The change in emphasis for HTML5 away from just content and more toward functionality, coupled with a much deeper impact from Apple on the broader model of computing than even Apple's most adamant fans could have anticipated, has led to a changed scenario for the Web. By this time next year, barring any delays, the Web delivery model for the world's three most prevalent platforms - Windows, iOS, and Android - will be based on apps.
This changes the landscape for developers like Mozilla and Opera Software, whose value propositions to date have been based around building better browsers: If the user now bypasses the browser icon and goes directly to an app, how does a browser maker convince customers that there's value in swapping out the engines that run their apps - components which, like graphics cards, they probably never see or even care about?
What do you do when your blogging service is slated to go dark? If you're a user of the popular Italian blogging service Splinder.com, you pack up and move over to WordPress.com. At least, that's what Automattic is hoping while it throws a lifeline to the bloggers that are being thrown out into the cold.
Splinder.com announced the shutdown in November of last year. Today Daryl L. L. Houston announced an importer for Splinder.com on WordPress.com that's available to users ahead of the closure, slated for January 31st.
Speed counts, and nobody knows that better than Google. The latest tweak to provide better performance comes in the form of adopting a new compression type that promises to yield files about 15% smaller than using Gzip to compress fonts. If you're already using Google's Web Fonts, what do you need to do to get the improvements? Nothing!
Cross-browser testing is crucial when developing Web sites, but it can be a royal pain to have to refresh each browser across several devices to see how pages are rendered. To help cut down on the pain, there's Shim, a Node.js app that lets you sync browsing sessions over several devices on the same Wi-Fi network. All you need is Node.js, Shim and a Mac running 10.6 or better with wired and wireless connections.
Okay, so we all know that both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg never finished their Harvard degrees, and look where they are now. But for the rest of us who just aspire to have a full time job, let alone an equity share in a hot startup, is a college degree really necessary to code? Maybe not, according to this blog post from Good Technology.
Erin Biba, who wrote the post back in November, asks: "Programming isn't accounting. It requires creative thinkers and problem solvers, people unlikely to thrive in the confines of a college classroom. So why do hiring managers apply traditional methods to a nontraditional job?"
Wednesday in ReadWriteWeb, Jon Mitchell posted a very pointed opinion on how Google's social network, Google+, is leading to gradual, though noticeable, adjustments in how all of Google's services work. In his article, Jon provided evidence that Google search results appear to favor recommendations on Google+ that link to an article that meets the search criteria, over a direct link to the article itself.
Writes Jon, "Google used to be about organizing the world's information. It was a service to the entire Web. But this social tangent is changing that. It's turning the Web into a Google+ popularity contest." However, he also writes that other Google users in his Google+ circles tell him they get different results.
Among a handful of patents transferred last December 31 from IBM's portfolio to that of Google, as first discovered by Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea, is a system for processing text compiled by users of social networks, and ascertaining their common interests. We've already seen the rise of tools such as Radian6 for ascertaining social net users' individual interests; this new technology, which received a U.S. patent only one year ago, would judge what concepts they share with one another.
The goal of this technology, as IBM originally stated, is to literally to filter out irrelevant links to articles that may not pertain to users' search intentions. What we don't know yet is whether Google intends to use this technology, or simply keep others from using it first.
The picture recently painted of a network of ubiquitous connectivity for each and every class of processor-endowed device on the planet goes so far as to suggest that things such as shipping tags, pacemakers, pipeline stress sensors, thermometers, and nuclear radiation monitors expose their methods to the world - perhaps with a RESTful state. Only through such openness could the spark of ingenuity for a standardized, all-purpose API be generated.
As KORE Telematics President and COO Alex Brisbourne told us in Part 1 of this three-part discussion with ReadWriteWeb, the engineering of such specialized devices may actually work against the creation of such an API. But commonality and generalization of functions are what drive costs down for device manufacturers - the more specialized something is, the smaller its potential market. Is there anything that "intelligent device" managers could learn from the design of existing, specialized, narrowcast (to use Brisbourne's term) devices that developers may apply to the architecture of the devices that real-world apps will remotely monitor and manage?
We bring in the new year with a new Pokki developer contest. Like the one we mentioned in October, you have a chance to win 30 large. But this one has an extra bonus with an all-expenses paid trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next spring. All you have to do is build a new game in HTML5 and other Web technologies (but not using any Flash, thank you very much) and have it approved at the Pokki store before the end of the day February 20, 2012.
Games will be judged by a panel of game development managers on the basis of gameplay, appeal, polish and overall graphics and sound. Besides the first prize mentioned above, there is a second and third prizes (but no trip) of $13,000 and $7,000. Here is where you can learn more about the contest and enter. Good luck! (We aren't affiliated with Pokki, but happy to promote other contests if you hear of them.)
Eric Bidelman, an engineer on Google's Chrome team, has released a JavaScript wrapper library for the HTML5 Filesystem API. Called filer.js, the library is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 License.
If Bidelman's name is familiar, it's because he wrote the book on the HTML5 Filesystem API, literally. Bidelman also worked on the Python Client Library for Google Docs.
