Archive for October, 2010

File Under: Identity
Oct
29
2010

Flickr Adds Limited OpenID Support

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Large web services from the likes of Google, Yahoo and others love to tout their OpenID support. But when these companies say “support,” sometimes what they mean is that you can use them as an OpenID provider — and store all of your precious personal information on their servers.

What’s much less common from the big companies are sites that let you sign in with OpenID. Today the popular photo sharing site Flickr has taken a small step in that direction.

The site has stopped short of true OpenID support, though that appears to be the end goal. For now its offering a way to sign in with your Google OpenID. Yahoo, which owns Flickr, is using Google’s authentication APIs to power the sign-in experience. Sadly, the new feature is only available for those signing up for Flickr. If you’ve already got a Flickr account, you have to authenticate using your original login.

Given that most of you probably already have Flickr accounts, today’s news isn’t all that exciting. But hopefully, it means the wheels are turning at Flickr and one day you’ll be able to sign in with any OpenID account.

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File Under: APIs, Identity, Web Services
Oct
29
2010

Connect to Twitter Without OAuth

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OAuth is a great way to sidestep the dilemma of having to hand over passwords to third-party sites and apps to access user data. This is the primary reason the authentication method is fast becoming a de riguer part of today’s social APIs.

But while OAuth solves one problem, it creates another — it greatly raises the complexity of simple apps.

We’ve looked at the issue in the past, particularly with regard to Twitter’s transition to OAuth, which broke countless small scripts. The good news is that OAuth 2.0 is less complex than its predecessor and removes much of the headache for small developers. Unfortunately, OAuth 2.0 isn’t widely adopted yet, and it’s not quite ready for prime time.

But there is a solution for Twitter. SuperTweet was created by developer David Beckemeyer. The service sits between your script and Twitter, where it does the heavy lifting of OAuth for you. Even better, you don’t have to hand over your Twitter password to SuperTweet — instead, you create a password on the site, approve SuperTweet to access your Twitter account and then connect your script to SuperTweet.

The service isn’t meant for full-blown apps, nor does it support commercial uses. But for individuals and non-profits without the development resources to make the switch to OAuth 2.0, it can bring those simple Twitter scripts back to life.

Of course using SuperTweet means adding another potential failure point between your script and Twitter, but if you can live with that, using SuperTweet is easier than wading into OAuth’s waters.

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File Under: Programming, UI/UX
Oct
28
2010

Unleash an Army of Bees With Machine Guns on Your Website

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Want to know if your website can stand up to a sudden, massive deluge of traffic? Sure, you could use some of the available tools like Flood, JMeter or The Ginder. But none of those options have bees with machine guns.

The news applications team at the Chicago Tribune, has released a new tool it calls Bees with Machine Guns that uses Amazon EC2 servers to launch what amounts to a distributed DoS attack against your site.

Now only is it an incredibly handy way to load test a website under arguably more realistic conditions than you’d get with other load testing tools, Bees with Machine Guns has awesome print statements that will turn your terminal session into a war zone.

For example:

$ fab -f bees.py attack:http://YOUR-DOMAIN.com/,1000,100
Read 2 bees from the roster.
Connecting to the hive.
Assembling bees.
Each of 2 bees will fire 500 rounds, 50 at a time.
Stinging URL so it will be cached for the attack.
[localhost] run: curl http://YOUR-DOMAIN.com/ >> /dev/null
Organizing the swarm.
Bee 0 is joining the swarm.
Bee 1 is joining the swarm.
Bee 0 is firing his machine gun. Bang bang!
Bee 1 is firing his machine gun. Bang bang!
Bee 0 is out of ammo.
Bee 1 lost sight of the target (connection timed out).
Offensive complete.
     Target failed to fully respond to 1 bees.
     Complete requests:     500
     Requests per second:   81.670000 [#/sec] (mean)
     Time per request:      612.188000 [ms] (mean)
     50% response time:     358.000000 [ms] (mean)
     90% response time:     1541.000000 [ms] (mean)
Mission Assessment: Target successfully fended off the swarm.
The swarm is awaiting new orders.
Done.

Keep in mind that this is essentially a DoS attack. Launch it against a site that isn’t yours and very bad things will happen to you. But for testing your own site’s performance, Bees with Machine Guns is awesome — all you need is an EC2 account and the script.

Major bonus points if your site can fend off the bees with miniature pies:

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File Under: Browsers
Oct
28
2010

Microsoft Drops a New IE9 Preview, Boosts CSS Support

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Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

We’re still months away from the official release of Internet Explorer 9 — it’s likely due some time during the first half of 2011 — but Microsoft continues to roll new features and additional web standards support into its next-gen browser.

The company put out a sixth pre-release “platform preview” of IE9 Thursday. It includes support for CSS3′s 2D transforms. There are also improvements to hardware acceleration, font rendering, and the browser’s JavaScript engine. You can read about these enhancements in depth on the official IE Blog.

Microsoft released the first beta of Internet Explorer 9 in September. But this new release is not a second beta, it’s the sixth platform preview. A bit confusing, sure. But beta releases are considered to be almost totally stable and are intended for a more general audience. Platform previews are on the bleeding edge, and may contain code that isn’t as thoroughly tested. So, this release is primarily aimed at developers.

IE9 Beta is doing spectacularly well, however — Microsoft says its beta release has been downloaded ten million times since its release six weeks ago. It has also been receiving kudos for its expanded support of web standards like HTML5, CSS 3 and WOFF.

Here’s a video showing off the new stuff in IE9 platform preview 6:

If you watch the video and read the post on the IE Blog, you’ll notice a lot of emphasis on “full hardware acceleration” in IE9, and how other browsers like Chrome and Firefox can’t perform as well as IE9 because they only offer “partial” hardware acceleration. In fact, all browsers have access to the same Windows APIs that enable off-loading work to the PC’s graphics processor when needed to speed up 2D and 3D animation rendering. This has been an issue of some debate over the past two months, with Microsoft and Mozilla going toe-to-toe over the issue.

If you want to test the new IE9 platform preview 6, it’s available for Windows 7 and Vista only. Microsoft also released some new tests at the ietestdrive site — run all your browsers through them.

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File Under: HTML5, Multimedia, Web Standards
Oct
28
2010

Adobe Shows Off Flash-to-HTML5 Converter

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Even though its Flash technology is used as a punching bag by web standards fans, Adobe has been building tools that embrace HTML5. The company recently released its own HTML5 video player, and Adobe Illustrator and Dreamweaver CS5 now contain a number of new HTML5 export tools.

Now it seems Flash might be joining the party. At Adobe’s Max conference this week, Adobe engineer Rik Cabanier showed of a demo of tool that converts Flash animations to HTML5 (well, technically it looks like a combination of HTML5, CSS and images).

The video below, while not the best quality, shows the tool in action:

Adobe Flash has taken a beating in the last couple of years. First Apple attacked Flash for poor performance, then open tools like HTML5, CSS 3 and JavaScript began stealing much of its thunder, offering video, audio and animation — traditionally Flash’s strongholds — without the need for the free plug-in.

While rumors of Flash’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, there’s no question that, were Flash to remain what it is today, it will eventually be replaced by HTML5 tools.

Keep in mind this is just a demo, not something that’s scheduled for release any time soon. It’s also worthy noting that, despite the claims of “HTML5,” the page generated appears to be using the XHTML 1.0 doctype. Clearly this is a work in progress.

Still, even if the final project generated the kind of messy markup you see in the video, just the ability to export your animations out of Flash, even if the final code needs some clean up, would be godsend for developers that want to move their complicated Flash animations to web standards that play on devices where Flash can’t run.

[via Adobe's John Nack]

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File Under: Browsers
Oct
27
2010

Firefox 4 Pushed Back to Early 2011

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Mozilla’s next big browser update is running a bit behind schedule.

Firefox 4′s estimated release date has officially been pushed back to early 2011. The browser’s release schedule, which is posted on a public wiki, has been updated to show some new dates: beta 7 in early November, then three more betas before the end of the year, with the release candidate due early next year.

We were originally expecting Firefox 4 to be finalized by now, in late October, when the schedule was first laid out several months ago. But Mozilla’s release dates are always moving targets, so we were expecting things to change. But not this much. Now, the wait for Firefox 4 looks like it could stretch out to three more months, which is sure to upset those eagerly awaiting an update.

The good news is that the current beta is very stable (at least in our testing) and has enough polish to make it safe for day-to-day use. If you’re feeling a little bit rock and roll, we’d recommend downloading the latest Firefox 4 beta. The new features like the updated user interface, expanded support for new standards like HTML5 and CSS 3, plus a much-improved JavaScript execution engine make it worth the very small risk of a crash.

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File Under: UI/UX
Oct
27
2010

Design for Serendipity (And Drinking Monkeys)

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Part of the beauty of the internet and HTML is its inherent serendipity — links lead you somewhere, and other links lead you somewhere else, beyond, anywhere. Yet, serendipitous as the web may be, few sites encourage this sort of haphazard exploration.

As developer Derek Powazek writes, “Serendipity powers the social web. It’s why every website has a “share this” link. Serendipity is at the core of why Twitter is fun, YouTube is valuable, and everyone you know has a Facebook account.”

In fact, argues Powazek, “we should be designing for serendipity.”

Unfortunately, things like the bottom line, advertising dollars and other external forces mean web designers are tasked with keeping you on a page, not sending you off to discover something else. Even Powazek’s examples, like YouTube’s “related videos” section is inherently designed to keep you on YouTube’s page. But the way it keeps you on YouTube is by creating a potentially serendipitous experience.

Nothing is going to change the need or desire to keep visitors on your page, particularly if eyeballs on those pages are your source of income, but adding the element of the accidental discovery to your site can make it even more valuable for your visitors.

Here’s more advice from Powazak (who is a former Webmonkey, by the way):

If you make a website, take a look at it and ask yourself, “when someone comes here looking for one thing, where do I have the opportunity to tell them about something else?” It could be in a footer, for example. This can be tricky, because you don’t want to interrupt a self-directed experience. Just look for the cracks where you can leave hints about what else is available. Hint: Newspapers have been designed this way for years. Crib, crib heartily.

There are many serendipitous routes that lead people to your stuff. Understand what they are and nurture them. But don’t become over-reliant on them. Design your stuff to create serendipitous connections between things. Look for every opportunity to hint that there’s much more to be discovered. Take the time to design the serendipity in to the experience.

Or, you could watch this video about drinking monkeys and see where that leads you:

Bookshelf photo by Juhan Sonin/Flickr/CC

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File Under: CSS
Oct
27
2010

Target the Future With CSS 3′s :target Rule

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Opera’s Dev Center has plunged head first into the complexities of the CSS3 :target selector with a tutorial that shows an example of how :target can be used to trigger animations and fades.

The result is a series of sliding, animated transitions that move and fade in and out as your click the menu links — all done with pure CSS, not a line of JavaScript necessary.

Of course there is a catch — the example only works in Opera.

The main problem with the :target selector is that a bug in WebKit prevents it from working in Safari and Chrome. The Opera tutorial code solves this with a media query which unfortunately also applies to Gecko, so the demo really only functions properly in Opera.

While that’s probably more than enough to stop most developers from using :target, the tutorial is nevertheless a nice glimpse of what will work in the near future. Perhaps the best thing about :target is that it really forces you to pay attention to the hierarchy of your HTML. And for that alone, Opera’s tutorial is well worth a read.

Photo: Mixy Lorenzo/Flickr/CC

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File Under: Browsers
Oct
26
2010

The Battle for Choice on the Web Isn’t Over

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A thoughtful essay by Stuart Turton at PC Pro argues that Mozilla, having already completed the shake-up in the browser world it set out to achieve, needs a new direction:

Like the catalyst in a science experiment, I’m beginning to wonder if Firefox’s greatest contribution to browsers is not its continued existence, but that it existed at all. Put another way: Mozilla has won all its battles, is it time the company picked a new war?

Turton goes on the suggest that Mozilla apply the Firefox model to develop a desktop office suite to rival MS Office, but I’m not convinced that’s a good idea. How many of you use Thunderbird instead of Gmail or Yahoo Mail?

Since we’re playing armchair quarterback here, I’d argue that Mozilla hasn’t come close to winning all its battles. There’s still a great deal of work to be done in the “choice” department on the web: the choice of open web technologies or proprietary technologies for video, audio and games; the choice of where to store your personal data on the web (and how the browser handles that decision); the choice of whether you get your apps from a store run by a corporation, or through an open, cross-browser platform with no Central Scrutinizer.

In other words, the “choice is good” fight isn’t over, it’s just about different stuff now. If Mozilla is going to change direction about how it promotes its philosophy, these are the places to concentrate. And it seems to me like the company is already doing so.

Of course, these issues are of little importance to the general public, many of whom are mostly concerned that pages load quickly, and that YouTube, Facebook and Gmail deliver the goods day in and day out. For all the browser vendors, that’s an ongoing competition with no finish line.

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File Under: HTML5, Multimedia
Oct
22
2010

Adobe Releases Its Own HTML5 Video Player

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Adobe has released an embeddable video player that plays HTML5 native video in browsers that support it, and falls back to Flash in browsers that don’t.

It’s cross-browser and cross-platform, so it works on iPhones, iPads and other devices that don’t support Flash. Using Adobe’s new player, these devices can show videos in web pages without the Flash plug-in.

There are already several players out there that use the HTML5-with-Flash-fallback method, such as Vimeo’s new player and the slick one from Brightcove that can handle video ads. All of these players, like Adobe’s, are based on open web technologies and can be customized with CSS and JavaScript. But this newest one, being from Adobe, is sure to be a bigger deal.

The company has come under fire in the past year over concerns about the stability and performance issues related to its Flash Player browser plug-in, and Flash technology itself. Apple’s iPad ships without support for Flash, and Apple initially disallowed apps created in Flash from being sold in its app store. Apple rescinded after a few months, but the damage was already done — Google began pushing HTML5 video over Flash by releasing WebM, a new open video format, and developers got busy looking at HTML5 as a replacement for Flash, at least when it came to embedding videos.

With its new player, Adobe is responding to their developers’ wishes for solutions that play well on the open web. It comes on the heels of last week’s release from Adobe, which lets artists using Illustrator export their drawings as HTML5 Canvas, and its earlier pack of HTML5 tools for Dreamweaver.

HTML5 video adoption among browsers has gone tremendously so far — Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera all support native video, and baked-in support is coming to Internet Explorer 9 next year. But it’s still a bit of a mess, with different browsers supporting different formats. So developers posting HTML5 video still need to encode their files in at least two of the three major formats — the widely-used H.264, the newer WebM, or the older Ogg Theora — to guarantee all HTML5 capable browsers will be able to see their videos.

With the proper file formats in place, Adobe’s new player will play native web video in all the newest browsers, and will switch to Flash playback mode for all your poor visitors stuck with IE6 or something equally stone-aged.

The new HTML5 video player is incorporated into the workflow of Dreamweaver Creative Suite 5, so if you’re already using Adobe’s tools to build your site, you can drop in a player using Dreamweaver’s “Customize Widget” function.

If you’re not a Dreamweaver person, you can still generate all the code you need using Adobe’s free Widget Browser app. One caveat — the Widget Browser is an AIR app, so you’ll need to have Adobe’s Flash-based runtime to use it, though AIR apps will install AIR for you if you’re lacking.

To develop its video player widget, Adobe used open source code from Kaltura, repurposing a popular library that’s found at the heart of several HTML5 video players.

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