Web Info & Tutorials

October 18th, 2006

IE 7 RELEASED

If you have not been playing with an early release to test your sites, maybe now is the time. IE 7 has been released to the wild and you can download it here.

The first word came from the IEBlog:

Today we released Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP. I encourage everyone to download the final version from http://www.microsoft.com/ie.

We listened carefully to feedback from many sources (including this blog) and worked hard to deliver a safer browser that makes everyday tasks easier. When I first posted publicly about IE7, I wrote that we would go further to defend users from phishing and malicious software. The Phishing Filter and the architectural work in IE7 around networking and ActiveX opt-in will help keep users more secure. IE7 also delivers a much easier browsing experience with features like tabbed browsing (especially with QuickTabs), shrink-to-fit printing, an easily customizable search box, and a new design that leaves more screen real estate for the web site you’re viewing. IE7’s CSS improvements are incredibly important for developers as many of you have made quite clear. I also think IE7’s RSS experience and platform are important, powerful, and innovative.

In addition to our release of IE7, Yahoo! has a customized version of the browser available today and over the next few days partners such as Weather.com and USA TODAY will offer their own customized versions. These versions will tailor the user experience with specific toolbars, additional search engines, favorites, and RSS feeds.

Is anyone seeing a bunch of new IE7 requests coming in? Found any issues with IE7 rendering bugs in your applications? It’s going to be a busy time!

October 18th, 2006

GOOGLE GADGETS FOR YOUR SITE

Google Gadgets used to be for Google pages. That has now changed.

Now you can checkout the gadgets and download code to put on your own sites.

Google Gadgets for the whole web has a few limitations, which gadget authors should be aware of when writing gadgets for third-party webpages. To ensure that your gadget will support distribution across the web, take note of these important facts:

  • Make sure your gadget supports 200-pixel content widths for placement on third-party web pages. While Google Personalized Homepage gadgets have an average width of 250 pixels, assume third-party web pages will have even smaller widths. Otherwise, you may start receiving complaint emails about annoying horizontal scroll bars.
  • You cannot store data or state for gadgets embedded on third-party web pages. If your gadget contains code to do so, it will silently fail.
  • Inlined gadgets cannot be added to third-party web pages, and will not appear in our directory of gadgets for your webpage.
  • Since inlined gadgets are not supported, embedded gadgets cannot modify third-party webpages for obvious reasons.

The widget/gadget/components keep growing.

Google Gadgets for You

October 18th, 2006

MOBILIZING WEB 2.0

This article argues Web 2.0 apps don’t automatically alter to the ambulatory sound - you hit to re-think the UI, maybe modify intercommunicate absent the covering altogether.

“Beware of credulous copying of PC services,” said king Wood, chief evilness chair of investigate for Symbian Ltd. “Some don’t translate.” He was speech weekday at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London.

Wood and others said that the inexplicit constraints of ambulatory phones and networks stingy that whatever Web 2.0 services won’t impact substantially without whatever changes to alter those limitations. Web 2.0 describes a newborn procreation of Web sites, whatever that enable user-generated noesis or consortium accumulation from different sources.

He utilised the warning of Google Maps, an covering initially fashioned for the PC. Because the covering is shapely on Ajax, same whatever another Web 2.0 services, it pushes accumulation discover to the computer figure in visit to pace up forthcoming individual requests. On a ambulatory phone, that impact drains shelling life, eats up restricted module and results in potentially rattling broad data-access charges. Google Inc. has introduced a edition of the information fashioned for ambulatory phones that eliminates whatever of that overhead, rising the ambulatory individual experience.

One artefact that Web 2.0 companies crapper similarly change their services for ambulatory devices is by relying inferior on browser-based applications and more on diminutive code clients that users crapper download onto their phones. “The covering module drop into the background,” said Wood.

Just as engrossing as the article itself is this indicator from slashdot, which notes an engrossing paradox of whatever Web 2.0 apps:

So whatever Web 2.0 apps seem same a uncolored sound for ingest on ambulatory phones — more so, in fact, than the PCs they were cursive for. Take for example, Google maps or Flickr or some of the myriad ethnic networking sites. Frankly, I astonishment ground anyone would modify poverty to ingest them patch movement at a desk. And still the actuality of using those apps on radiophone phones is solidly unsatisfactory because of the inexplicit constraints of ambulatory phones and networks.

I had someone asking me most ambulatory platforms the another day. There are whatever academic benefits of ambulatory apps, not meet the manifest run-anywhere argument. Mobile apps can, in the correct circumstances, acquire income direct against the user’s sound bill. They haw also goodness from special functionality much as camera practice and geo-tracking. BUT …

A ambulatory edition is digit of those things whatever startups would same to do, but only haven’t the resources for, digit of this nice-to-haves same internationalization or syndication. It doesn’t attain it some easier that ambulatory platforms are so unbelievably broken crossways sound models, countries, and meshwork providers, permit lonely bedevilment most what the individual has installed on crowning of the accepted falsehood (Flash? Java? Opera?). And then there’s auditing and authorisation processes to go along with it. Right now, there are *so* whatever options a start has to consider, play from the bounteous one: covering app or standalone? If ambulatory admittance is not a set feature, how whatever scheme 2.0 companies are feat to bother?