Archive for September, 2011

File Under: Mobile
Sep
30
2011

The Current State of Responsive Images

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The BostonGlobe.com on mobile, tablet and laptop screens

We’ve looked at several different ways to handle images in responsive web design, but new techniques keep popping up, many of them well worth exploring. Part of the reason there is no one answer, no go-download-this-code sort of solution, is that everything about responsive design is still very experimental, responsive images doubly so.

Even some of the best examples of responsive design — like the recently launched BostonGlobe.com — don’t handle responsive images properly (the team behind the Globe site is reportedly working on a fix).

One thing is clear though, serving full size images to mobile users is a bad idea. Using max-width on your images means that they will scale yes, but, by itself, it doesn’t address the bandwidth issue. In fact, loading big images and forcing mobile browsers to scale them is the worst of both worlds — large image downloads and processor-intensive downscaling. And, not only are large images a waste of bandwidth for mobile users, with mobile data caps becoming more common, you may well be costing your visitors money.

The question is, which of the myriad options is the right way to serve responsive images?

Jason Grigsby over at the Cloud Four blog has started a series of articles tackling that question, and the answer is, it depends. “When I started working on this project two months ago,” writes Grigsby, “I thought I would get to the end and be able to say, ‘Here are the three approaches that work best. Go download them… but what I’ve found is that there is no comprehensive solution.”

Grigsby then dives into the most comprehensive rundown of responsive image techniques that we’ve ever seen. For some more background on what responsive images are, why you want them and how you can go about creating future-friendly” images, check out Responsive IMGs Part 1. Then, when you’re ready to dive into the various possibilities, read Responsive Images Part 2, which covers everything from JavaScript solutions to server side detection techniques.

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File Under: Humor
Sep
30
2011

Samuel L. Ipsum: Pulp Fiction Placeholder Text

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Really you should be designing for the content, a practice that pretty much precludes the use of placeholder text. That said, our new rule is, if you’re going to use placeholder text, use Slipsum — Samuel L. Ipsum (probably NSFW).

Sure it defeats the purpose of Lorem Ipsom entirely by being distractingly, hilariously readable, but sometimes when you’re slogging through a boring project you need a little humor.

Slipsum comes in two varieties, regular, NSFW Pulp Fiction quotes and Lite quotes without the swearing.

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File Under: Browsers
Sep
30
2011

Beta Update: Firefox 8 Offers Smarter Tab Restore

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The official release of Firefox is now at version 7, which means that all the other Firefox channels have also been bumped up. Nightly now sits at version 10, Aurora at 9 and Beta now contains Firefox 8, which has several new features worth noting, including more control over add-ons and the ability to limit which tabs load on restart.

If you’d like to give the beta channel a try, just head on over to the Firefox channels page and download the beta release. Those of you already on the beta channel should be updated to the latest version the next time you restart Firefox.

Perhaps the most useful new feature in Firefox 8 is the ability to selectively restore tabs. If you use a lot of tabs you know that closing the browser with dozens of tabs open, and then firing it up again the next day, makes for a very slow restart. You’re left waiting for all those tabs to reload when all you want to see is one of them.

That’s why Firefox 8 adds an option to change the way Firefox reloads tabs when it starts. Using the new setting you can tell Firefox to only load the focused tab when it restarts. That way the tab you want loads and you don’t need to wait for all the rest to finish. Background tabs then load when you select them.

To enable the new tab restore features, head to Firefox’s Preferences and look for it under the General tab.

Firefox 8 also gives you more control over add-ons installed by third-party software. Now any add-ons you don’t explicitly install are disabled until you opt-in. That stops less than scrupulous developers from hijacking Firefox without your knowledge.

The latest beta of Firefox adds some new developer features as well, like support for the HTML5 contextmenu attribute, a part of the menu element that allows developers to add items directly to the browser’s right-click menu. More details about what’s new for developers can be found on the Mozilla developer wiki.

Other new features in the beta channel include a new default search option for Twitter, some better animations when dragging tabs around and improved security for websockets, which were just recently re-enabled in Firefox 7.

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File Under: Web Apps
Sep
29
2011

Flickr’s New ‘Photo Sessions’ Bring Back the Slideshow

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Flickr has unveiled a new feature dubbed Photo Sessions, which are real-time slideshows you can share with your friends around the web.

Say you want to share a slideshow with some friends you met on your last trip abroad. You’re back home and they’re back home on the other side of the globe. No one is coming over for dinner and slides. Instead, you just create a new session on Flickr and send the resulting URL to your friends. Once everyone has joined in, sessions become a bit like screen sharing — you swipe to the next photo and everyone else’s screen follows along.

Flickr has thrown in a few interactive features as well, including the ability to chat while the photos roll by. There’s also a way for your friends to doodle on your images from their own laptops or iPads.

Combine Flickr’s new sessions with a group chat app — Skype, iChat or the like — and you have a kind of disjointed, thoroughly modern take on the good old carousel slideshows your parents subjected their friends to in the ’70s. Feel the shag carpet people.

Alongside Sessions Flickr also announced a new Android app, which is considerably more impressive than the company’s iOS app. The Android Flickr app offers filters, geotagging and sharing in a slick-looking app that seems aimed at catching up with Instagram.

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File Under: Browsers
Sep
28
2011

Amazon’s Silk Web Browser Adds New Twist to Old Idea

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One of the headline features of Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet is a completely new Web browser called Silk that is designed with a “split” architecture, allowing it to offload much of the heavy lifting to Amazon’s cloud computing cluster for superior browsing performance.

When the user requests a webpage in Silk, the request will be routed to Amazon’s servers in the cloud. Amazon will load the webpage on the server side, downloading all of the necessary content elements in parallel. After downloading the content, Amazon will send the compiled page — including HTML, JavaSript, CSS, and images — back to the device as a single stream of data.
Amazon can can take advantage of its high-bandwidth connection to the Internet backbone to retrieve individual page elements faster than the user would be able to natively on the device. Web content that is already on EC2 or S3 will obviously be right at Amazon’s fingertips, further reducing the time it takes for Amazon to collect that content.

Amazon can also use its massive cloud storage infrastructure to cache enormous amounts of content that is commonly loaded by users, ensuring that it is instantly available to transmit. Amazon intends to put its machine learning expertise to use determining which pages users are likely to load so that the relevant content can be aggressively pre-cached and ready when needed.

The company’s engineers say that Silk’s robust server-side caching even obviates the need to cache anything locally on a device’s internal storage. The cached content can be pushed first while the cloud is loading all the other content elements, reducing overall page load time.

To further reduce network overhead, individual content elements like images can be compressed as appropriate for the target form factor — based on screen size and pixel depth — to further shave down their size. Amazon can use much more aggressive compression on text and other elements than has historically been possible with standard Web technologies.

The Silk browser maintains a single persistent connection to Amazon’s cloud (using Google’s fast SPDY protocol), through which requests are sent and content is received. This single connection to the Web is what lends Silk its name — as Amazon puts it, a single thread of silk is an “invisible and yet incredibly strong connection between two things.”

The ideas behind Silk are compelling, but they aren’t particularly novel. Opera has been using a similar approach for years to power the “turbo” mode of its desktop and mobile browsers. Amazon, of course, benefits from a much larger-scale cloud computing infrastructure with which to get the job done.

Amazon has also added a few unique twists of its own that will further improve the user experience. An Amazon engineer at the New York launch event told us that the split browsing infrastructure can even compile JavaScript to ARM machine code on the server side in situations where it will provide a speed boost. He also told us that Amazon will track whether users prefer the full or mobile versions of various websites so that they can predict which one is better to send to users.

We asked Amazon a few questions about the privacy implications of the split browsing model. We were told that collected usage data is anonymous and stored in aggregate, thus protecting user privacy. It’s also possible to completely turn off the split browsing mode and use Silk like a conventional Web browser.

Silk’s split design is a good fit for the Kindle Fire, a content-focused device with tight cloud integration. The feature will likely bring completely transparent performance improvements to mobile browsing. For more details, you can watch Amazon’s explanatory video.

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File Under: Multimedia
Sep
28
2011

Developer Turns Geocities Archive Into a ‘Digital Pompeii’

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For a brief time in the early ’90s Geocities was the web. And, for all its shortcomings, Geocities did nevertheless usher in much of what makes the web great — that anyone can create nearly anything.

When Yahoo picked up Geocities for $3.5 billion in 1999 many called it a bargain, but a mere 10 years later the web had moved on and Yahoo shut down and deleted Geocities. The Archive Team stepped in at the last minute and managed to preserve some 650GB worth of Geocities, which lives on as a Bittorrent file. Like most of us you probably find that vaguely comforting, but chances are, you aren’t seeding that file. In fact, we haven’t heard of anything coming out of the Archive Team’s efforts, until now.

Developer and designer Richard Vijgen has put together what looks like a very cool visualization of the Geocities data. Given that Geocities split websites into neighborhoods (usually based on content), nicknamed URLs streets and even called its users “homesteaders,” Vijgen decided to use that metaphor to construct The Deleted City.

Vijgen calls The Deleted City, “a digital Pompeii … that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.”

[The Deleted City] depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighborhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain.

In full view, the map is a data visualisation showing the relative sizes of the different neighborhoods. While zooming in, more and more detail becomes visible, eventually showing individual html pages and the images they contain.

So far there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to actually access The Deleted City for yourself. Vijgen tells our friends at Wired UK, “The project was intended to be a touch screen installation to be exhibited in a gallery setting. I’m currently looking for a suitable setting to show it.”

In the meantime you’ll have to make do with the video walkthrough above.

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File Under: Browsers
Sep
27
2011

Speedier Firefox 7 Uses Less Memory

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Mozilla has released Firefox 7. Thanks to the faster release cycle, Firefox 7 comes just six weeks after Firefox 6 and brings some significant speed boosts that make it well worth the upgrade.

If you’d like to take Firefox 7 for a spin, head over to the Mozilla downloads page. Current Firefox users will be automatically updated to the latest version.

Firefox 7 sees as much as a 50 percent reduction in memory use, which is great news for those that frequently have a lot of tabs open or leave Firefox running for long periods of time.

The shrinking memory footprint is part of Mozilla’s ongoing effort to reduce Firefox’s memory use. This is the first release to benefit from the MemShrink project, as it’s known. Those who’ve been using the Nightly or Aurora channels know that even more memory improvements are on their way in Firefox 8 and 9.

Web developers will be pleased to know that Firefox 7 re-enables web sockets by default. Firefox had web socket support in earlier releases, but it was turned off due to security concerns. Now web sockets are back and Firefox 7′s support has been updated to match the most recent draft version of the web sockets protocol. If you’re developing a web app that uses web sockets and want to support Firefox, be sure to use the -moz prefix in your code.

Other good news for web developers in Firefox 7 include support for the Navigation Timing spec, which allows you to measure page performance from the page itself, and some performance improvements, which will speed up animations done in the HTML5 Canvas tag.

Firefox 7 also stops websites from resizing your main window. If you’ve been doing such things (seriously, don’t) bear in the mind that, as of Firefox 7, you can’t resize a window or tab that wasn’t created by window.open, and you can’t resize a window or tab when it’s in a window with more than one tab.

If you’re worried about this latest release breaking your add-ons, rest easy, there’s a very good chance it won’t. Mozilla is getting much closer to an improved add-on system that will alleviate the upgrade pain for those who rely on extensions. Mozilla is already automatically updating compatibility for add-ons on its own site. Add-ons downloaded from around the web are a different story, but at least for those it hosts Mozilla reports that the move from Firefox 6 to 7 will negatively affect only 1 percent.

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File Under: Web Services
Sep
27
2011

Delicious Bookmarking Relaunches Sans Yahoo

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The new, more eye-catching Delicious.com

The newly revamped Delicious bookmarking service has relaunched. While the new Delicious is missing a few features, and has been demoted back to beta status, long time users will be happy to see that someone is finally giving the original king of online bookmarking a little love.

After Yahoo acquired Delicious back in 2005 the site languished. Updates were infrequent and fans watched as the web effectively passed Delicious by. Unable to decided what to do with Delicious, Yahoo eventually settled on sending it off to the “sunset.” Later Yahoo changed its mind and sold the site to AVOS, a new company from YouTube creators Chad Hurley and Steven Chen.

The new Delicious website is the first step in AVOS’s plan to return Delicious to its former glory and also make it appeal to a wider audience. For now that means that Delicious.com has seen a minor redesign with rounded corners and more images. The site looks a little less spartan, but most of the big changes are behind the scenes.

In a blog post on the AVOS website the Delicious team writes that the primary goal with the relaunch was to update the backed code:

the eight-year-old site needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. The result is a new homepage, interface and back-end architecture designed to make Delicious easier to use.

We’re proud of what we built, but the process has also brought the site “back to beta” as a work in progress.

For long time Delicious users the relaunch may be a little disappointing. There aren’t any new features to speak of, rather the terminology of Delicious has been updated to fit with the times. For example one of the main new features in the revamped Delicious is the “Stacks” feature, which allows you to create collections of links and share them with other users. That probably sounds familiar to existing Delicious users since it’s really just a rebranding of the old Delicious Bundles.

Similarly instead of adding users to your network you now “follow” them and there are no more Bookmarks, rather you’re saving links. And Delicious users can now add avatars to their profile.

While there’s nothing wrong with updating Delicious to use the parlance of the times, long time users have expressed some disappointment that the new version has broken some features of the old. For it’s part AVOS seems well aware of the problem, hence the “back to beta” message in the AVOS blog post, but of course that does little to appease users missing their pet features. Some the features you may miss include tag clouds, batch tag operations and of course Bundles, though Stacks are pretty close. On the plus side AVOS has retained the proper privacy settings for your bookmarks (er, links), the API and feeds still work and it’s now possible to use multi-word tags, something that wasn’t possible on the old Delicious.

In fact, while the new Delicious may be a slight regression in functionality, long time users should be relieved to know that, after years of being ignored by Yahoo, someone is finally willing to put some work into Delicious.

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File Under: Identity, privacy, Social
Sep
23
2011

Facebook Wants Your Past, Present, and Future On Open Graphs and Timelines

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Facebook will soon allow its users to integrate all of their music, media, and lifestyle actions and interactions with their profiles, Mark Zuckerberg announced at Facebook’s f8 conference yesterday. Connecting profiles to services like Spotify will allow users to fill out their own curated “Timeline,” so friends can see each others’ media activities both as individuals and aggregated over their entire network, a move that will explode the amount of content on the site.

The new arrangement is part of two new Facebook initiatives, one of which is the Timeline. Users can fill in their Timelines with both content pulled in from other services — say, an article “liked” on Ars Technica or a game played — as well as “real world” activities like photos or status updates. The real world content can be filtered by date into the timeline, so users can fill in their backstory on the site with everything that happened before Facebook existed: moves to a new city, first words as a baby, or every single relationship breakup pre-2004.

Once in place, the timeline will be the new News Feed, with friends’ updates streaming past. But not everything will make it into the Timeline: small updates, like what music friends are listening to, may be relegated to the Ticker, the integrated online friends/status update bar rolled out Wednesday. Users will be able to choose which activities are significant enough to appear in their timelines.

Zuckerberg also placed emphasis on the new use of verbs in timelines, which will allow people to sort their friends activities in different ways. For instance, with a status update reading “Casey Johnston is watching Veronica Mars for the millionth time,” users will be able to click both “watching” to see what else friends are viewing at the moment, or “Veronica Mars” to see a list of other friends who like Veronica Mars.

These updates will feed into the second new feature, Facebook Open Graph, which collects and ranks the the activities or items that friends are interacting with. Apps that integrate with Facebook will be sorted in Open Graph based on popularity with a user and his or her friends, including Spotify, Hulu, Netflix, Foodspotting, Vevo, and Nike+, among many others. Open Graph is intended to help with app discoverability, showing users what their friends are doing without flooding their feeds every time a friend kills a mobster or plants a new crop of corn.

When Timeline was introduced, Chris Cox, director of product at Facebook, noted that “there is nothing we love to summarize more than time itself,” stating that with the new features it would be possible for users to create months or years in review.

Of course, Facebook’s entire motivation isn’t just for friends to become more intimate with each others’ past and present. Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO, spoke briefly at the conference, and noted that “because our [Spotify's] playlists are social, they [users] are more engaged. And because they are engaged, they are more than twice as likely to pay for music.” For Spotify, which boasted 2 million paying members worldwide as of Wednesday, the exposure to the better part of a billion Facebook members could mean big bucks.

The new completionist Facebook is a significant departure from what Facebook’s most avid competitors, Google+ and Twitter, currently offer on their sites. If Facebook can get users to buy into putting their whole life histories on the site, the amount of content there will explode, and create an investment and representation of self users won’t be likely to abandon. And with more content comes more opportunities to target ads.

The beta for Facebook’s timelines begins today, with availability being rolled out gradually. Neither Zuckerberg nor any of the speakers mentioned a timeline for the new version, but we expect it will be sooner rather than later.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

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File Under: Browsers
Sep
23
2011

Firefox: Speed Up, Slow Down, Go All Around

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Mozilla is considering two new proposals that will both speed up and slow down Firefox’s controversial new rapid-release development cycle.

The first plan — to speed up Firefox development — would shorten the existing six-week Firefox development cycle to a five-week development cycle. While that might not seem like a huge deal, consider that Firefox spends six weeks in each channel in the cycle — moving from nightly to aurora to beta and finally Firefox proper. Shortening the cycle by a single week means that the final release of Firefox would get to users three weeks faster than it does now.

Of course the five-week cycle is just a proposal. While developers seem to be supportive of the idea, most believe it will be some time before Firefox is ready to speed up again and so far the company has made no commitments.

At the same time Mozilla is also planning a slower release cycle for a new Firefox channel aimed at managed, enterprise environments. Firefox’s move to a rapid release cycle earlier this year left many of the browser’s business users out in the cold. Now Mozilla has proposed a new Extended Support Release (ESR) version of Firefox which would be updated every 30 weeks. That’s considerably slower than the current six-week release cycle that Firefox uses. In addition to the slower updates, the ESR version of Firefox would enjoy 42 weeks of support.

While that’s good news for Firefox’s enterprise users, there’s nothing in the proposal that would limit the ESR channel to enterprise. Mozilla does say that it won’t advertise the ESR channel on its various Firefox websites, but there won’t be anything to stop “regular” users from using the ESR channel.

Of course there are a few things you should keep in mind even if Firefox’s rapid release cycle drives you crazy. The most notable thing to bear in mind is that Mozilla says that the ESR channel won’t enjoy the same cycle of testing that happens via the existing nightly, aurora and beta channels. The ESR channel will be just that, a totally separate channel.

Mozilla also notes that the ESR channel will be “less secure” than the rapidly updated Firefox, with only “high-risk/impact security patches” being backported to the slower release plan. Among the other caveats that come with the new ESR proposal are that Firefox would only be supported on operating systems “supported at the beginning of an ESR.” Presumably that means running Firefox ESR on OS upgrades that come along during that 42 week cycle would not be supported.

The limited security and support in Mozilla’s current Firefox ESR proposal make it worth asking why Mozilla is even bothering with the enterprise market. After all, enterprise tends to move slower and needs a browser that will be as secure a year from now as it is now, which Mozilla does not seem to be offering. As Joe Brockmeier at ReadWriteHack points out, “unlike Microsoft and Google, there’s little upside for Mozilla in engaging enterprises… there’s no set of enterprise products for Mozilla to sell to large and slow-moving organizations, but it faces added costs and development burden to be dealt with to keep enterprises happy.” Mozilla itself acknowledges that the new plan will be a resource drain and could slow down the development of regular Firefox.

For its part Mozilla seems to view the new enterprise plan as a learning experience, noting that the ESR releases will give the company “a better read on the opportunities in a market space it is unfamiliar with.”

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