Archive for November, 2010

File Under: Location, Social
Nov
16
2010

Google Hotpot Smartens Up Local Search, But It’s No Yelp Killer

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Google has unveiled the awkwardly-named Hotpot, which is a kind of ratings tool and recommendation engine for Google Places.

As you review restaurants, music venues, stores and the like, Hotpot’s recommendation engine learns what you like and suggests other places you might like. Throw in recommendations from friends and Hotpot starts to sound very useful. Indeed Hotpot is useful, bringing location-based searching, algorithms that learn what you like and friends’ recommendations together in a single place.

But, perhaps because of that combination of features, it’s also awkward to set up and poorly integrated with the rest of Google’s services. It has some features that trump its main competitor, Yelp, like the awesome search tool. But the social and community aspects of Hotpot — features Yelp handles well — are too difficult to get set up.

Which isn’t to say that Hotpot isn’t useful. You just have to clear its awkward silo-style hurdles first. If you head over to the new Hotpot URL, you’ll be asked to sign in with your Google account and then to pick a nickname for use on Google Places.

Once that’s done you’ll need to find your friends and “add” then to your list of Hotpot friends. Setting up Hotpot feels a bit like you just slipped back in time five years to a web where every social service is an island.

It could be that Google was worried about another Buzz-style backlash if it made Hotpot’s social features automated. Instead, everything is manual — you’re presented with a list of friends that you can add (follow might be the more familiar verb here) much like the process Google Reader uses.

However, with Reader the sharing notices are sent inside the Reader web app. With Hotpot, the notices are sent to your friend’s Gmail account for approval. Worse, there doesn’t seem to be an “Add all” button — if you’ve got 300 friends, you’ll be click “Add” 300 times.

Once you’ve made it past the initial hurdles of setting Hotpot up, its results are actually pretty good. Having only tested Hotpot for a few hours, it’s hard to judge the quality of recommendations, but as a simple Google Places search tool, the interface is clean and easy to use.

Continue Reading “Google Hotpot Smartens Up Local Search, But It’s No Yelp Killer” »

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File Under: Social
Nov
16
2010

Bundle a Bunch of Sites Behind One Bit.ly Link

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Link shortening service Bit.ly has unveiled a new link bundling feature that allows you to group multiple links — up to 100 — on a single page and share that page with your friends with a single short URL.

If you’ve been looking for a way to share more than one link at a time with your Twitter followers — perhaps links to both sides of an argument, a collection of your favorite restaurants in New York, or collected coverage of some major, earth-shattering news event — a Bit.ly bundle fits the bill.

Link-shortening services such as Bit.ly have seen an explosion in popularity in the past few years thanks to the steady growth of Twitter, Facebook and other services which limit posts to bite-sized bursts of 140 to 420 characters. Bit.ly remains a powerful link-shortening service with over four billion unique URLs shortened. The company also offers some stand-out features like stat-tracking for each link, automatic QR Code generation, some open APIs and support for popular social web technologies like OAuth.

Now that you can wrap multiple links inside a single Bit.ly URL, it becomes even easier to squeeze more info into a single tweet.

If you’re thinking that a page of links would be pretty boring, well, Bit.ly seems to have had the same thought. The company has integrated media previews of images and videos, as well as any titles, descriptions and notes you want to add to your links.

Bit.ly bundles can also function as a group collaborating tool, your friends can comment on your bundles and even build their own based on your starting points. It also makes Bit.ly a more valuable service, rather than just a middleman of necessity standing between a URL and Twitter.

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File Under: HTML5
Nov
15
2010

Working With Forms in HTML5

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The HTML5 specification adds a new set of tools for handling web forms. Generally referred to as HTML5 Forms, the new tools enable browser-side form validation.

It’s important to understand that HTML5 Forms are not meant as your sole means of validation. You still need to do server-side validation and, of course, sanitize the user’s input before you store anything in a database.

In fact, HTML5 form validation is less validation and more, as developer Mounir Lamouri puts it, “like an adviser guiding you in filling the form.” In other words, HTML5 forms provide a quick means of very basic validation to let users know about errors before they submit the form.

The new forms spec is essentially designed to replace any JavaScript validation tools you might be using now — for example, ensuring that required fields are filled in or that a tel field actually contains a telephone number.

Lamouri has written a good basic overview of how to use HTML5 forms in Firefox 4, one of the few browsers that supports most of the Forms spec. WebKit browsers are a little behind but still support some of the spec.

Obviously, with very limited browser support at this point, HTML5 forms aren’t ready for prime time. But if you’d like a glimpse of what’s coming, Lamouri’s overview makes a great introduction. If you’d like to experiment with the tools outlined in Lamouri’s post, you’ll need to grab a copy of Firefox 4 beta 7.

For further reading on HTML5 forms, be sure to check out the forms chapter in Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into HTML5, available for both online and offline browsing.

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File Under: Events, Web Basics
Nov
12
2010

20 Years Ago, The Web’s Founders Ask for Funding

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Robert Cailliau's original logo

Ever wonder who the first web developers were?

Twenty years ago today, when Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” was at the top of the charts, two engineers at CERN’s data handling division wrote the proposal to fund the research project that would give birth to the web.

The proposal, submitted by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau on November 12, 1990, laid out what they wanted to build and the resources they’d require. The team wanted to start by building a browser and a server. They estimated development would take six months, and that it would require “four software engineers and a programmer.” There are also some serious hardware requirements totaling tens of thousands of dollars (or is it Swiss francs?), but about a third of the requested funding was dedicated to software user licenses.

Here’s the overview:

The attached document describes in more detail a Hypertext project. HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.

The project has two phases: firstly we make use of existing software and hardware as well as implementing simple browsers for the user’s workstations, based on an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments. Secondly, we extend the application area by also allowing the users to add new material.

Phase one should take 3 months with the full manpower complement, phase two a further 3 months, but this phase is more open-ended, and a review of needs and wishes will be incorporated into it.

The manpower required is 4 software engineers and a programmer, (one of which could be a Fellow). Each person works on a specific part (eg. specific platform support).

Each person will require a state-of-the-art workstation , but there must be one of each of the supported types. These will cost from 10 to 20k each, totaling 50k. In addition, we would like to use commercially available software as much as possible, and foresee an expense of 30k during development for one-user licences [sic], visits to existing installations and consultancy.

We will assume that the project can rely on some computing support at no cost: development file space on existing development systems, installation and system manager support for daemon software.

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File Under: Browsers
Nov
10
2010

New Beta Release Gives Firefox a Shot of Jäger

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A new beta version of the next Firefox browser has arrived.

Mozilla released Firefox 4 Beta 7 on Wednesday. Unlike the last couple beta releases which mostly just tidied things up, this release is a substantial step forward. Most notably, it includes a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey that give the browser a performance boost on script-heavy sites.

It has better support for web graphics and fonts, and it has been deemed complete enough for add-on developers to begin porting over their creations from older versions of Firefox.

If you’re a beta tester already, you’ll see an automatic update today or Thursday. If you’d like to download beta 7 for Windows, Mac or Linux, you can do so from Mozilla’s beta site.

Wednesday’s release comes on the heels of the recent announcement that Firefox 4 won’t be ready until early 2011. Mozilla’s release dates have always been somewhat loose, but the last update was over a month and a half ago, and we were originally expecting the browser to arrive some time between October or January. Now, it looks like Firefox 4′s release date could stretch out as far as the second quarter of next year. It’s a blow to fans of the open source browser, especially since Firefox is seeing increased competition from Chrome, which shifted to an accelerated release schedule earlier this year, and from Internet Explorer 9, which entered a public beta phase in September.

The silver lining here is that it’s looking like Firefox 4 will be much different than 3.6, the current version, and that the update will be worth the wait. Also, the beta releases have been remarkably stable, and, with very few exceptions, are capable enough for every day use.

For the full list of what’s new, check out the release notes. Here’s what has us the most excited.

The enhancement sure to make the biggest splash is Firefox’s new JägerMonkey just-in-time JavaScript compiler. Complicated, JavaScript-heavy sites like Facebook and web apps like Gmail will be more nimble, and you should see a big speed increase on games and demos that previously only impressed those running Chrome or Safari. JägerMonkey is new code that works in tandem with the same TraceMonkey JavaScript code that powered previous versions of Firefox (love the naming convention, by the way) and you can read more about the change on Mozilla engineer David Mandelin’s blog.

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File Under: Browsers, Multimedia
Nov
9
2010

Chrome Now Offers Click-to-Play Option for Flash, Other Plugins

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We recently outlined a way to get rid of the Flash plug-in completely for a smoother, less battery-sucking web browsing experience.

But if that’s too radical of a step for you, Google’s Chrome browser has a new trick up its sleeve — a built in “click-to-Flash” feature.

As our friends at Lifehacker note, Chrome’s new content controls mean you can turn all your plug-ins — Java, Flash, QuickTime and anything else you might have installed — into an on-demand experience.

Even better, you can create a whitelist of sites where you’d like to allow auto-loading of plug-ins — for example, YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing sites.

To get these features in Chrome, you’ll need to be running either the Dev or Canary channels. Provided you have one of the pre-release builds of Chrome, open up the Preferences panel and click the Under the Hood tab. Then click the “Content settings” button and chose the “plug-ins” option. From there you can control how plug-ins load and which, if any, sites to white or blacklist.

Of course, there were already some extensions for Chrome (and almost every other browser) that do the same thing. But now that those controls are baked in, you don’t need to track down an extension to control your plugins.

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File Under: Browsers, Social
Nov
7
2010

First Look at RockMelt, a Browser Built For Facebook Freaks

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The rumor mill has been buzzing for months about the imminent arrival of a new “Facebook browser” called RockMelt.

Well, it really does exist, and it’s here. RockMelt is being released as a limited public beta Sunday. Anyone can sign up to test it out, but the release will be throttled so as not to overload the cloud-based components of the app. RockMelt will be doling out download links as quickly as it can manage on a first-come, first-served basis.

The two founders, CEO Eric Vishria and CTO Tim Howes, demonstrated RockMelt to Wired a few days before Sunday’s launch.

It’s based on Chromium, so it inherits Google Chrome’s speed, looks, and basic functionality on both Mac and Windows.

And while its Facebook integration runs deep, RockMelt is not exactly a Facebook browser. It’s a social web browser, allowing you to post links, videos and status updates to both Facebook and Twitter (that’s it for now, but more services will be added later). There are also built-in clients for consuming your Facebook feed and managing multiple Twitter feeds, a chat client, and lightweight RSS reader. It does use your Facebook account to personalize the experience, but its reach is broader than just Facebook.

We’ve seen browsers custom-built for the social web before, most notably Flock, which launched as a MySpaced-up version of Firefox. Mozilla experimented with Ubiquity, an in-browser tool for posting to different social sites and interacting with web services. There are a number of add-ons that can embed social networking dashboards into the browser for you. These tools have grown in popularity as we’ve struggled to manage the ever-increasing flow of links, media and bits shared by our online friends.

So, the idea isn’t original. And RockMelt doesn’t sport a complete re-invention of the browser interface, either. But it is very streamlined, and there are some key elements that people who live and breathe the social web will find intriguing.

Continue Reading “First Look at RockMelt, a Browser Built For Facebook Freaks” »

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File Under: HTML5, Multimedia, Web Standards
Nov
5
2010

Going Straight: How To Ditch Flash and Embrace the Future of the Web

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Adobe’s Flash Player is the whipping boy of the web — it’s proprietary, HTML5 is better, Flash hurts battery life and it’ll slap your grandmother if you leave it running for too long.

Apple has been leading the anti-Flash charge, most recently electing to not ship Flash with its new MacBook Air notebooks. Apple claims it doesn’t want to be responsible for keeping Flash up to date, but the company is also prescient when it comes to recognizing when old technology needs to go (remember the floppy disc?).

While we’ve been using Flash blocking browser extensions for years, the idea of ditching Flash completely still feels premature. HTML5, for all its promise, still can’t match Flash in every area, nor is every website embracing HTML5 right now.

However, the promise of better battery life for laptops and mobile devices make the argument against Flash even more compelling. Our friends at Ars Technica were testing the new Macbook Air notebooks when they discovered that getting rid of the Flash Player boosted battery life by as much as 33 percent.

While we can’t guarantee you’ll see the same results on your own laptop, if you want to ditch Flash completely it isn’t too difficult to do.

Blogger Steven Frank has details on how to get rid of Flash on the Mac and replace it with the YouTube5 Safari extension. YouTube5 rewrites every YouTube embed you encounter, forcing them to use the HTML5 version of the YouTube player.

That works well if you’re using Safari and primarily encounter Flash through YouTube movies. But of course, some of us use Firefox, and YouTube isn’t the only site that “needs” Flash. It’d be nice if there were a Firefox equivalent to the Safari YouTube5 extension, but so far we haven’t been able to find one.

Other areas the Flash-free plan causes pain: multi-file uploaders like those from Flickr, Vimeo and other services often need Flash to work properly; charts and graphs on news sites often rely on Flash, and of course those addictive games your friends pass around are Flash-based.

Mac blogger John Gruber has a further tip for those times you really do need Flash, when you need, in Gruber’s words, “to cheat” — use Google Chrome. Because Google’s Chrome browser ships with its own version of Flash, it’s unaffected by the uninstall process outlined by Frank and Gruber.

Gruber also has an extra, and somewhat compelling, argument for why getting rid of Flash is better than just blocking it — many publishers offer non-Flash alternatives for browsers that don’t have the plug-in, so you can still at least see something in place of the Flash content.

If you’re using Windows, the easiest way to get rid of Flash is using Adobe’s Flash Uninstaller. Just download the app, make sure you close any app that might be using Flash, and run the uninstaller. Grab a copy of Google Chrome for those times when you need Flash and you’re well on your way to a Flash free web and, quite possibly, extended battery life.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that even HTML5 goodies like Canvas animations or videos, if left running indefinitely, will drag down your battery life just like Flash. In the web of the future, with no Flash at all, will we be blocking Canvas to stop annoying ads and save battery life? Quite possibly, but until then… enjoy.

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File Under: Browsers
Nov
4
2010

Chrome 9 Preview Looks a Lot Like Chrome 8

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Chrome logoUsers of the Chrome Dev channel may have noticed that the version number has been updated to Chrome 9. The latest release keeps with Chrome’s frantic development pace, but, so far, brings little in the way of actual changes.

If you’d like to try out the latest and greatest, you can switch the Chrome dev channel following Google’s instructions.

Chrome 9 has a few enhancements to Chrome’s JavaScript engine and improves the still not-enabled-by-default hardware acceleration for Windows. But most of the rest of the changes listed in the changelog are small enough to leave you wondering why this release deserves a full version number bump.

Of course Google has always been a bit different when it comes to releasing software. Betas are seemingly perpetual, “open” means, well, nothing really and version numbers are just something that happen on a timetable, with little or no bearing on features or improvements.

Some have suggested that Chrome is chasing IE, which will be at version 9 next year. That seems unlikely, given that most people neither know nor have any interest in their browsers’ version number (most people it seems don’t even know what a web browser is, let alone what a version number might be).

But if that were the case, then Chrome is aiming low. We want to see Chrome reach the illustrious level of Emacs — currently shipping version 23.

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File Under: CSS, Fonts, Visual Design
Nov
4
2010

Good Web Typography Is Easy With Type-a-File

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The web is awash with CSS frameworks. But, while frameworks can be great for prototyping and quick mockups, they’re often overkill for most projects. It’s also pretty rare to find a framework that meets all of your design needs.

If you’re just looking for a way to get some great typography on your site, but don’t need a grid or other tools that often come with a full-blown framework, check out Type-a-File. Type-a-File isn’t exactly a framework, it’s more specific — a set of typography styles that you can adapt into your CSS.

Type-a-File is the work of designer Russ Maschmeyer and currently offers eight different typographic style sheets, designed, in Type-a-File’s words, to “give your web typography a head start.”

The style sheets takes advantage of some of the new features in CSS 3 like column-count and border-radius, as well as services like TypeKit for fancy fonts. Fortunately, the vast majority of the rules aren’t based on the still-nascent CSS 3 spec, so nearly all the effects will work in older browsers as well.

In addition to basic rules for typographic elements — h1-6, p, lists, cite and so on — Type-a-File has a few classes you can apply to pull quotes, create “kickers” or “sidenotes” and change default headings.

Type-a-File is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so if you’d like to take one of the eight example style sheets and use it to build something of your own you’re feel to do so. You can even submit it back to Type-a-File for inclusion on the site.

Photo by the four elements/Flickr/CC

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