Remember non-vendor-prefixed CSS 3 properties (and put them last)
Everybody wants to use CSS 3 now that even Internet Explorer will support parts of it once IE 9 is out. But since parts of CSS 3 are still subject to change, most browsers use a vendor prefix for many CSS 3 properties to signal that their implemenation is “experimental” and may change in a later version of the browser.
This means that for a property like border-radius to work cross-browser you need to specify it several times with different vendor prefixes, like this:
.box {-moz-border-radius:10px;-webkit-border-radius:10px;border-radius:10px;}
Tomorrow Apple Event: Any Expectation?
The announcement dates back to just one week ago and it has already sparked the usual trepidation around the web about what the next shiny little device from Apple could be.
From the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco on September 1, Steve Jobs will reveal the Apple’s news, music-themed this time of the year: it will probably be a product to be launched in the coming weeks, but about which we don’t have many clues yet.
The most reliable voices report about a complete redesign of the iPod lines that could probably inherit the dual cameras and Retina display from the new iPhone 4, and a New Service That Could let users listen to streaming music over the Internet without downloading songs directly to their own computer. Credible speculation, if you look back at December 2009 when Apple acquired LaLa, a streaming digital music service – currently suspended – which allowed the users, among other interesting features, to purchase streaming-only Web albums.
Some rumors report that Jobs could also introduce a new iPad model, with a smaller screen size of 7 inches versus the actual 9,7 inches, Retina display equipped and priced significantly lower than the $ 499 needed for the current basic model of the tablet.
Probably, however, despite many who want a smaller model of the Apple tablet, that’s easier to carry and less bulky than the currently available version, we won’t see anything like that before next year anyway, because the introduction of a different product concept would be too close to the launch of the original iPad of just a few months ago.
Finally, we expect the announcement of the possible relaunch of the not-so-lucky Apple TV with its brand new name “iTV” which would then benefit from on-demand movies, television series and programs through a special decoder.
?We’ll see then. Any expectation on your side?
Tomorrow Apple Event: Any Expectation?
The announcement dates back to just one week ago and it has already sparked the usual trepidation around the web about what the next shiny little device from Apple could be.
From the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco on September 1, Steve Jobs will reveal the Apple’s news, music-themed this time of the year: it will probably be a product to be launched in the coming weeks, but about which we don’t have many clues yet.
The most reliable voices report about a complete redesign of the iPod lines that could probably inherit the dual cameras and Retina display from the new iPhone 4, and a New Service That Could let users listen to streaming music over the Internet without downloading songs directly to their own computer. Credible speculation, if you look back at December 2009 when Apple acquired LaLa, a streaming digital music service – currently suspended – which allowed the users, among other interesting features, to purchase streaming-only Web albums.
Some rumors report that Jobs could also introduce a new iPad model, with a smaller screen size of 7 inches versus the actual 9,7 inches, Retina display equipped and priced significantly lower than the $ 499 needed for the current basic model of the tablet.
Probably, however, despite many who want a smaller model of the Apple tablet, that’s easier to carry and less bulky than the currently available version, we won’t see anything like that before next year anyway, because the introduction of a different product concept would be too close to the launch of the original iPad of just a few months ago.
Finally, we expect the announcement of the possible relaunch of the not-so-lucky Apple TV with its brand new name “iTV” which would then benefit from on-demand movies, television series and programs through a special decoder.
?We’ll see then. Any expectation on your side?
Internet Killed Blockbuster. Who’s Next?
Dallas – The bomb blew up just a few days ago when a Los Angeles Times article reported that Blockbuster Inc., the video rental giant, is ready to file for bankruptcy.
Overwhelmed by debt and losses amounting to over billion since 2008, the video rental chain is yet another of the world’s most famous names to join the long list of once successful companies that have not been able to adapt their business to the radical changes in the market introduced by the Internet. Another high-profile victim.
In a recent note (August 13), Blockbuster reported total revenues for the second quarter of 2010 were 8 million, with a loss of 4 million compared to total revenues for the same period one year ago. Net loss for the second quarter of 2010 was million with a negative increase of million compared to net loss in the second quarter of 2009.
As with the entire music industry, that in the early 2000, with the rapid spread of the Internet, has witnessed the failure of its revenue mainly because of music piracy and as, more recently, the bookstore chain Barnes & Nobles, which is paying for a significant delay in entering the business of electronic books (which record is firmly in the hands of Amazon), Blockbuster pays his choice of sticking to an old distribution model for its core business, a model that’s no longer adequate in the age of the Internet and unable to compete with Netflix or iTunes.
If it is true that over the next five years entertainment, music, books, videos, video games, will be distributed mainly via remote connections – it’s already happening right now, you know – I believe we have to realistically expect that the classic physical media will suffer a further drastic reduction and that this change will cause another earthquake which will spare only those who will react in a timely fashion.
To cope with the losses, Blockbuster plans to shut down 500 to 800 of the 3,425 on the United States territory. The bankruptcy will be filed probably by the end of September.
Internet Killed Blockbuster. Who’s Next?
Dallas – The bomb blew up just a few days ago when a Los Angeles Times article reported that Blockbuster Inc., the video rental giant, is ready to file for bankruptcy.
Overwhelmed by debt and losses amounting to over billion since 2008, the video rental chain is yet another of the world’s most famous names to join the long list of once successful companies that have not been able to adapt their business to the radical changes in the market introduced by the Internet. Another high-profile victim.
In a recent note (August 13), Blockbuster reported total revenues for the second quarter of 2010 were 8 million, with a loss of 4 million compared to total revenues for the same period one year ago. Net loss for the second quarter of 2010 was million with a negative increase of million compared to net loss in the second quarter of 2009.
As with the entire music industry, that in the early 2000, with the rapid spread of the Internet, has witnessed the failure of its revenue mainly because of music piracy and as, more recently, the bookstore chain Barnes & Nobles, which is paying for a significant delay in entering the business of electronic books (which record is firmly in the hands of Amazon), Blockbuster pays his choice of sticking to an old distribution model for its core business, a model that’s no longer adequate in the age of the Internet and unable to compete with Netflix or iTunes.
If it is true that over the next five years entertainment, music, books, videos, video games, will be distributed mainly via remote connections – it’s already happening right now, you know – I believe we have to realistically expect that the classic physical media will suffer a further drastic reduction and that this change will cause another earthquake which will spare only those who will react in a timely fashion.
To cope with the losses, Blockbuster plans to shut down 500 to 800 of the 3,425 on the United States territory. The bankruptcy will be filed probably by the end of September.
What characters are allowed unencoded in query strings?
A couple of months ago I advised people to Be careful with non-ascii characters in URLs. We’ve been discussing that at work lately, more specifically whether characters like “:” and “/” are allowed unencoded in query strings or not.
I may well have made mistakes trying to understand the specification, so any help clarifying any errors in the following would be appreciated.
The summary of my previous post is this:
In essence this means that the only characters you can reliably use for the actual name parts of a URL are
a-z,A-Z,0-9,-,.,_, and~. Any other characters need to be Percent encoded.
But what about those query strings? After studying RFC 3986 – Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax I’ve come to the following conclusions.
Posted in Web Standards.
What characters are allowed unencoded in query strings?
A couple of months ago I advised people to Be careful with non-ascii characters in URLs. We’ve been discussing that at work lately, more specifically whether characters like “:” and “/” are allowed unencoded in query strings or not.
I may well have made mistakes trying to understand the specification, so any help clarifying any errors in the following would be appreciated.
The summary of my previous post is this:
In essence this means that the only characters you can reliably use for the actual name parts of a URL are
a-z,A-Z,0-9,-,.,_, and~. Any other characters need to be Percent encoded.
But what about those query strings? After studying RFC 3986 – Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax I’ve come to the following conclusions.
Posted in Web Standards.
The Cost of Tweets (CO2 Emissions)
According to data from Twitter, published in February 2010, every day around 50 million tweets are sent over the popular micro blogging platform.
Considering an average time of 10 seconds to write one single tweet and the average consumption of 250 watt/hour for one single computer, the total daily consumption amount to 35 kW h (kilowatt hour).
Multiplying this value for the average estimate of CO2 emission per kW, we obtain the daily value of CO2 emission which rises up to 492,000 Kg. Obviously this value is only an rough estimate (rounded down) but, just to give you an idea, it’s like driving a car producing 150 grams of CO2/Km for 3,3 million kilometers.
- The Cost of Spam: CO2 Emissions – Woork Up
- CO2 Emission caused by Tweets – Calculator
Minimise file size with the YUI Compressor TextMate Bundle
It’s quite obvious that the smaller the files that make up your website are, the less time your visitors will wait for them to download. One way of reducing file sizes is minimising JavaScript and CSS files by removing comments and whitespace, among other things.
To do that, you can either let the server do it for you or minimise the files yourself before uploading them to the server. Letting the server do it automatically is probably the most convenient way since you don’t have to remember to do it. But it isn’t practical or possible for everyone to use something like minify, so sometimes you’ll need to do it manually.
That may sound like more trouble than it’s worth. Luckily for us TextMate users there’s a handy YUI Compressor TextMate bundle that makes it almost as transparent as the server-side solution.
Posted in CSS, Coding, JavaScript.
10 Useful Frameworks To Develop HTML-Based Webapps for Touch Devices
Make HTML-based touch applications. Easy.
In the last two years the rapid growth and diffusion of touch devices such as iOS or Android based platforms has forced developers and web designers to rethink the model of their own webapps for the new “touch experience” introduced by the iPhone in 2007.
During this period several frameworks have been released to help web developers implement quickly applications for this kind of touch devices. Here is a collection of some useful frameworks to develop easily HTML-based webapps that will work on all popular smartphone and tablet touch platforms.
Titanium – Appcelerator Titanium is a free and open source framework to develop easily native mobile and desktop apps with web technologies. It provides developers with over 100 customizable UI controls for native tables, views, tabs, alerts, dialogs, buttons, support for geolocation, social networks and multimedia.
Sencha Touch – Sencha Touch is a HTML5 mobile app framework that allows you to develop web apps that look and feel native on Apple iOS and Google Android touchscreen devices. It supports HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript for the highest level of power, flexibility, and optimization in developing your web applications.
Sproutcore Touch – Sproutcore Touch is the touch edition of the Sproutcore framework for developing HTML 5 web applications that includes complete support for touch events and hardware acceleration on the iPad and iPhone.
PhoneGap – PhoneGap is another interesting open source framework for building cross-platform mobile apps with web standars (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript). This framework supports geolocation, vibration, accelerometer, camera, orientation change, magnetometer and other interesting features for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Palm.
Rhodes – Rhodes is another excellent open source framework to rapidly build native apps for all major smartphone operating systems (iOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android). It supports GPS geolocation, PIM contact reading and writing, and camera image capture.
iUI – iUI is a framework consisting of a JavaScript library, CSS, and images for developing advanced mobile webapps for iPhone and comparable/compatible devices.
iWebkit – iWebkit 5 is the new version of the popular ultralight framework for easily creating iPhone and iPod touch applications. The current release has new improved features and is really easy to understand in order to develop in just a few minutes your own web apps.
XUI – XUI is another javascript framework for building simple web applications for mobile devices. No much documentation available but it worth to try it for not complex apps.
jQPad – jQPad is an iPad web development framework jQuery based with some features for quickly developing simple iPad applications.
jQuery Mobile – Closing I want to suggest you jQuery Mobile, the touch-optimized version of the popular jQuery framework for smartphones and tablets which will allow you to design a single highly branded and customized web application that will work on all popular smartphone and tablet platforms. The framework will support iOs, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm webOS and other devices. The framework is under development and will be available in late 2010.