Archive for December, 2010

File Under: Visual Design
Dec
20
2010

Sneak a Peek at the Process Behind 37Signals’ Redesigned Site

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If you’ve ever wanted a peek behind the scenes of a redesign, the 37Signals blog has a fascinating look at the design iterations for the company’s new website.

37Signals is best known for its Basecamp project management software and the Ruby on Rails platform, which grew out of the former.

Even if you don’t like the final design — and plenty of commenters on the blog post don’t seem to be big fans of the typography-focused redesign — the process behind it is worth looking at. Sometimes, seeing what ends up on the cutting room floor is more instructive than looking at the finished product.

The post should also make you feel a bit better if you too fail to magically draw up the right design on your first try.

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File Under: Programming, Social, Web Services
Dec
20
2010

Yahoo Looking to Sell, Not Shut Down Delicious

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Good news Delicious fans — Yahoo has finally made something of an announcement, saying that the bookmarking service will not be shut down, but sold off.

Despite a leaked, internal image that listed Delicious and other services in a “sunset” category, Yahoo denies it is planning to shut the bookmarking service down.

The Delicious blog says the service is looking for “a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users.”

According to the same announcement, the tech press is to blame for assuming that “sunset” meant shut down. More likely, Yahoo simply wasn’t ready for the level of backlash that rumors of Delicious’ demise brought about, and now the company is backpedalling.

Yahoo also hasn’t made any announcement regarding MyBlogLog, Yahoo Buzz or any of the other services listed as “sunset” in the leaked graphic that circulated last week.

Presumably, in some cases, sunset does in fact mean “shut down.”

Still, the word that Delicious will live on in some form is good news for the millions of users and bookmarks the service currently hosts. Unfortunately, Yahoo has not denied that it has laid off the engineers and technical staff behind Delicious.

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File Under: APIs, Programming, Social, Web Apps, Web Services
Dec
17
2010

Yahoo Plans to Kill Off Delicious Bookmarking Service

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According to a leaked photo, Yahoo plans to close a number of services, including Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog and Delicious, the popular bookmarking site.

Most of the closing services are Yahoo projects that simply never went anywhere, but Delicious, which Yahoo acquired in 2005, was once the king of bookmarks and helped popularize many of the key elements of today’s social web.

Delicious (Del.icio.us in its original incarnation) popularized tags as a more flexible alternative to folders, introduced us to the idea of following other users and helped kick off the “share it with the world” trend that created today’s social websites like Twitter and Facebook.

Under Yahoo’s leadership Delicious ceased to be innovative. Delicious remains a useful service, but it hasn’t really improved on its original features in almost half a decade.

It’s unclear what will happen to Delicious. So far Yahoo hasn’t made any official announcement, nor has the company given any hint of when or how Delicious will head into the sunset, but one thing is for sure: the web will be poorer without it.

Fortunately for Delicious users its impending demise doesn’t mean your bookmarks will disappear forever. It’s actually quite easy to export your bookmarks, and there are dozens of services that can import them and replace Delicious in your workflow.

I’ve been a heavy Delicious user ever since the demise of its competitor Ma.gnolia. I bookmarked sites, scraped the API and stored the bookmarks on my own server (you can find the details of those scripts in our Django tutorial). I also relied on feeds from other people to find news, links and other tidbits for Webmonkey.

The first part of that workflow is easy to replace. I signed up for Pinboard.in, which lacks some of Delicious’ sharing features, but offers a mirror of the Delicious API. I imported my Delicious bookmarks into Pinboard, changed the root url in my scripts and effectively replaced Delicious in less than 10 minutes. If you don’t want to pay for Pinboard, Zootool, StumbleUpon and other services also make fine Delicious replacements.

But Delicious isn’t just a bookmarking service, it’s a fantastic resource for finding links, stories and the latest news about nearly anything that interested you. Its popularity make its reach extensive. You can easily tap into the minds of friends, colleagues and strangers to see what they’re reading on the web. The concept of tags makes it easy to find links related to any topic or combination of topics that interests you.

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick likens the impending death of Delicious to “setting a museum on fire.” Where, asks Kirkpatrick, “are you going to find a reading list of the best collected written works and other multimedia about almost any given topic?”

Put simply: nowhere.

Twitter is a possibility. Delicious even used Twitter for some of its real-time search features. But Twitter isn’t dedicated to links the way Delicious is so you’ll have to put up with a lot more noise to find the same stories. Facebook may fill the gap for people. It’s also possible that Pinboard or another service will grow in the wake of Delicious’ collapse and come to offer a similar depth and breath of links.

Exactly what will happen to all those links currently stored on Delicious remains to be seen. It’s possible Yahoo may sell off Delicious, but in the absence of a statement from Yahoo, many users have already assumed the worst.

Hopefully Yahoo will at least keep the Delicious domain active, even if the service is not. Perhaps the Archive Team — which saved Geocities from death at the hands of Yahoo — can scrape and mirror Delicious.

For those that have only vaguely heard of Delicious and don’t see what the fuss is, just re-read the above replacing the word Delicious with the word Flickr or even Facebook. This is the template I’ll be using five years from now when Facebook meets the same fate.

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File Under: Web Basics
Dec
16
2010

Google Helps You Avoid Playing Tech Support for the Holidays

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Google's new Teach Parents Tech site is friendlier than xkcd's flowchart

If you’re like us you dread going home to see the family for the holidays because it means, when the eggnog is flowing, you’ll be asked to play computer technician for less savvy relatives.

Well this year, Google has a better solution — a new website dubbed “Teach Parents Tech.” The company has put together some fifty videos to help the less tech savvy among your family learn the basics — like how to change desktop backgrounds, create strong passwords, add bookmarks to a web browser or even create a blog.

In addition to the videos, the site offers a handy form letter you can use to send videos to your parents. With a healthy dose of snark — one of the signature options is “good luck (you’ll need it)!” — and some genuinely useful videos, the site just might save you a few headaches this holiday season.

Of course we didn’t see a video on how to re-install Windows after dozens of viruses have brought it to a crawl, so possibly there will still be some work to do while the rest of the family enjoys a nice holiday feast.

Comic by XKCD, CC

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File Under: HTML5, Multimedia, Web Standards
Dec
16
2010

Microsoft Adds H.264 Video Support to Firefox

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Thanks to licensing issues and exorbitant fees, Mozilla doesn’t support the H.264 video codec in Firefox, but Microsoft (yes, Microsoft) is aiming to change that.

Microsoft has created a Firefox plug-in that will tap into Windows 7′s native H.264 support, allowing Firefox 3.6 and the 4.0 betas to play H.264 encoded video.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can download a copy of the HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in from Microsoft’s Interoperability Labs.

The HTML5 video tag promises to eliminate the need for third-party plugins like Flash or QuickTime. Sadly, it’s a long way from “promises” to “delivers.” While HTML5 offers a video tag for authors to easily add videos to their webpages, it’s up to the browser to actually play that video. And that’s where the problem arises — what video codec should the browser use?

Apple is standing firm behind the H.264 video codec. But H.264 has licensing requirements, fees and is not free in any sense of the word. Mozilla Firefox supports Ogg Theora and WebM, both of which are open and free. Google’s Chrome supports all three codecs. Opera supports Ogg Theora and WebM. Microsoft has decided to support H.264 and WebM in IE9.

In short, varying codec support across browsers has made native HTML5 video a mess.

Microsoft’s new add-on brings support for H.264 to Firefox whether Mozilla wants it or not. The add-on parses HTML5 pages and replaces video tags with a call to the Windows Media Player plug-in. Unfortunately it’s not perfect. To deal with the different codec support in each browser, many sites use JavaScript to determine the browser’s codec support before presenting a video. If that’s the case, the new add-on won’t work because the detection code won’t see the H.264 support (the H.264 support is an add-on, not a native part of Firefox).

Ironically, native web video isn’t supported at all in Microsoft’s own browsers, regardless of the codec used (IE9 will introduce support for HTML5 video when it is released next year). Third-party developers have already created an experimental IE add-on to help current versions of IE get in on the native web video fun.

Microsoft’s add-on is far from ideal, but if you’ve been frustrated by Firefox’s lack of H.264 support, it does offer a partial solution. Hopefully, in the long run, browsers will standardize around WebM, which seems to enjoy the most widespread support (Apple’s Safari is current only browser that hasn’t pledged WebM support), but if that doesn’t happen solutions like this one may become even more common.

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