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Gmail Tasks Leaves Labs, Becomes Real Feature

By Michael Calore July 14, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Software & Tools


One of Gmail’s most popular add-ons has made the jump from experimental widget to fully baked feature.

Tasks, a simple to-do list for Gmail, is now part of the official Gmail experience. It was previously only available from within Gmail Labs, a sandbox for Google’s engineers to publish and test out experimental Gmail features.

The Labs area of Gmail debuted over a year ago, and Tasks is the first feature to “graduate” from Labs and be incorporated into the default Gmail experience.

Since its launch in April, 2004, Gmail has grown from a bare-bones webmail client into a full-fledged platform. There’s a contact manager and fully integrated text, video and SMS chat. Anyone who wants more can plug in one of the 50-odd widgets from Labs to extend it.

The best Labs features are the ones which enable cross-talk between Gmail and other Google services, like displaying lists of Calendar items or Google Docs in the Gmail window, showing video previews in e-mails that contain YouTube links and adding auto-complete suggestions to Gmail’s search box. Of course, some Labs widgets just show pictures of your kids.

Tasks is an awesome feature. It lets you set up a number of simple to-do items, then check them off and delete them as you complete each one. For enthusiasts (like me) it’s great for keeping track not only of work items, but also personal items. Like many people, I use Gmail both at work and at home. Tasks was also recently made available as a stand-alone mobile web app, and I have a bookmark for it on my iPhone’s home screen.

Tasks is indispensable, and not just to me. Google says over 1 million Gmail users have installed it. There are tens of millions of people using the free service.

Gmail Product Director Keith Coleman tells Webmonkey that popularity was the primary factor in Tasks getting the nod. Coleman says others will follow soon. Any app being considered has to have behind it a commitment from the Gmail development team that they will continue to work on it and keep it fresh. Of course, there’s a base level of stability required as well. “We want to make sure it’s going to work perfectly for most people,” Coleman says.

Labs has been such a success, Google is extending the idea to Calendar as well. Starting Tuesday, Google Calendar users will see a new page in their settings called Labs. Just like in Gmail, there will be some experimental features you can turn on. It’s been seeded with a few selections from Google Calendar engineers, like a World Clock, and one I like called Next Meeting, which tells you how much time you can waste playing Kingdom of Loathing (or nuking wiki spam) before your next conference call.

There’s also a new Calendar API for creating custom Calendar enhancements. This is primarily of use to those with Google Apps Premium Edition inside their companies. People can create custom fields for things like notes about which conference rooms have projectors.

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MS Office on the Web: What it Is and What it Isn’t

By Michael Calore July 13, 2009 Categories: Business, Software & Tools

The world’s most popular office software suite is making its way onto the web, but it’s doing so one baby step at a time.

As expected, Microsoft announced more details around its Office 2010 suite at an event in New Orleans Monday morning. Along with enhancements to the popular documents and productivity tools, the company also showed off how four of the suite’s key apps — Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote — will be deployed on the web as browser-based applications. Microsoft also announced pricing and availability for Office Web Apps. Beta invites will go out in late August and final versions — both paid and free — will be available in early 2010.

Microsoft first unvieled working demos of these web-based apps in October, 2008 at a developer conference in Los Angeles, and Monday’s demos showed only a few new hints of what’s to come.

We won’t get our hands on Office Web Apps for another month, but what we do know is that they will be lightweight, dumbed-down versions of their desktop counterparts. They will remain closely tied to, and largely dependent on, the Windows desktop. This is understandable, since Office for the PC desktop has proven to be Microsft’s most valuable cash cow behind its Windows desktop and server products.

So while its competitors are gaining steam with full-blown productivity applications that run completely in the browser — namely Google Docs and start-up Zoho with its office suite — Microsoft is still firmly entrenched in the “software plus services” camp.

Here’s what we know about Microsoft’s web strategy for Office 2010.

Office Web Apps will be available for free

The four key Office apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote — will be free to anyone with a Windows Live account, but according to Microsoft’s Office 2010 FAQ (a Word document), the free version will be ad-supported. Versions without ads will be available to people who buy Office Professional Plus and Office Standard 2010 licenses. The ad-free versions can also be made accessible privately by companies running SharePoint 2010 server.

If you’re a regular Jane, a grandpa or a poor student who wants to access the free version, you have to log in to Windows Live, upload a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document to your SkyDrive, then choose to edit it in the browser. You make your edits, save your file, then it syncs back up to your SkyDrive. Note this is only convenient if you already have a local copy of Office.

The experience has been dumbed down for the web

The Office Web Apps are not intended to be stand-alone applications for editing and composing documents.

The browser-based tools have the basics, like changing fonts and styles, creating lists and tables, or messing with rows and columns in Excel. But it’s obvious that the bulk of the functionality will be reserved for the desktop apps. Microsoft’s announcement positions Web Office Apps as offering “easy viewing and lightweight editing” — the word “lightweight” is used several times, in fact — clearly suggesting you’re only getting a taste.

The screenshots and official video demos that are available do not show any app-specific functionality for printing documents. There’s also no indication what sorts of tools exist for things like generating charts and graphs from scratch — something Google offers through its Chart API.

At any point in the online version, you can download your document and continue editing it in Word on the desktop. You’re even encouraged to do so — screenshots released Monday show a big button in the user interface inviting you to “Continue in Word” or “Continue in Excel.”

You won’t need to use Internet Explorer

In the FAQ, Microsoft says, “Office Web Apps are designed to work with Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox.” Chrome isn’t supported because (Microsoft says) it has such minor market share.

If you want to see the apps running in Firefox, check out Robert Scoble’s video interview with a Microsoft representative, who shows how similar the experience is in both IE and Firefox.

You won’t need Silverlight

A few advanced functions of Office Web Apps will require Silverlight, but there’s no plug-in required for the basics like editing and saving. Almost everything is pure standards-compliant Ajax, so the apps won’t be crippled if you don’t have Silverlight.

The Office Web Apps demos I saw last October were powered entirely by JavaScript and CSS (just like competing apps from Google and Zoho).

Your docs will look really nice

If you read Microsoft’s press materials, there’s much talk about “preserving document fidelity” on the web, and it seems the company has paid particular attention to this. The interface even looks and behaves like the much-loved Ribbon introduced in Office 2007. When you open your document in the browser, it won’t break your formatting or ruin the indenting on complicated lists — a big gripe among Google Docs users.

The experience also degrades gracefully for smartphones, even the iPhone’s Mobile Safari.

There will be real-time collaboration

The web version of Excel will have real-time collaboration, meaning two people can edit the same spreadsheet at once and see each other’s edits.

Microsoft says it’s going to include real-time editing in Word and PowerPoint later, but that it chose not to include it in the initial release for technical reasons. Instead, you can enable e-mail and IM notifications that tell you when changes are made.

Both Zoho and Google Docs have embedded chat and real-time editing. Google’s implementation is still a little janky, but Wave, a similar Google app with more advanced real-time collaboration technology — you see edits almost instantly, right down to keystroke — shows even more promise.

Office Live Workspaces is kaput

Microsoft’s current implementation of document editing in the browser, Office Live Workspaces, is being discontinued and rolled into Windows Live. Expect everything to be rebranded and redirected to Office Web Apps when it launches in 2010.

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Amazon Cripples Mobile Apps With New API Restrictions

By Scott Gilbertson July 10, 2009 Categories: Mobile, Platforms & APIs

Amazon has changed the terms of service surrounding its popular data APIs such that its no longer possible to access Amazon data from mobile devices. As a result, one of our favorite mobile apps, Delicious Library, has been forced to shut down.

The mobile version of Delicious Library, an application that tracks and stores books, music, movies and more, has been removed from the iPhone App Store.

Perhaps the strangest element of new TOS is that not only can mobile apps not access the APIs, they can’t use data from the APIs even if, as in the case of Delicious Library, the actual access is done via a desktop app. For example the iPhone version of Delicious Library doesn’t actually connect to Amazon at all, but it did display information synced from the desktop version, which violates the TOS.

The relevant line of the TOS, section 4e, reads: “You will not, without our express prior written approval requested via this link, use any Product Advertising Content on or in connection with any site or application designed or intended for use with a mobile phone or other handheld device.”

It’s a curious restriction, especially the fact that even synced data is off limits, but at first glance it would seem there’s an easy workaround — just contact Amazon and ask for permission.

Unfortunately for Delicious Library fans Shipley did that and was informed that, currently, no exceptions are being made.

It would seem that, for now anyway, mobile apps that want to access Amazon’s APIs are quite simply dead in the water.

However there is a notable exception, another excellent iPhone app called SnapTell. SnapTell lets you take pictures of products with the iPhone, for example a book cover, and then uses image recognition tools to look up the product on Amazon and other online retailers.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, SnapTell was recently acquired by Amazon. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber suggests that the new API restrictions are Amazon’s effort to kill SnapTell’s competition.

We contacted Amazon to ask about the new API restrictions. Although it was given ample time to respond, at the time this article was published, the company had not yet responded.

So is it an anti-competitive measure, or is there another explanation? So far Amazon isn’t saying, but there are plenty of upset developers and Amazon does have a history of questionable behavior — the company once tried to claimed it had “invented” one-click purchasing.

While the short term effects of the new TOS restrictions are felt by developers, the long term damage may well be to Amazon, which is looking increasingly less appealing as a data source. Developers working with Amazon data in desktop apps are essentially out of luck if they want to port their apps to a mobile platform. Given that restriction, developers may simply turn to another service from the very beginning — why use restricted data when there’s free data?

For his part, Shipley says Delicious Library will return using another set of APIs from another, as yet undetermined, provider. For now, the mobile version of Delicious Library is gone.

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Silverlight 3 Arrives, Brings Smoother Video, Better Web Apps

By Michael Calore July 9, 2009 Categories: Multimedia, Software & Tools

Microsoft has released the latest version of its Silverlight player.

The release of Silverlight 3 arrived late Thursday night. The company’s presentation technology for graphics and video on the web was supposed to be released to the public on Friday morning, July 10 — there’s even a lavish launch event scheduled at a San Francisco hotel — but Microsoft decided to push Silverlight out a day early.

Silverlight 3 is a small, free plug-in download from Microsoft. It’s cross-browser and cross-platform, so it runs on Windows, Mac (the newest versions are Intel only) and Linux computers. The open-source Linux version is called Moonlight, and it ships with Novell distributions. If you’re running Ubuntu or some other non-Novell distribution, you can download it and install it manually.

Silverlight is Microsoft’s plug-in based player for streaming video and audio content, handling rich internet apps and displaying animated user interfaces in the browser — Redmond’s answer to Adobe Flash and open-source technologies like those promised by HTML 5. When Silverlight first arrived in 2007, it didn’t run too well on non-Windows desktops. Worse, with very little content available on the web for Silverlight to play, there wasn’t much of a reason to bother with it.

But quite a bit has changed in two years. Most notably, the compelling content finally arrived. Microsoft streamed live video and highlight clips on NBC’s official Beijing Olympics website in the summer of 2008 using Silverlight. The company released version 2 in September of 2008, an upgrade which improved Silverlight’s performance on Macs and improved the video playback quality overall. Silverlight was used again to stream coverage of the 2008 Democratic National Convention and all of the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament games in 2009, serving to raise Silverlight’s profile — and it’s install base — even more.

By now, Silverlight is installed on around 30% of web-connected PCs and devices like Windows Mobile smartphones. It’s a far cry from Adobe Flash’s install base (which is over 90%) but it’s a significant gain in a short period of time nonetheless. Also, Microsoft claims there are over 300,000 developers actively building web sites, apps and animated user interfaces in Silverlight right now.

Silverlight’s video capabilities have always been impressive when compared to Flash, and the new version boasts some new features that should keep the competition with Flash hot. It uses a media broadcasting technology Microsoft calls Smooth Streaming, an adaptive technology for playing the same H.264 video stream at the highest bitrate the device and its bandwidth limitations will allow. So if you’ve got a fast computer with an HD monitor and a wide open pipe, you’ll see super high quality video at up to full 1080p HD. If you’ve got a dinky smartphone with mid-level data service, you’ll see a constrained version of the same video.

The new version of Silverlight also has better 3-D graphics support and the ability to offload graphics work to a GPU for a smoother, hardware-accelerated user experience.

On the rich internet apps front, Silverlight 3 includes the ability for developers to create apps that run outside of the browser on a PC desktop, or on a mobile phone — yet another place where Silverlight 3 is catching up to competing technologies like AIR, Adobe’s Flash-based runtime for running webapps outside of the browser.

Also due to be released Friday (but not showing up yet, as of this writing late Thursday night) is Expression Studio 3, Microsoft’s set of tools for building Silverlight apps, standards-based websites and vector graphics for the web. The current version, Expression Studio 2, costs $700, or $350 for an upgrade from previous versions.

As mentioned previously, the Silverlight browser plug-in is free.


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Firefox’s Ubiquity Add-on Gets Smarter, Goes International

By Scott Gilbertson July 9, 2009 Categories: Software & Tools

Mozilla has released a major upgrade for its Ubiquity plugin, a tool that offers a command line-style interface for on-the-fly web mashups.

Ubiquity 0.5 is the final release of Ubiquity 0.5, which we reviewed in detail back when the preview version first landed. It’s a project from Mozilla Labs, a fact that speaks to why we find it one of Firefox’s most useful add-ons.

The Ubiquity add-on for Firefox is a “command line interface for the web”. It enables you to interact with web services like Google search, Twitter, Yelp, Delicious and Gmail, as well as perform searches on content sites like Amazon, Wikipedia and Flickr. Ubiquity enables you to perform specific tasks, like e-mail a link to a Gmail contact, post a tweet or check the weather, all with just a few keystrokes.The latest version is a major improvement. It offers a more natural language engine that’s closer to human speech, and corrects some oversights in how Ubiquity parses non-English commands. It also contains s new language parsing engine which doesn’t require you to put hyphens in long commands and can make educated guesses about what you want to do. For example, type “taco” and Ubiquity will automatically suggest a Yelp search for the nearest taco stand.

If you already installed the preview release, you won’t notice any dramatic changes in the final version, though Mozilla has squashed a few bugs. We noted in our test drive a few weeks ago that it was quite buggy, so we recommend upgrading.

For the time being, upgrading will be a manual process. Because this update changes some of Ubiquity’s underlying code, this release breaks many third-party Ubiquity tools. As a result, Mozilla is not, at least for now, pushing the new version through the automatic update feature.

Instead, if you’d like to upgrade you’ll have to head over to the Mozilla Labs Ubiquity page and install the update yourself. If you want to take advantage of the new features be sure open up the Ubiquity preferences and make sure the “Use Parser 2″ option is checked.

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Five Questions About Google Chrome OS

By Scott Gilbertson July 8, 2009 Categories: Operating Systems, Software & Tools

Google announced it will release a new operating system, the long-fabled Google OS, late Tuesday night. While details are currently limited to a short post on the Google Blog, the idea outlined is an operating system built on top of Linux and running primarily a web browser for access to online apps like Gmail, Google Docs and the rest of the Google suite.

Google says it’s working with netbook manufacturers to get Google Chrome OS-powered netbooks to the market in 2010, and it’s not hard to see how netbooks could benefit from the new, lightweight OS and its cloud-based apps.

But at the same time, Google’s announcement reads like classic vaporware, raising far more questions than it answers.

Is the world ready for the cloud?

Forget connection issues, Wi-Fi dead zones and the potential security and privacy risks involved with hosting your data in cloud, what about far more basic issues — how are you going to get music on your iPod? How will you run games? How will you print a document?

After all, Apple already made an admirable effort to turn the iPhone into a cloud-based computing system and we all know how that ended — with a native SDK that sent even the most successful web app developers scurrying to learn C.

Even Google quickly released a native search application for the iPhone, despite having already adapted most of its web-based offerings to work with the small screen. And while we’re huge fans of the potential that offline storage in HTML 5 offers, even we’re willing to admit that the web-based Gmail interface is dog slow compared to the iPhone-native Mail app.

Interestingly, Google isn’t the first company to try to turn its web-based apps into the basis for a lightweight operating system. Good OS previously announced Cloud, an operating system that “integrates a web browser with a compressed Linux operating system kernel for immediate access to the internet, integration of browser and rich client applications.”

Thus far, while Good OS has managed to find its way onto a few netbooks, the OS is far from a success.

Cross-Platform Web Apps?

Perhaps the most intriguing tidbit in Google’s announcement is the statement that the core building blocks of Chrome OS apps will be cross-platform.

It certainly sounds good, but we’re wondering how that’s going to work — in particular, how will offline data storage be handled? There’s the Gears plug-in for browsers, but Gears is rough around the edges and slow to update for new browser releases. For example, Gears still doesn’t work with the latest versions of Firefox or Safari (a beta version of Gears for Safari does exist, but it requires some workarounds to avoid bugs).

There’s a possibility HTML 5’s offline storage mechanism will solve this particular problem, but with IE8 offering little support for HTML 5, it isn’t going to be cross-platform. And it’s difficult to fault Microsoft for hesitating to support HTML 5, given that the spec is still a draft and subject to change.

Given the complexities involved, it seems unlikely that Chrome OS apps will be truly cross-platform — unless Google just means cross-platform in the sense that the apps will run in any web browser, but that’s hardly remarkable enough to tout in a press release.

A browser bundled with the OS, now where have we heard that before?

Google’s Chrome OS announcement says the Chrome web browser will be bundled with the operating system, which is quite simply “Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.”

Given Microsoft’s history with bundling browsers into the OS and the subsequent anti-trust lawsuits, we assume Google is going to offer some desktop programming tools that will allow other browser makers to run their software on Chrome OS as well. If not, expect Google to experience its own dose of regulator wrath.

Will Chrome OS offer better privacy?

Google is already tracking your searches, the links you click, the e-mails you send and the sites you visit. Are you ready for Google to know every last detail of everything you do from the minute you turn on your netbook? While all that data is anonymized and (theoretically) not traceable to you, it may still give concerned users reason to pause.

Will Chrome OS offer improved security and virus protection?

Google says, as it did upon the announcement of the Chrome browser, that going back to the drawing board will mean a more secure system less prone to viruses and malware. That sounds good, but it also makes for an unknown, untested system. Which would you rather use, an OS like Unix that’s nearly 40 years old and has been attacked from every angle and patched over time, or a system that’s ten minutes old and sounds good on paper, but has no experience in the wild?

Conclusion

Perhaps we’re being overly hard on an operating system that is specifically targeted at netbooks — an underpowered and still very niche market — but Google’s announcement is uncharacteristically short on details, making it hard to see it as anything other than an attempt to generate hype.

However, if we are to assume Google will do a good enough job answering our last four questions relating to the technical and legal details of the new OS, it’s really the first question that’s the biggest. And, it may be rendered moot by the time Google Chrome OS is released to the consumer market.

Remember the video Google released a few weeks ago showing spot interviews with people on the street? Regular, non-technical Americans were asked generic questions about their web browser, and almost everyone showed some level of confusion about the difference between a browser, the web, an e-mail client, a search engine and even the computer itself. This general ignorance about under-the-hood computing is Google’s biggest opportunity to shine. If the company can offer a user experience that’s just a web browser, it may succeed in fully blurring the lines between computer, desktop and web among the average consumer who, frankly, couldn’t care less about the differences.

Google will need to work out a way for users to interface with common devices like cameras, iPods and printers — tying them to Picasa, Amazon (like the MP3 store partnership the companies have on Android) and Google Docs. But if it succeeds, the just-a-browser OS could become something of a hit despite the hurdles.

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Code for Tomorrow’s Web Today Using Modernizr

By Scott Gilbertson July 7, 2009 Categories: Programming, Visual Design, Web Basics

Web developers have been watching the developement of the HTML 5 and CSS 3 specifications for some time. Between the two specs, many of today’s complex web design headaches — like creating rounded corners or animating page elements — can be solved with a single line of code.

Want your text to have a drop shadow? No problem. How about boxes with rounded corners using a single line of code? Also easy to do. But this is still all fantasy. The problem holding us back is the same one web developers have had since the birth of the web — inconsistent browser support means your pixel perfect designs won’t work in every web browser.

Of course, many of the styles in CSS3 degrade gracefully — that is, browsers that don’t support rounded corners will simply render the box as a rectangle. In some cases that’s fine. Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome users will see one design and Internet Explorer users will see another.

However, there are some cases where that’s not good enough — for example in detecting HTML 5 support like the new <:canvas> capabilities — and that’s where the wonderful new tool Modernizr comes in handy.

Modernizr is a compact (6kb compressed) JavaScript library that can detect which CSS 3 properties the current browser supports.

Modernizr is a very slick and lightweight way to start using some of the very cool emerging standards of HTML 5 and CSS 3, while maintaining support for older browsers.

If the browser in question supports the feature you’re targeting, then Modernizr adds a class to the body tag so that you can specifically target just the current browser. For example you could have two CSS rules in your stylesheet like this:


body.multiplebgs div p {
  /* properties for browsers that
     support multiple backgrounds */
}
body.no-multiplebgs div p {
  /* optional fallback properties
     for browsers that don't */
}

In this case, Modernizer would check to see if the current browser supports multiple backgrounds (another nice new CSS 3 feature) and then apply the class multiplebgs so you can write specific rules for that browser.

Currently, Modernizer can detect the following elements:

  • Canvas
  • rgba()
  • hsla()
  • border-image:
  • border-radius:
  • box-shadow:
  • Multiple backgrounds
  • opacity:
  • CSS Animations
  • CSS Columns
  • CSS Gradients
  • CSS Reflections
  • CSS Transforms
  • CSS Transitions

However, Faruk Ateş, the creator of Modernizr, cautions that Canvas and CSS columns support is still experimental and may not work correctly in every browser.

In addition to the CSS 3 elements, Modernizr will allow you to use elements from the HTML 5 spec and style them, even in Internet Explorer.

For more details on how to use Modernizr on your site, check out the detailed tutorial.

One day HTML 5 and CSS 3 will be taken for granted and work in every browser, but until then solutions like Modernizer offer a way for developers to start working with new features today.

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XHTML 2 Dies a Lonely Death, Makes Room For HTML 5

By Scott Gilbertson July 6, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming, Web Basics

The web’s governing body has taken XHTML 2.0 off life support. The World Wide Web Consortium, the group charged with overseeing the languages that power the web, has decided not to renew the charter of the XHTML2 working group, which is set to expire at the end of 2009.

Quick, web developers, the sky is falling — panic!

Actually, the sky is just fine. In fact, it’s considerably clearer than it used to be, and there’s certainly no reason to panic over the death of XHTML 2.0. The supposed successor to XHTML 1.x and the markup language that was once hailed as the next evolutionary step for the web has for all intents and purposes been dead for years. All the W3C has done is give it a proper headstone. And with the burial complete, the W3C can put all its efforts into the real future of the web — HTML 5.

But what about the much-touted advantages of XHTML that the web-standards purists (including us) were fussing about just a few years ago?

To understand how and why XHTML 1.x gained so much favor and why its successor fell out of favor, we need to go back in time a bit and take a closer look at HTML 4.

HTML 4 is a very loose language full of options. So many options, it fostered a bunch of experimental new ideas for how to build web pages — some good, some bad. However, to say that HTML 4 encourages bad code (which was the XHTML rallying cry) is like blaming the English language for producing bad novels. HTML 4 code can in fact be well-formed and semantically valid, so long as the authors know what they’re doing and adhere to the spec.

However XHTML 1.0 was much stricter, and the validation tools were much better at pointing out bad code, which is at least partially responsible for its popularity — if you were lazy and wanted to make sure that your code was well-formed, XHTML 1.x made it much easier to check.

But that was never the real purpose of XHTML. The X isn’t there because it’s cool, it’s there because XHTML is really XML.

As Henri Sivonen, who is working on the HTML 5 spec, points out, there are really “two meanings to XHTML: technical and marketing.”

The technical aspect covers authors who genuinely want to serve XML documents and use the application/xhtml+xml MIME type. When it comes to serving web pages, these folks are in the minority. Which isn’t to say the technical aspects of serving XML aren’t important; they are and they will be covered by the new XHMTL 5, an XML serialization of HTML 5.

The far more prevalent use of XHTML is the marketing variety — in other words, pages are written in XHTML 1.x, but served as using the text/html MIME type. So while these documents might be valid XML, they aren’t served as XML documents anyway. In such a scenario, the browser ignores the fact that the document is XML and simply renders the page as it would any other HTML page.

So why did everyone love XHMTL so much if it was really pretty much the same thing as HTML 4?

The answer is that XHMTL encouraged much better coding practices. Tags needed to be fully closed (think, <br /> rather than <br>) and well-formed. XHTML made for cleaner, much more manageable code than HTML 4.

However, HTML 5 already addresses most the those issues, and it allows you to use either the closed syntax of XHTML 1.x or the open syntax of HTML 4. That means that your well-formed XHTML 1.x code can (in most cases) be converted to HTML 5 by simply changing the doctype.

So what was wrong with XHTML 2.0? Although largely well-intentioned, XHTML 2.0 was an entirely different beast than its predecessor and did two things that essentially doomed it from the get-go.

First, it was backwards-incompatible with XHTML 1.x. All that XHTML 1.x code would need to updated to work with the new spec. HTML 5 on the other hand is backward-compatible with both XHTML 1.x and HTML 4.

The second problems stems from the fact that XHTML 2.0 wasn’t simply an XML formulation of an HTML spec; it was a completely new spec that ignored the realities of web development in favor of semantic precision. Because of this, it failed to offer any compelling, practical new features.

Where HTML 5 has loads of new stuff for developers to use — native audio and video embeds, multi-column layout tools, offline data storage, native vector graphics — XHTML 2.0 didn’t offer anything of the sort.

Another big reason we’ve been tagging XHTML 2.0 as dead for some time is that not one browser maker has implemented anything in the XHTML 2.0 specification. While all the latest releases of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and yes, even Internet Explorer, have implemented at least some aspects of HTML 5, none of them has touched XHTML 2.0.

Big names like Google and Apple are already rolling out web services that use HTML 5’s new features to embed videos and store data for offline access, but again, no one is building XHTML 2.0 apps.

But wait, what about that minority of web pages actually served using the application/xhtml+xml MIME type? Aren’t those pages screwed without XHTML 2.0?

If they were conforming the the XHTML 1.x spec, they were screwed anyway since XHTML 2.0 isn’t backwards-compatible. But no, they aren’t screwed by the dropping of the XHTML 2.0 spec. In fact they’re in much better shape since there will be XHTML 5, designed exclusively for documents that actually need to be served as XML.

So what spec should you be using for your web pages? In the future, HTML 5 will be the best choice. Until the future is even distributed (that’s a nice way of saying “until IE catches up”) we’ll be using HTML 4.01, though XHTML 1.x will work as well.

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Google Update Now a Scheduled Task, But Still Evil

By Scott Gilbertson July 2, 2009 Categories: Software & Tools

Google has released a slight revision of its Google Update software for Windows. The latest version eliminates the need for Update to run constantly in the background — one of several reasons we’ve previously labeled the software “evil” — but stops short of conforming to the best practices of software updating.

Instead of running constantly in the background, consuming resources and creating a potential security vulnerability, Google Update now runs as a scheduled task.

Google Update has also been changed to allow some control over when it runs. The default is for Update to check with Google’s servers once an hour, but if you dig into the Windows Task Scheduler you can change that interval and even disable it altogether. However, according the Google Open Source Blog, tinkering with the update interval might cause Google Update to revert to its always-on status.

“When Google Update determines that the Windows Task Scheduler or Service mechanisms are not working as expected,” says the blog, “we have added in fallback mechanisms that cause Google Update to begin running as a continuous process again.”

So much for user control.

You might wonder what all the fuss is about. After all, what’s wrong with keeping your software up to date? Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with it, but Google’s Update software flies in the face of over 20 years of software best practices — there’s simply no need for desktop software to run update checks continuously, or even once an hour.

It’s not hard to see how Google views Update: it’s a way for it to have the constant update capabilities its web apps enjoy, but on your desktop. The problem is that while we accept that we can’t control the web, we most definitely can (and want to) control what happens on our laptops and PCs.

Or at least we could until Google decided we couldn’t.

The well-established practice of checking for updates when an application launches has been serving the industry — and some of its biggest names, like Adobe and Microsoft — well for for decades.

The latest version of Google Update is a baby-step in the right direction, but we still won’t be using Chrome, Google Earth or anything else that relies of Google Update until Google does the right thing.

The Mac version of Google update remains unchanged.

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EveryBlock Source Code Release Offers Glimpse of the Magic Behind the Curtain

By Scott Gilbertson July 2, 2009 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming

EveryBlock, the local news aggregator that touts itself as a “news feed for your block,” has followed through on its much-anticipated source code release.

The local news site was founded two years ago by Adrian Holovaty, who is also one of the creators of the Django web development framework, which powers EveryBlock. Over the past two years, EveryBlock has operated on a grant from the Knight Foundation. The grant enabled EveryBlock to remain free of the pressures of venture capital funding and focus on experimenting with “micro local” news. The result of those experiments is a whole new way of looking at local news. We’re especially fond of the awesome EveryBlock iPhone app.

One of the stipulations in the Knight grant was that EveryBlock release its source code so that other sites can build on EveryBlock’s foundation.

For developers working with Django — a Python-based web framework — the new code provides a wealth of Django and geographic tools. It’s particularly interesting since much of it was written by Holovaty himself, one of the stars of Django development.

Of course, just because the code is not available to the public doesn’t mean you can drag-and-drop some files to your web server and create your own EveryBlock clone.

It would be nice if you could but, while the source code is a good starting point, much of EveryBlock’s success has nothing to do with its impressive source code. EveryBlock’s real success stems from the team’s ability to work with government officials to get access to the raw data and then organize it geographically.

If you’ve followed the EveryBlock blog at all, you’ll know that, sadly, local governments aren’t exactly forthcoming with their data. In fact, some seem downright hostile to the idea of sharing “their” data. The fact EveryBlock has been able to get access to data like building permits, crime stats and everything else on the site, is more a testimony to the group’s skills as bureaucratic negotiators than any Python tricks hidden up its sleeves.Still, having had a look at the EveryBlock source code, we can assure you there are indeed some very cool Python tricks in EveryBlock’s code — especially when it comes to working with geographic database extensions like GIS — and it will no doubt prove a gold mine for the Django community.

So what happens to EveryBlock.com, now that the grant money is gone? Holovaty writes on the EveryBlock blog that the site plans to continue as a private company, and he promises that the team still has some cool tricks to show off. “We have some exciting ideas planned around revolutionizing the whole EveryBlock experience,” writes Holovaty, “we’re only getting started.”

If you’d like to see what sort of magic has been powering EveryBlock for the last two years, head on over to the new source code page and download the code. The code is broken down into several categories with tools ranging from the GIS tools to the data-acquisition modules and scripts. All of the code is available under the GPL 3.0.

One thing to keep in mind if you’re planning to develop some sort of EveryBlock site: The design and the name are not part of the release. In other words, your project can be inspired by EveryBlock, but don’t rip it off.

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