’s controversial Chrome Frame browser plug-in is now out of beta and ready for prime time.

Chrome Frame is an Internet Explorer plug-in that replaces the default IE rendering engine, which is lacking in support for web standards, with the more modern and capable engine that powers Google’s Chrome browser. It essentially embeds Google’s browser inside any tab or window within Microsoft’s browser, giving even the older, antiquated versions of IE the gift of enhanced JavaScript rendering and support for HTML5 technologies like embedded audio and video.

So if you’re stuck using IE6 or IE7 at work and would like to see what the latest and greatest on the web actually looks like, you can grab the official release of Chrome Frame from Google. If you’ve been using the Chrome Frame beta, you’ll automatically be updated to the latest version.

According the Chrome blog, the latest release of Chrome Frame is three times faster on Windows Vista and Windows 7, and the most common conflicts with other IE plug-ins have been solved.

While it sounds like a good idea — improving the web by bootstrapping older, less capable versions of IE — Chrome Frame has proven to be quite controversial. In the past, Mozilla Vice President of Engineering Mike Shaver has quite convincingly argued that Chrome Frame for IE muddles the user’s understanding of browser security, and in the end will create more confusion and little benefit.

Still, whether or not it’s a good idea, Chrome Frame appears to be here to stay. The Google Chromium blog reports that sites like DeviantART and Github have already added support for Chrome Frame. Google Docs and YouTube are also on board, and Gmail and Google Calendar will soon support Chrome Frame as both services begin to drop support for older browsers.

The next version of Internet Explorer will have expanded support for HTML5 and a much better JavaScript engine. It’s in beta now, but the final release of IE9 is still several months away. Our estimate on its arrival is early 2011.

If you’d like users to see your site via Chrome Frame — provided they have it installed — all you need to do is add a head tag to your pages:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

Alternately, you can had an HTTP header using your Apache (or similar) webserver configuration. See the video below for more info on making sure your site triggers Google Chrome Frame when it’s available.

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