Archive for the ‘Web Apps’ Category

File Under: Browsers, Web Apps
Oct
19
2010

Mozilla Shows Off Plans for an Open Web App Store

By

Mozilla LabsMozilla has released more details about its soon-to-arrive Open Web Applications platform.

There are two key components: a directory where users can browse available web apps, and a new dashboard that will be baked into the browser interface, where users can install and manage their favorite apps.

The company published some technical documentation for developers so they can get to work retrofitting their apps with the code necessary to make them work with the new dashboard.

We first heard mumblings from Mozilla about this “Open app store” for the web back in May, only one day after Google announced its own app store for its Chrome browser and web-based Chrome OS. Google’s store is expected to make its full debut soon. The apps in Google’s store will be optimized for Chrome and may not work in other browsers, but Mozilla’s approach will list apps that work on “any modern browser with support for basic HTML technologies” — including mobile browsers. Mozilla says it will let each browser vendor dictate how it presents the app dashboards and management features.

So, app stores for web apps?

It doesn’t make much sense when coupled with what we’ve seen of “traditional” app stores — the ones popular in the mobile world, like those for Apple, Android and BlackBerry devices. But unlike those app stores, which actually involve downloading a package and installing it for offline use, a web app store is simply a directory of apps that are hosted on web servers.

In Mozilla’s model, users browse the app listings, where everything is categorized and rated. Developers can also host their own apps. Users click “install” on the ones they want, and those apps are added to a dashboard inside their browser.

It’s been mocked up for Firefox, and it looks something like this:


In the dashboard, you can manage how apps access your personal information, or uninstall them. Users don’t have to use the dashboard. They also have the option of saving a link on their desktop or mobile home screen for a single-click launch.

Continue Reading “Mozilla Shows Off Plans for an Open Web App Store” »

Tags: , , ,
File Under: HTML5, Web Apps
Oct
5
2010

Take a Peek Into Rumpetroll’s HTML5 Pond

By

On Monday, we told you about Rumpetroll, the bizarre web app that turns a regular old chat room into a pool of swimming, talking tadpoles.

It uses HTML5 Canvas, WebSockets, JavaScript and CSS 3 to power all of the interactions and the front end. So if you have a browser that supports these technologies — currently, that’s Chrome, Safari 5 or Firefox 4 Beta — check it out.

We pinged team Rumpetroll, asking how they created the unique app. Hans Petter and Hugo Ahlberg, two of the designers, wrote back with some of the technical details.

We’ll let Hans walk us through it:

Our project started on a whim just a few weeks ago when Hugo tweeted that he had secured rumpetroll.com (He’s Swedish and finds the word immensely witty) and Daniel Mahal figured he’d create some content for the site.

Daniel, Simen Brekken and Hans Petter work in an interactive agency (apt.no) and Hugo is in the midst of launching his mobile web app startup. So as developers and designers who do this stuff for a living, we figured it’d be a great project to explore what modern browsers can do that is not yet viable for commercial projects. All without plugins. It even supports the iPad if you have iOS 4.2 beta. (The current Mobile Safari does not support WebSockets.)

Swimming around alone was interesting for a minute. But when joined by schools and schools of actual virtual tadpoles, it became inexplicably entertaining.

We use WebSockets to keep the connection between browser and server alive at all times, this makes it really fast. One tadpole sends at most five updates per second to the server, which in turn broadcasts it to every other tadpole. The WebSocket server is implemented in Ruby with the glorious EventMachine and em-websocket. HTML files are hosted on Mediatemple and the WebSocket server runs on a Joyent SmartMachine. The virtual pond is drawn with the HTML5 Canvas element.

You may think of WebSockets as turbocharged Ajax, And it will probably have a huge impact on the future of the web.

The project is open and hosted on github, and we’d love contributions. Certainly anyone who’ve spent two minutes in the pond must have at least ten ideas for it.

I like his observation that WebSockets is sort of like a “turbocharged Ajax.” In a sense it is — WebSockets allows services to keep running in the background and can provide updates to the browser without requiring the user to touch anything. Of course, they are technically not the same thing, but it’s a good high-level analogy.

See also:

Tags: , ,
File Under: CSS, HTML5, JavaScript, Web Apps
Oct
4
2010

Chat With Other Tadpoles in Rumpetroll

By

This may be the most bizarre chatroom ever created.

It’s called Rumpetroll. In Norwegian, the word means “tadpole,” but the literal translation is “ass troll.” It’s a very clever name, as Rumpetroll is a chat room.

Enter, and you’re dropped into a color-shifting primordial soup with a bunch of other tadpoles (that also happen to look like sperm). Click around with your mouse to swim around and join up with other groups. Type to chat, and enter “name: Mike” to give your tadpole/sperm a display name.

The visual environment is powered by Canvas, JavaScript and CSS 3. It also uses WebSockets, a technology which allows persistent client-server connections. It exemplifies how web standards can be used to write a front-end that turns the most banal and simple web app into something unique and interesting.

Because of these leading-edge technologies, you’ll need a modern browser like Chrome, Firefox 4 or Safari 5.

I’ve been hanging out in Rumpetroll all morning. I’ve gone on some fruitless adventures into the abyss. I also met some Russians. I’ve even encountered a few users who have learned how to hack the site’s JavaScript to increase the size of their tadpole, or speed it up so they can fly around at amazing speeds.

The creators are four hackers from Oslo, Norway: Daniel Mahal, Hans Petter Eikemo, Hugo Ahlberg and Simen Brekken. Kudos!

See also:

Tags: , , , , ,
File Under: HTML5, Web Apps
Sep
29
2010

HTML5 Telnet Emulator Conjures the Pre-Web Past

By

Hey kids, wanna go back in time?

If you’re looking for a “lean back” experience, we’d recommend the YouTube Time Machine.

But if you’re looking for something a little more “lean forward,” check out the jsTerm telnet emulator from Peter Nitsch. There are a bunch of bookmarks to choose from in the drop-down, so click around and visit some far-off locales.

The project is based on Flashterm, but Peter has hacked it together in HTML5. It uses Canvas to render the graphics, drawing a new image every time you press a key, plus WebSockets and Node.js to handle the client/server connection. You can dig into the source on github.

Not as hardcore as PuTTY, but it’s a pretty unique use of HTML5 and Canvas, so it’s obviously cooler.

I was a telnet kiddie back in the day — it’s what we did in the 1980s before web browsers, and before you could read Wired magazine on a gopher server — so this really brings me back. It has me itching for some Doritos, a Mountain Dew and the first three Chili Peppers albums.

See Also:

Tags: , , ,
File Under: Social, Web Apps
Sep
29
2010

ThinkUp Adds Color, Depth to Your Social Network Stats

By

If you’ve ever wanted to archive your social network activity, store in your own database and pull all sorts of interesting visualizations out of it, then the new ThinkUp app is what you’ve been waiting for.

ThinkUp is one part metrics app — tracking which of your posts are most popular, for example — and one part cross-network aggregator. It offers features you won’t find on Twitter or Facebook, like a detailed “conversation view” of exchanges with other users. ThinkUp also acts as a backup for your social network data, pulling it into your own database. It even offers CSV files for creating your own spreadsheets.

Since it archives all of your activity, ThinkUp is an especially useful tool for those of us who like to maintain control over our own data. It takes stuff that would otherwise only live in the various networks’ silos and copies it to a database where we’re the administrator. So if we want to ditch Twitter or Facebook in some distant future where those companies start acting against our best interests, we don’t lose the massive stores of updates, links, photos and, most importantly, friend relationships we’ve already set up. And in the meantime, it lets us have fun with all the data it’s archiving.

Although ThinkUp is still a beta release, we took the code for a spin and found it to be stable enough to be useful. At the moment, it only supports Twitter and Facebook data, but ThinkUp plans to add additional social networks in the future, including LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and Google Buzz. If you’d like to try out the limited beta, head over to Github and grab the code. You may notice it’s a project published by Gina Trapani, the former Lifehacker editor who is now an independent author, blogger and programmer.

Continue Reading “ThinkUp Adds Color, Depth to Your Social Network Stats” »

Tags: , , , ,
« OLDER POSTS