Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

Adobe Announces Photoshop for the ‘DroidsAdobe Announces Photoshop for the ‘Droids

Posted by Farhan on November 7th, 2009 | No Comments »

With Friday’s launch of the the new Motorola Droid and some slick new features in Android 2.0, Google’s mobile operating system is stealing a bit of thunder from the iPhone.

Now, there’s one more battleground: Photoshop.com, Adobe’s online photo service based around its flagship photo editor, has jumped on the Android bandwagon as well. Adobe released a new Android-based photo app Friday that allows you to edit, view, share and upload images directly from your phone. It works with any photos stored on the phone.

Photoshop.com Mobile is already available for the iPhone and Windows Mobile devices. It’s a free download on all three mobile platforms. The Android version of Photoshop.com Mobile has all the features found in its Apple-y and Microsoft-y cousins, but it also packs in a few things that can’t be done on the iPhone — like background image uploads, so you can upload an album and still do other things with the images are being transferred.

As for the editing tools themselves, well… don’t expect “real” Photoshop. But the basic options like cropping, straightening, color corrections and preset image transformations can go a long way toward making your mobile images look much better.

Adobe has a video overview, but for some reason doesn’t offer any way to embed it. You can check it out on the Photoshop.com Mobile site. Watch for the subtle iPhone snub about midway through the video, when Adobe’s Corey Barker says, “this particular phone has a really cool feature called background processin

Filed under Web Design


WordPress Goes Real-time With RSS Cloud Support

Posted by Farhan on September 14th, 2009 | No Comments »

ver wish your RSS reader worked more like a Twitter client? Or even FriendFeed, where updates just appear in real-time? Well, that idea has been gaining ground for some time, and it just got a whole lot more appealing now that WordPress has announced support for RSS Cloud.

RSS Cloud takes advantage of the cloud element in the RSS 2.0 specification. Actually cloud has been there since RSS 0.92, but no one paid much attention to it until Twitter and others ushered in the idea of a real-time web. The cloud element is used to deliver push notifications to your feed reader.

That’s essentially the reverse of how RSS readers work right now. At the moment, most popular RSS readers poll sites to see when they have new content. Another, slightly better method is to wait for a ping from your blog to let the RSS reader know when new content is available. But as WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg notes in the announcement, “getting every ping in the world is a lot of work… RSS Cloud effectively allows any client to register to get pings for only the stuff they’re interested in.”

The result is that new posts from your favorite blogs arrive much faster using the RSS Cloud method. As Marshall Kirkpatrick writes over at ReadWriteWeb, the difference in wait times is like “the difference between checking your e-mail every once in awhile and using a Blackberry to get new e-mails pushed to you as soon as they arrive.”

Sounds good, no? More news, delivered faster. Well, the bad news is that there’s really only one feed reader that currently supports RSS Cloud — Dave Winer’s River2. However, with WordPress now implementing the cloud element in its feeds, some 50 million posts a week are potentially accessible to cloud-enabled feed readers, which should be more than enough to tip the balance in RSS Cloud’s favor.

Of course there are some competing specifications, like pubsubhubbub or FriendFeed’s SUP proposal, which both do something similar to enable push updates.

WordPress has already said that its working on other ways of pushing notifications to news reader, including pubsubhubbub, so while you may have to wait a while before your favorite reader enables support for RSS Cloud and others, the WordPress announcement has certainly added incentive. And, hopefully, it will give RSS readers a much needed kick in butt — let’s face it, RSS readers aren’t exactly hotbeds of innovation right now.

Indeed Dave Winer is trying to get popular Twitter clients to support RSS Cloud. If they do, they could well end up supplanting RSS readers as the way most people get their news.

We’ll just have to stop calling them Twitter clients and start calling them what they should be referred to as: news clients.

Filed under Web Design, Wordpress


Using HTML5 Today With Modernizr

Posted by Farhan on September 14th, 2009 | No Comments »

Web developers looking to play with the new features in HTML5 are still struggling with incomplete and inconsistent browser support. While HTML5 is far from perfect (and complete), that doesn’t mean you can’t use it; it just means using it is a little more complicated since you need to detect the current browser’s level of support and then adjust accordingly.

Fortunately there is Modernizr, a very nice JavaScript Library that can detect which HTML5 features are available to the current user’s browser. With that information you can then create conditional JavaScript statements to offer HTML5 to those browsers that support it, but still fall back on other content for those that don’t.

We’ve covered Modernizer before, taking a look at its basic capabilities and how you can use them, but now Mark Pilgrim — of Dive Into Python fame — has released another chapter of his coming Dive into HTML5 book with a much more in depth look at how to detect HTML5 features and what to do for fallback content.

Pilgrim also covers some more complex scenarios. For instance, he shows how detecting support for the HTML5 <canvas> element is often not enough to determine compatibility since different browsers support different aspects of the full API. In one example, Pilgrim shows how to detect <canvas> support and then adds further checks for those who need the Canvas Text API.

Another pain for web developers is the mixed bag of support for the <video> element. Nearly all the latest versions of popular browsers support <video> (well, not IE8, but we’re assuming that’s no surprise), but then even those that do support <video> support different video formats. Mozilla wants .go files, Safari will be looking for .mp4 videos, and so on. Pilgrim offers up a series of checks to figure out which video to serve using Modernizr.

We know what you’re thinking: this HTML5 stuff is more trouble than it’s worth. Right now, you’re probably right. But in a year or two, HTML5 will be spoken everywhere on the web, and taking the time to figure it out and start using it now will put you well ahead of the learning curve.

Check out Pilgrim’s post, and be sure to keep an eye on Webmonkey for more HTML5 coverage.

Filed under Programming, SEO, Web Design


HTML5 Drag-and-Drop API Is no Panacea for Developers

Posted by Farhan on September 14th, 2009 | No Comments »

We’ve all seen it happen: a less web savvy friend wants to upload an image so they grab it from the desktop and drag it over to their web browser where… nothing happens. It’s good for a chuckle every now and then, but really, isn’t that exactly how you should upload a file to the web? After all, it works everywhere else on your PC.

Developers have been pining for drag-and-drop support in webapps pretty much since the first servers came online. But now, with HTML5 nearly here, true drag and drop support is about to become a reality.

Yes, there are JavaScript libraries that allow you to create drag-and-drop interfaces within the browser, but that’s not what we’re talking about. Rather, HTML5 offers the holy grail — drag a file from your desktop straight to a browser window and it will magically upload.

Of course, for developers, nothing is every that easy. The drag-and-drop portion of the HTML5 spec is very new, incomplete and at the moment, really only works in a very limited form in Firefox 3.5 and Safari nightly builds.

But that doesn’t mean people are starting to experiment with it. Leslie Orchard of Mozilla recently posted a very nice tutorial that will walk you through the basics of the HTML5 drag-and-drop API and help you create a little demo app (another nice working demo can be found over at The CSS Ninja).

Orchard concludes that the “first-class drag and drop events in HTML5 and Firefox make supporting this form of UI interaction simple, concise, and powerful.” However, web developer Francisco Tolmasky has a decidedly different take.

Tolmasky recently posted about his experiences implementing a drag-and-drop interface for his slide presentation web app, 280 North (think Keynote in the browser). Tolmasky found that not only are there a number of browser bugs and implementation shortcomings, but the spec itself is flawed in many ways. For example, as Tolmasky discovered, there is no reliable way to determine whether a user wants to drag an object, or simply select several by dragging to highlight them.

Another problem, and one that’s more prominent in the other side of the drag-and-drop experience (i.e. dragging out of or within the browser) is the complexity involved in figuring out where the user plans to drop the selected item and how that effects what the webapp should do with the item:

Take 280 Slides for example: When a user drags the slides out of slides navigator, he may be planning to drop it to any number of locations. If he is dragging it from one instance of 280 Slides to another, then we want to provide a serialized version of these slides so that they can be added to the other presentation. If however, he drags these slides into a program like Photoshop, then we would want to provide image data. If he were to drag them to his desktop, then perhaps we could provide a PDF version. He could even drag them to his text editor and expect the text contents of his slides to be pasted.

Desktop APIs provide hooks to delay the “what do I do with this object” problem until you actually drop the object somewhere, which saves a ton of processing overhead. But the HTML5 spec currently doesn’t have any such delays. And, in the case of dragging a large number of objects, this shortcoming can result in significant lag times.

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Filed under Microsoft, Web Design | Tags: Clients, Firefox 3.5, HTML 5, JavaScript, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Foundation, WWW


Complex Web Layouts Made Easy With New CSS3 ‘Flexible Box Model’

Posted by Farhan on August 29th, 2009 | No Comments »

While HTML5 has been getting most of the attention lately, CSS 3, the other half of the web developer’s toolkit for next-generation web pages has been progressing as well.

Although the CSS Working Group has taken a fair amount of flack from the development community over the years, despite the Working Group’s lack of transparency and refusal to engage the community, the actual implementers — Apple, Mozilla, Opera and Google — continue to push CSS 3 toward the mainstream.

One of the more interesting aspects of CSS 3 is the new Flexible Box model spec which essentially allows you to define how unused portions of block level elements are handled. Sound confusing? Well, initially it can be. Fortunately, Alex Russell of Dojo fame has put up a nice guide to using the new flexible box model.

Essentially, two new CSS 3 selectors, hbox and vbox, allow you to easily center an element within its parent element. Then, as the spec says, “unused space can be assigned to a particular child or distributed among the children by assignment of ‘flex’ to the children that should expand.” In other words, you can make some child elements flexible and others fixed, which makes for considerably more complex layouts using only a fraction of the code you’d need to do that using pure CSS 2.

One thing to keep in mind: selectors like hbox and vbox are not universally supported yet, so if you need everything to work in IE, this method is off limits. However, hbox and vbox do work in Gecko and Webkit, which means these tricks will work just fine for Safari, Firefox and Chrome. Opera is only progressive browser missing from the list.

As Russell points out in his write-up, while universal support is still a ways away, these techniques could be used in mobile interfaces where Safari and Chrome are prevalent.

Filed under Web Design, Wordpress


New JavaScript Library Brings Vector Graphics to the Masses

Posted by Farhan on August 26th, 2009 | No Comments »

The use of Scalable Vector Graphics, better known as SVG, has long been a great way to create dynamic graphics on the web — just feed your ever-changing values into an SVG XML file and you’ve got an always up-to-date image. It’s a great tool for displaying dynamic charts, graphics and other data visualizations on the web.

But of course, there are some issue with SVG, namely (what else?) inconsistent support across browsers. Eventually, SVG will likely enjoy native support in all the major browsers. In the mean time, there’s a possible solution on the horizon — the SVG Web JavaScript Library.

SVG Web is a JavaScript library which provides SVG support for most browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Combining the library with the native SVG support in many browsers brings you to a solution that reaches about 95 percent of the web.

That’s pretty good by nearly anyone’s standards, and the demos on the project’s website show off some impressive tools — drag and drop photo editing, a Tetris knock off and more.

The only catch is that the SVG Web project is still in the early alpha stage and has quite a few bugs (several of the examples don’t work with Firefox’s native SVG support, though everything we tried did work with the Flash fallback option).

Still, despite the early alpha status, quite a few big names, including Wikipedia, are either currently using or working on projects that plan to use the SVG Web library. If you’ve been itching to get your SVG graphics on the web, but you’ve been hesitant due to browser compatibility issues, give SVG Web a try. And remember, if you find any bugs,

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Filed under Programming, Web Design | Tags: Data Formats, Firefox, Internet Explorer, JavaScript, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Scalable Vector Graphics


WebMediaBrands Sells Internet.com to QuinStreet

Posted by Farhan on August 12th, 2009 | No Comments »

August 10, 2009
By internetnews.com Staff: More stories by this author:

WebMediaBrands has inked a deal to sell its Internet.com unit to online vertical marketing firm QuinStreet.

The deal will see privately held QuinStreet paying $18 million in cash for Internet.com, which publishes IT- and developer-focused sites including InternetNews.com, Datamation, Linux Planet, and others.

Following the sale, WebMediaBrands (NASDAQ: WEBM) will continue to operate its other business lines, which include Mediabistro.com and Graphics.com, as well as the two sites’ related job boards, online tutorials and tradeshows.

The deal is subject to shareholder approval and other customary closing conditions.

“We believe that this transaction will be beneficial to WebMediaBrands and its stockholders as it will significantly improve our balance sheet and at the same time allow us to focus on growing B-to-B communities in the non-tech space,” WebMediaBrands CEO Alan Meckler said in a statement.

Internet.com began as a unit of Mecklermedia, the parent of the Internet World conference and magazine. In 1998, Penton Media acquired Mecklermedia’s print and tradeshow business, while Meckler bought back Mecklermedia’s online properties to become the publicly traded Internet.com.

In 2001, Internet.com changed its corporate name to INT Media Group, while retaining Internet.com as a separate brand name for its network of IT and developer sites. INT Media Group has since changed names to Jupitermedia — following the 2002 purchase of Jupiter Research — and then to WebMediaBrands after the sale of Jupiter Research and JupiterImages divisions in 2006 and early 2009, respectively.

Filed under Web Design


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