From interrupting your followers with Kanye, to voicing your displeasure with antiquated web browsers, to protesting DDoS attacks, Twibbons have become ingrained in the Twitter community as a way for users to show their support for a cause with their avatars. Now, the project is celebrating a cool milestone: one million users.

Beyond the quirky Twibbon campaigns we’ve highlighted at Mashable, the site has also been used for plenty of good — we’re told that more than 90,000 people wore pink breast cancer Twibbons on their avatars during Breast Cancer Awareness Month and currently more than 24,000 are showing their support for Haiti. Overall, nearly 30,000 causes can now be supported.

Much like TwitPic, which we recently reported is making several million dollars annually, Twibbon’s one of those simple ideas that’s become a staple of the Twitter ecosystem. Looking to leverage that success, the company is also working on developing a business — brands can now create their own campaigns using the service.

Tags: Twibbon, twitter

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Originally posted at Web Crawler

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• Mike Radcliffe’s Inspector. A key feature, now solid as a rock,
• Jan ‘Honza’ Odvarko’s expanded and refined Net panel, with accurate timings,
• Steve Roussey’s reworking of HTML editing and entity support,
• Kevin Decker’s CSS and Style side panel improvements,
• Support for dynamic, graphical breakpoints through out Firebug.
• Tested support for the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.6

This is a big deal. The release is out *before* Firefox 3.6. No more “oh man we have a new Firefox but it doesn’t work with Firebug argh”. Awesome.

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For those unfamiliar with Boot Camp, it’s the dual-booting tool that allows Mac users to install to and boot Windows partitions from their hard drives, and this update gives Mac users looking to dual-boot Windows 7 something to be happy about. Specifically:

This update adds support for Microsoft Windows 7 (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate), addresses issues with the Apple trackpad, turns off the red digital audio port LED on laptop computers when it is not being used, and supports the Apple wireless keyboard and Apple Magic mouse.

Boot Camp is a free download, requires Mac OS X.

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Image by pickinjim2006.

Lamm-Hartmann says once you’ve made up your mind, staying on in a job you’re checked out of emotionally will just stress you out even more. Her advice: Don’t let the fact we’re in a recession hold you back—the job market is more fluid than it appears as people leave jobs they’re dissatisfied with.

The ideal way to go would be to have something lined up [before quitting]. But that’s not always the case these days. If you are dissatisfied, and your company is laying off or downsizing, and you know you want to be doing something else, then go. It’s risky, it’s giving up job security, but there’s really no such thing as job security anymore anyway. And a lot of times companies are providing support, too, like outsourcing support where you can actually get some career counseling if you don’t know what you want to do next. There are lots of companies out there right now that are helping people connect with what they really want to do.

If you’re not ready to do something quite so drastic as walk out on a steady (albeit unhappy) job situation, then consider freelancing without quitting your current job. Have you walked away from your job recently to pursue another opportunity? What motivated you to jump ship? How did it work out? Let us know in the comments.

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Read the rest of HarperCollins Negotiating an eBook Deal With Apple For Its Tablet [New Apple Tablet to Bring eBook Support When Released?]

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An new year new sponsors our first new year edition of our monthly thank you post to our sponsors for their support throughout January, who have helped and supported Creative Nerds immensely to help increase the growth of our site.

Become one of our sponsors and get your site noticed by our readers

Creative Nerds has thousands of visitors each day and one of the main perks of becoming one of our sponsors is that your company or product will be noticed by thousands of people each month. Each Month we write a post dedicated to our sponsors thanking them for their support, making our readers aware of our sponsors and chance for our readers to learn a bit more about sponsors.

Heart Internet

Heart Internet’s Reseller Professional account is every Internet professional’s dream. Specially tailored for web designers, Internet integrators, web hosting resellers and developers, our Reseller package includes unlimited web space, unlimited bandwidth and the ability to host unlimited domains at no extra charge!

ForeUI

ForeUI is a handy UI prototyping tool. It can rapidly create static or interactive, skinnable UI prototypes of your website or software. You can use ForeUI to:

Create mock-up for the GUI in your mind and make others understand quickly. Make working prototype of website or software to collect feedback from potential users. Perform usability testing before releasing the beta version. Generate the schematics that can be inserted in the design documents.

PSD To Html

RapidxHTML is a small team of designers and developers, with a wide range of skills and experience. Each of us know our strengths and weaknesses and how these fit into the big picture.

They came together with one simple objective to offer professional XHTML / CSS markup services at affordable price. We combine expertise in eye-catching graphic layout with modern web design standards built into one of the most powerful systems in the world.

Premium WordPress Themes

Premium WordPress Themes Club! Are developing professional wordpress themes and provide efficient support of our templates. Join the club and choose the membership that suits your needs. We are proud to invite you to the best wordpress themes club and provide you with the full access to all our themes, as well as tutorials, support and the community forum.

Viva Themes

They create quality and professionally designed wordpress themes. They offer themes for your business, blog or personal sites. All of that comes with their excellent free support.

PSD Mall

Psdmall is a web design shop that sells unique photoshop designs. All designs are created from scratch in photoshop and are delivered in a .psd format. Psdmall is the perfect solution for newbie designers, developers, domainers, or anyone in need of a high quality design at an affordable price.

Digital Product Delivery

Each day, thousands of vendors use DPD to automatically sell downloads and deliver their digital products to customers. Integrating with PayPal and other popular payment processors, DPD is the quick and easy way to set up your products for automated selling.

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It is written in JavaScript, uses Google Gears for clientside storage & supports MSN, AIM or any other XMPP-based services (you can easily create a closed chat group for your community).

iJab has lots of features like:

• theme support
• new message pop-up notifications
• multi-user chat
• search users
• avatar, smiley support
• & much more..

The application has 3 modes: stand-alone application, Facebook-like web chat bar in page & live support

Special Downloads:
Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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Tags: Gears, Jabber, Javascript, MSN, XMPP

Related posts

• Open Source Real-Time Collaboration Server: OpenFire
• Zoom Script With A Smart Interface: TJPzoom
• YUI Slideshow: Customizable And Animated Slideshows
• Wrap Content Around Images: jQSlickWrap
• What You See Is What You Ajax: WaveMaker

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A new NY Times comes through with more details about the upcoming Wii Netflix support. Just yesterday we told you that Netflix’ CEO has confirmed that Netflix video streaming is heading to the Wii and today we can further elaborate on that.
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British Sri Lankan music artist M.I.A.’s next big single will be called “Down Like Your Internet Connection,” a song about arguing with Verizon tech support to get her cable Internet and wireless up and running.

M.I.A. has been known to tech geeks for years; she jump-started her career by spreading the first singles from her debut album, Arular, online. The album wasn’t out yet, but savvy web users could track the songs down with the help of blogs and file-sharing services.

The artist is known for putting heavy words to light music, but this is a far cry from songs about child soldiers and immigration politics. When you’ve been on the phone with tech support for several hours, you might start to see it as a sort of war, though.

M.I.A. was trying to get her broadband working when she decided mid-crisis that she should ask the support people to help her out with her music. “Ten phone calls later, I have Internet that sticks and a song,” she said.
Rolling Stone reports that the song actually features Filipino Verizon tech support workers singing the hook.

The album — which was made in collaboration with producer Blaqstarr — will be released this summer. If “Down Like Your Internet Connection” is the first single, it will probably hit several weeks earlier. “I Fight the Ones That Fight Me” is another revealed song, but the album itself still doesn’t have a name.

[via Switched]

Tags: album, blaqstarr, down like your internet connection, m.i.a., mia, music, single, tech support, verizon

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Google is struggling to provide adequate customer service for the Nexus One (aka Google phone), according to reports. The Google Mobile forums are brimming with unanswered queries and problems, as customers turn to Google itself for support.

One recurring issue in the forums is a problem with the phone either not switching to 3G or switching back and forth between 3G and EDGE too frequently — it’s not clear if this is a significant issue or if the complaints are just a symptom of Google’s less-than-stellar customer support.

InfoWorld writes of the concerns:

Google appears to be only accepting e-mail customer queries, to which it pledges to reply in one to two days — far too long, say most people who are complaining online.

Many people are also turning to T-Mobile and HTC, but getting little help there. T-Mobile is often referring people back to either Google or HTC for answers to questions. HTC is often referring people back to T-Mobile, according to complaints online.

Google appears to acknowledge the issue. Google Android lead Andy Rubin admitted in an interview at CES: “We have to get better at customer service.”

Tags: customer service, Google, nexus one, problems, support

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Previously on Fubiz

• Sony Australia Campaign
• Sony Make Believe
• Fred Perrot

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2010 is shaping up to be the year Ford SYNC forever alters how we experience digital content in our vehicles. Today, the automotive company is breaking even more ground with the news that the next evolution of SYNC will support third-party mobile applications. Get ready to stream Pandora and tweet hands-free in your Ford.

Ford is essentially paving the way for running SYNC-supported mobile applications in your car, courtesy of the Ford SYNC API. It will start with support for Pandora for streaming online music, Stitcher for listening to podcasts in your car, and OpenBeak for safe and hands-free tweeting while driving. The bottom line is that you’ll be able to wirelessly control your smartphone applications in your car via the SYNC system with voice commands and steering wheel buttons.

The remarkable development — scheduled for release in 2010 — is ground-breaking when it comes to technology made available in cars, and certainly outshines the $1,200 Pioneer device with Pandora support. It’s all made possible thanks to Ford’s SYNC API, which will spawn support for the apps mentioned above and also eventually create a much larger application ecosystem.

The development also marks the sophistication and evolution of mobile applications. It seems like a dream to envision all our favorite apps functioning in our cars, and yet it’s a reality that Ford is bringing courtesy of its SYNC system.

Tags: CES, CES 2010, ford, ford sync, music, pandora, trending

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Google has added preliminary support for extensions to Google Chrome for Mac, provided you’re willing to install and use the “dev channel” release of the browser.

If you’ve been using the Mac beta release from December 2009, you’ll need to manually download the dev-channel release. There is no automatic beta-to-dev upgrade option. Using the dev-channel release means you’ll potentially be dealing with more bugs and quirky behavior in Chrome, but in our testing the trade-off — having access to extensions — is well worth the occasional bug.

Downloading a separate .dmg file is a small technical hoop to jump through, but because the support for extensions is experimental, it’s only available to those willing to put in the effort to get it. Instructions are on the Chromium project site.

Of course, the currently available Chrome extensions are limited when compared to what Firefox users will be accustomed to, but at least Mac users finally have access to ad blockers (aka “ad hiders”) and other useful extensions like OpenID auto-fill for faster logins. Also new in the Mac dev-channel release is support for bookmark syncing across Chrome installations (which works regardless of which OS you’re using). Additionally, Chrome for Mac now supports favicon-only pinned tabs, which reduce your favorite tabs to just the favicon, saving considerable space in the tab menu bar.

Google has also released updates to the Windows and Linux dev channels. While both platforms get some welcome bug fixes, there are no major new features. If you’re running the dev channel on any platform you should be automatically updated to the latest release. If you’d like to switch from stable or beta to dev, head to the Google Chrome dev-channel page and grab a copy.

See Also:

• Chrome Extensions Are Cool, But They Can’t Match Firefox
• Chrome for Mac and Linux Is Here. Be Excited
• Mozilla’s JetPack Prepares to Take On Chrome Extensions

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Originally posted at The Download Blog

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The consulting firm discussed some of its research in advance of the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, which formally kicks off Jan. 7 in Las Vegas.

For starters, service contracts associated with technology products might seem like an area that cash-strapped consumers might forego in tough economic times. Yet some 49% of the vendors surveyed by Accenture said consumers had increased purchases of new service contracts during the downturn; 22% said sales hadn’t changed, and 18% said sales had declined. (The remainder said they don’t offer service contracts).

Realizing the need to keep customers happy, vendors have taken various steps to improve their service offerings to please customers, Accenture found. Yet customers weren’t particularly impressed; only about 9% of consumers surveyed thought service and support of their technology vendors had improved during the downturn.

Among those who did think their vendors’ service and support had improved, some 81% of survey respondents said they are more likely to continue doing business with those companies.

In general, Accenture has found, customers are more loyal to consumer-electronics companies’ service than their products. “If I buy a product and it doesn’t work and I get good service to fix it, I’m more loyal to the brand than if I don’t have to call customer support in the first place,” says Jean-Laurent Poitou, the global managing director of Accenture’s electronics and high-tech business group.

When it comes to technology products that have a service component–such as paying for Internet or wireless services to make gadgets useful–consumers tended to keep up spending during the downturn, even if hardware expenditures decline, Accenture found. “The service spending pattern is more resilient than spending on products,” Poitou says.

One counterintuitive finding in Accenture’s recent research that does not have to do with services: the firm’s surveys have found that consumers in emerging economies are more receptive to spending more money on “green,” environment-friendly products than those in mature economies where people are more affluent, Poitou says. The reasons may have to do with consumers in some countries getting an eye-witness view of some environmental harm, he suspects.

“Sometimes the consequences are more visible in these emerging markets,” Poitou says.

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As many others are doing, Google is reminiscing about the year that is almost over, and reflecting upon some of its accomplishments. The Custom Search Team specifically is reflecting on some of its highlights for 3009.

Google lists the following as key developments for the year in custom search:

• integration with several hosters to bring Custom Search to your doorstep
• enabled support for rich snippets, giving you more control over presentation of results
• it’s now easier for you to promote specific content to the top of your search results
• we deployed contextual search within Blogger, Google Sites and Wikipedia
• automatic transliteration is now integrated into the search box
• improved results rendering flexibility with the Custom Search Element
• plug-n-play with themes for enhanced customizability of results look and feel
• added support for structured metadata and the ability to restrict results by specific attributes
• we got you ready for the growing population of users searching your websites with mobile devices, such as Android phones, iPhone, iPod Touch, Palm Pre, etc.

Google promises additional metadata support in the new year, with more results customization and other features for Custom Search. With that in mind, it may be a good time to give Google you feedback, if you are a user of Custom Search. They’re openly requesting it.
 

Related Articles:

> Google Does Some New Things with Custom Search

> Google Launches Custom Search For Smartphones

> AdSense For Search, Custom Search Come Together

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I want to wish you all happy holidays and a great start in 2010. Furthermore this is a great opportunity for me to say thanks to you for all your support over the last year. You are incredible and I couldn’t have done it without you. While I started my freelance career after graduating in summer I did not write as much as I hoped. I can promise you however that this will change in 2010. I will use these festive days to come up with new ideas for freebies and tutorials.
So once again: Thanks for always being supportive and I hope you have a lovely time with your friends and family!

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Originally posted at Relevant Results

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Hot on the heels of last month’s 10.10 release, the web browser Opera has just issued a pre-alpha Opera Labs release of the upcoming Opera 10.5. The build is available for Windows and Mac users — with a Linux version coming later.

The big news is that the Opera 10.5 pre-alpha offers users a taste of Opera’s new JavaScript engine, known as Carakan. The next generation of browser wars will be all about JavaScript speed. Carakan for Windows is seven times faster at JavaScript than the Futhark engine used in Opera 10.10.

CSS3 and HTML5 Support Enhanced

Although speed is clearly the big focus with the 10.5 pre-alpha, the Opera Desktop team has also added support for CSS3 transitions and transforms, as well as more HTML5 support for stuff like persistent storage.

Opera’s CSS3 support is actually more advanced that what is currently being used in Safari 4 and in Google’s Chrome (I haven’t tested it against the WebKit nightlies). Namely, rounded corners with border-radius and the variations in box shadows are far more complex. Even CSS3 Transforms and Transitions — something that has been part of Google Chrome and Safari 4 for quite some time — is more advanced in Opera 10.5. You can check out all the new features here.

Opera will likely never be able to compete against the bigger names in the desktop browsing space, but by continuing to evolve and innovate, the browser and the team prove that they are worth keeping an eye on. Are you an Opera user? What do you think about the future of the desktop browser?

Tags: css3, opera, opera 10.5, web browsers

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Well, the Atlassian FishEye crew just popped up with a preview of side by side diffs in the browser and the looks great, similar to FileMerge and the like. Pete Moore takes us on a walk through:

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As we move forward with the Web and browsers become capable of rendering more advanced code, we gradually get closer to the goal of universal standards across all platforms and computers. Not only will we have to spend less time making sure our box model looks right in IE6, but we create an atmosphere ripe for innovation and free of hacks and heavy front-end scripting.

The Web is an extremely adaptive environment and is surrounded by a collaborative community with a wealth of knowledge to share. If we collectively want to be able to have rounded corners, we make it happen. If we want to have multiple background images, we make it happen. If we want border images, we make that happen, too. So desire is not the issue. If it was, we would all still be using tables to lay out our pages and using heavy over-the-top code. We all know that anything can be done on the Web.

Made for the Web

CSS 3 properties like border-radius, box-shadow, and text-shadow are starting to gain momentum in WebKit (Safari, Chrome, etc.) and Gecko (Firefox) browsers. They are already creating more lightweight pages and richer experiences for users, not to mention that they degrade pretty gracefully; but they are only the tip of the iceberg of what we can do with CSS 3.

In this article, we will take those properties a step further and explore transformations, transitions, and animations. We’ll go over the code itself, available support and some examples to show exactly how these new properties improve not only your designs but the overall user experience.

CSS Transformations

CSS transformations are a W3C oddity. It is the first time I have sat down to read the full specifications on something and didn’t feel like I had a handle on the subject afterward. The specs are written with the level of technical jargon you would expect from the W3C, but it focuses on the graphic (as in graph drawing) element of transformations and matrices. Having not dealt with a matrix since freshman-year Calculus, I had to do a lot of good old-fashioned browser testing and guessing and checking for this section.

After going through every tutorial I could find and too many browser tests to count, I came out with some useful information on CSS transformations that I think we can all benefit from.

transform();

The transform property allows for the kind of functions also allowed by SVG. It can be applied to both inline and block-level elements. It allows us to twist, zoom in on and move elements, all with one line of CSS.

One of the biggest complaints about cutting-edge design is that the text is not selectable. This is no longer a problem when you use the transform property to manipulate text, because it is pure CSS and so any text within the element remains selectable. This is a huge advantage of CSS over using an image (or background image).

Some interesting and useful transform functions (that are supported):

• rotate
  Rotate allow you to turn an object by passing a degree value through the function.
• scale
  Scale is a zooming function and can make any element larger. It takes positive and negative values as well as decimals.
• translate
  Translate essentially repositions an element based on X and Y coordinates.

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Rotate

The transform property has many uses, one of which is to rotate. Rotation turns an object based on a degree value and can be applied to both inline and block-level elements, It makes for a pretty cool effect.

#nav {
    -webkit-transform: rotate(-90deg);
    -moz-transform: rotate(-90deg);
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3);
    }

Support
Support for transform: rotate is surprisingly widespread. In the CSS snippet above, we directly target -webkit- and -moz- and rotate the #nav element by -90 degrees.

Pretty straightforward, right? The only problem is that the rotation is for a pretty important design element, and many designers will be reluctant to use it if Internet Explorer does not recognize it.

Luckily, IE has a filter for this: the image transform filter. It can take four rotation values: 0, 1, 2, and 3. You won’t get the same fine-grained control that comes with Webkit and Gecko, but your design will remain consistent across older browsers (even IE6).

Is it okay to use?
Yes, but make sure it is thoroughly tested.

Scale

Scaling does exactly what you think it would do: zoom in and out on an element. The scale function takes both width and height values, and those values can be positive, negative or decimals.

Positive values scale up the element, as you would expect, based on the width and height specified.

Negative values do not shrink the element, but rather reverse it (e.g. text is turned backwards) and then scaled accordingly. You can, however, use decimal values lower than 1 (e.g. .5) to shrink or zoom out of an element.

#nav {
/* The nav element width and height will double in size */
-webkit-transform: scale(2);
-moz-transform: scale(2);
}

#nav {
/* The nav element width will double in size, but the height will remain unchanged*/
-webkit-transform: scale(2, 1);
-moz-transform: scale(2, 1);
}

#nav {
/* The nav element width will double in size and flip horizontally,
but the height will remain unchanged */
-webkit-transform: scale(-2, 1);
-moz-transform: scale(-2, 1);
}

Support
The scale transformation is supported in Firefox, Safari and Chrome, but not any version of Internet Explorer (yet) as far as I could tell. Scaling an object is a fairly significant design choice, but it can be applied with progressive enhancement using :hover, which can add a little pop to your navigation especially.

#nav li a:hover{
/* This should make your navigation links zoom slightly on hover */
-webkit-transform: scale(1.1);
-moz-transform: scale(1.1);
}

Is it okay to use?
From time to time, yes. But not with critical design elements.

Translate

The name “translate” is a little misleading. It is actually a method of positioning elements using X and Y values.

It looks much the same as the other kinds of transformation but adds an extra dimension to your website.

#nav{
/* This will move the #nav element left 10 pixels and down 20 pixels. */
-moz-transform: translate(10px, 20px);
-webkit-transform: translate(10px, 20px);
}

Support
Translate is currently supported in Firefox, Safari and Chrome when you use the vender extensions -moz- and -webkit-.

Is it okay to use?
Yes, but normal X/Y positioning is just as effective in many situations.

Chaining Transformations

Transformations are great individually, but if you want multiple transformations, the code can pile up pretty quickly, especially with the vendor extensions. Luckily, we have some built-in shortcuts:

#nav{
-moz-transform: translate(10, 25);
-webkit-transform: translate(10, 25);
-moz-transform: rotate(90deg);
-webkit-transform: rotate(90deg);
-moz-transform: scale(2, 1);
-webkit-transform: scale(2, 1);
}

These transformations can be chained together to make your CSS more efficient:

#nav{
-moz-transform: translate(10, 25) rotate(90deg) scale(2, 1);
-webkit-transform: translate(10, 25) rotate(90deg) scale(2, 1);
}

The real power of these properties is in combining and chaining them. You can move, turn, zoom in on and manipulate any inline or block-level element without JavaScript. Once support for these properties becomes widespread, we’ll be able to build and design even richer and more lightweight interfaces and applications.

Transition

A basic transition refers to a CSS property that define and moves an element from its inactive state (e.g. dark-blue background) to its hover or active state (e.g. light-blue background).

Transitions can be coupled with transformations (and trigger events such as :hover or :focus) to create a kind of animation. Fading the background color, sliding a block and spinning an object can all be done with CSS transitions.

#nav a{
background-color:red;
}

#nav a:hover,
#nav a:focus{
background-color:blue;

/* tell the transition to apply to background-color (looks like a CSS variable, doesn't it? #foreshadowing)*/
-webkit-transition-property:background-color;

/* make it 2 seconds long */
-webkit-transition-duration:2s;
}

Support
As cool as the transition property is, support is limited to WebKit browsers. Firefox does not support it right now, but it’s safe to assume that it is right behind WebKit on this. So you may as well add -moz-transition to your CSS for future enhancements. And even a version without a vendor extension, just in case.

Is it okay to use?
For subtle enhancements, yes, but not for dramatic effects.

Animation

Animations are where the real action in CSS 3 is. You can combine all of the elements we’ve talked about above with animation properties like animation-duration, animation-name and animation-timing-function to create Flash-like animations with pure CSS.

#rotate {
margin: 0 auto;
width: 600px;
height: 400px;

/* Ensures we're in 3-D space */
-webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;

/*
Make the whole set of rows use the x-axis spin animation
for a duration of 7 seconds, running infinitely and linearly.
*/

-webkit-animation-name: x-spin;
-webkit-animation-duration: 7s;
-webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
-webkit-animation-timing-function: linear;
}

/* Defining the animation to be called. */
@-webkit-keyframes x-spin {
   0%    { -webkit-transform: rotateX(0deg); }
   50%   { -webkit-transform: rotateX(180deg); }
   100%  { -webkit-transform: rotateX(360deg); }
}

All this fantastic CSS animation code and a live example can be found at CSS3.info The demo is viewable in any browser, but the animation works only in the nightly build of WebKit. It looks just like the video above, but it’s worth installing WebKit to see it for yourself (it’s pretty awesome).

Support
There is, unfortunately, almost no support for CSS animations yet. To even experiment with them, you have to download the nightly build of WebKit. This is the first indication of CSS as a true programming language and a huge step towards not only Flash independence but super-usability and large-scale accessibility across the Web.

Conclusion

Right now, JavaScript bridges the gap until CSS 3 comes into full effect. Unfortunately, getting full browser support for these great properties will be a long journey. Until that day comes, we can take advantage of some serious progressive enhancement and rely on JavaScript to enhance our websites and applications. That’s not a bad thing; just how it is at the moment.

With the recent announcement of IE9, I wouldn’t be surprised if the IE team include some of these properties in the new version of the browser especially since talks for CSS3 integration have already begun (border-radius).

The future of the Web is bright, especially with these highly experimental properties such as animation. Although many of the properties are not usable for client or high-level production work, they sure are fun to play with! We can all look forward to the day when we have support across the board to build some really great lightweight applications.

References And Resources

• A Crash Course in Advanced CSS3 Effects
  Net Tuts put out a great screencast on a lot of cool CSS 3 effects.
• Webkit Announces Support for CSS 3D Transforms
  CSS3.info has a great demo of CSS 3 animations that are supported by the nightly build of WebKit.
• Jonathan Snook on CSS Text Rotation
  Jonathan Snook tackles this up-and-coming CSS3 property.
• DEV Camp CSS3 Tricks
  A slideshow presentation by Dan Kurtz.
• W3C Spec on 2-D Transformations
  A resource specifically about 2-D transformations.
• W3C Spec on 3-D Transformations
  A resource specifically about 3-D transformations.
• W3C Spec on CSS3 Animations
  The W3C working draft specifications for CSS animations.

(al)

© Tim Wright for Smashing Magazine, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: animation, behavioral, CSS

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Our sponsors are essential for keeping Creative Nerds growing bigger and better.  This is our December edition of our thank you to our valued sponsors for their support through out December, Featuring the useful services which each sponsor has to offer for our readers.

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Creative Nerds has thousands of visitors each day and one of the main perks of becoming one of our sponsors is that your company or product will be noticed by thousands of people each month. Each Month we write a post dedicated to our sponsors thanking them for their support, making our readers aware of our sponsors and chance for our readers to learn a bit more about sponsors.

Heart Internet

Heart Internet’s Reseller Professional account is every Internet professional’s dream. Specially tailored for web designers, Internet integrators, web hosting resellers and developers, our Reseller package includes unlimited web space, unlimited bandwidth and the ability to host unlimited domains at no extra charge!

ForeUI

ForeUI is a handy UI prototyping tool. It can rapidly create static or interactive, skinnable UI prototypes of your website or software. You can use ForeUI to:

Create mock-up for the GUI in your mind and make others understand quickly. Make working prototype of website or software to collect feedback from potential users. Perform usability testing before releasing the beta version. Generate the schematics that can be inserted in the design documents.

PSD To Html

RapidxHTML is a small team of designers and developers, with a wide range of skills and experience. Each of us know our strengths and weaknesses and how these fit into the big picture.

They came together with one simple objective to offer professional XHTML / CSS markup services at affordable price. We combine expertise in eye-catching graphic layout with modern web design standards built into one of the most powerful systems in the world.

Premium WordPress Themes

Premium WordPress Themes Club! Are developing professional wordpress themes and provide efficient support of our templates. Join the club and choose the membership that suits your needs. We are proud to invite you to the best wordpress themes club and provide you with the full access to all our themes, as well as tutorials, support and the community forum.

Bounce web Premium Hosting

Bounceweb, a shared web hosting and reseller hosting provider, will provide solutions to your needs. We are a hosting provider specialized in Linux Web hosting, and our main services are: cpanel web hosting, reseller hosting and domain registration.

Instant Flip book

Convert your PDF brochures, newsletters & catalogues into Digital Flash Flipbooks in seconds! Unlike many other services, you actually get the page flip files instead of just a link to a hosted version. Add it on your website, put it on an USB-stick or what about reselling it with profit to a client. There’s no link to us so set your profit margin and sell!

Digital Product Delivery

Each day, thousands of vendors use DPD to automatically sell downloads and deliver their digital products to customers. Integrating with PayPal and other popular payment processors, DPD is the quick and easy way to set up your products for automated selling.

Stockvault

Stockvault.net is a stock photo sharing website where designers and photographers can meet to share their images. You don’t have to sign up to be able to download our images, but we’d like you to do so anyway, just so you can gain access to our special features. All images on this site are free for personal and non-commercial usage.

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Sanjiv Jivan has released Smart GWT 2.0, a big release for the project.

The core updates are:

GWT 2.0 support

Smart GWT supports GWT 2.0 and continues to remain compatible with GWT 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7. This release is a drop-in upgrade for users of earlier versions of Smart GWT. The API’s of Smart GWT have been very stable and as a result there will be no upgrade cost or migration effort for users upgrading to Smart GWT 2.0

New Enterprise Blue theme and significantly improved Enterprise Gray theme

These themes now closely follow the Vista UI specification and guidelines. Incorporating the new theme is as simple as inheriting the new EnterpriseBlue theme module and does not require any other changes.

And other features include:

• Drop-in upgrade with no upgrade or migration effort
• Multi-Column sort support
• Grid Row Expansion support for
  • memo rows
  • detail views
  • nested editable form
  • nested editable grid (useful for representing 1-many relationships)
  • any custom embedded component
• Collection of standard Window icons, picker icons and transfer buttons as part of every theme
• Improved Showcase demo with ability to search for samples by keyword. Added several new samples
• Various other enhancements like Date field masks, improved IE 8 and Safari strict mode support.

To see the breadth of the project, make sure to check out the showcase which is very deep indeed. Nice work guys!

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Of course, browser support is still somewhat limited in “the real world,” so it’ll be some time before you can begin using them heavily in your daily work. But if you’d like to jumpstart your understanding of CSS 3, the 24 Ways blog has a nice tutorial on manipulating images using CSS 3’s transform properties.

The article tackles mainly WebKit-based transforms, though if you’re using nightly builds of Firefox 3.7, the -moz-transform code will work as well.

Obviously, Internet Explorer won’t be able to render any of these CSS rules, so you’ll want to make sure the effects degrade for browsers that don’t understand CSS 3. For example, the first demo in the tutorial simply rotates an image and applies a drop shadow. Browsers that don’t understand the CSS would simply display the image without the rotation or shadow — not ideal, but workable.

The other possibility would be to include some JavaScript for less-capable browsers, but that defeats much of the purpose of CSS 3 — making complex transforms quick and simple.

Another point worth mentioning is that the box-shadow rule has actually been dropped from the CSS 3 spec due to time constraints. Most likely it will be resurrected as drop-shadow, or something similar, but the change is still in the discussion stage so you might want to hold off using box-shadow for now.

Be sure to dig around the rest of the 24 Ways site, which is a bit like an advent calendar for web designers. We’ve featured 24 Ways tutorials in the past and, so far, this year’s offering look to be every bit as useful as those from years past.

See Also:

• Complex Web Layouts Made Easy With New CSS3 ‘Flexible Box Model’
• Solving Internet Explorer’s PNG Shortcomings with JavaScript
• Microformats are Awesome, Now Put Them to Work for Your Site

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Quickly answer support tickets using predefined replies & self service knowledgebase.

Manage Support Tickets:

• Convert support emails to tickets instantly
• Keep track of customer issues threaded form
• Reply with a predefined message for every frequently raised issue
• Reply directly from your email

Create Knowledge Base:

• Easily generate searchable knowledebase articles
• Provide self-service client support portal
• Create tutorials, manuals, troubleshooters and more
• Support Sidebar (exclusive) on your website

http://www.h2desk.com/

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Web Sockets

First up, we have Web Socket support being turned on by default on the developer channel. If you want to be a really cool JS h4x0r you should write a server app using node.js. If you want it to work on older browsers, try out the old favourite shim tale of use Flash to degrade, and Mozilla support should be coming soon and surely IE9 will support it too

Now you can code like this:

Chrome Extensions Beta

Although I curse at the weak support on Chrome Mac (coming by end of week though!), other Chromers can use the new beta extension system pioneered by the awesome Aaron Boodman and team:

Today, we’re really happy to release a beta of extensions that begins to deliver on our initial vision. Extensions are as easy to create as webpages. Users can install and uninstall them quickly without restart, and extensions have a great polished look that fits in with Google Chrome’s minimalist aesthetic. When developers upload an extension it is available to users immediately, with limited restrictions and manual reviews only in a few situations.

On the technical side, we’ve been able to use Google Chrome’s multiprocess architecture to help keep extensions stable and safe. And Chromium’s extensive performance monitoring infrastructure has helped us ensure extensions affect Google Chrome’s speed as little as possible. You can learn more details about the internals of our system in the videos below.

I am excited about the new extension systems of Chrome and Jetpack, and wrote up thoughts on how we are jumping out of the page and into the runtime as Web developers.

rel=”noreferrer” and target=”_blank”

I missed the fact that in Chrome you can opt-in to a new process from a link. This is important as every tab is NOT necessarily in its own process. People assume that is the case (a one to one mapping) but it isn’t (and has interesting security implications):

In many cases, though, Google Chrome needs to keep pages from related tabs in the same process, since they may access each other’s contents using JavaScript code. For example, clicking links that open in a new window will generally cause the new and old pages to share a process.

In practice, web developers may find situations where they would like links to other pages to open in a separate process. As one example, links from messages in your webmail client would be nice to isolate from the webmail client itself. This is easy to achieve now, thanks to new support in WebKit for HTML5′s “noreferrer” link relation.

To cause a link to open in a separate process from your web page, just add rel=”noreferrer” and target=”_blank” as attributes to the tag, and then point it at a URL on a different domain name. For example:

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Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on A busy Chrome week: Extensions, Web Sockets, and more

Originally posted at The Download Blog

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And web companies everywhere are recognizing that Tender is a leader in this area. Read on to learn more and for how to win a membership of your own to this great tool.

About Tender

The team at entp have done a great job differentiating themselves from the competition with their support based tool Tender. The describe the application as so:

Tender Support organizes your customer care so you can focus on delivering the best service possible.

Tender works by funnelling support requests to your Tender site. If clients contact you via email or the web form, the requests all sit one inbox for you. This streamlines your process and makes it easier for you to respond quickly and appropriately.

Streamline your support and keep your clients happy.

Add to this all the features of the app and it’s easy to see why so many teams are using this tool to manage their support. Tender includes a well designed knowledge base component, allowing your users to answer many of their questions on their own. As well, the app can be customized to match your company’s branding.

How to Enter

So, here’s your chance to win one of 3 Plus memberships to this great tool. How do you win today? Leave a comment and mention what application or service you and your team manage. And include how you currently do support. The winners will be announced at the end of the day!

And a big congratulations to our winners from Day 8 — enjoy Lovely Charts guys.

And Over at Mac.AppStorm: CleanMyMac & MacHider

Don’t forget to check out what’s going on over at Mac.AppStorm! Today they’re giving away a few copies of CleanMyMac & MacHider.

CleanMyMac is a sophisticated all-in-one-suite utility that helps keep your Mac clean and healthy. MacHider is an innovative product intended to put your confidential information out of sight of third parties or other unwanted eyes.

Read more and enter the competition

Come Back for Day 10

It doesn’t stop here. The giving continues each day until our grand finale on the 24th. Tune in each day for the newest prize and keep up to date with our RSS feed or Twitter account.

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Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on Christmas Giveaway Day 9: Tender

Originally posted at The Web Services Report

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PhoneGap API’s available to Palm devices include geolocation, accelerometer, notification, orientation, sms, telephony, network, file (read only), and a limited selection of device properties (see the PhoneGap Mobile Spec running on the Palm Emulator to the left).

Essentially a JavaScript shim that maps to the various mobile APIs, the PhoneGap API & suite of tools makes it much easier to build mobile apps for the iPhone, Google Android and various versions of Blackberry by leveraging standard web-based technologies. You can now add Palm to the list of mobile devices being supported by the PhoneGap project.

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Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on PhoneGap Updated to Support Palm webOS Apps

• New Platform: bBlog, though it had served me well, was no longer being updated. The version I was running was hideously out of date, fairly bloated, and a pain to maintain by the end. It was also causing problems for the VPS it was running on.
• New Host: The site was outgrowing the JaguarPC VPS it was on, and was suffering downtime. I wanted more control over my own hosting and an opportunity to learn more about hosting my own site. So a self-managed VPS was on the list.
• New Design: The old design was thrown together pretty quickly after the incident with the trademark police. I wanted something brighter, cleaner and more spacious.

In no particular order, here are a few useful (hopefully) tricks I learned along the way:

HTML 5

The site uses HTML 5, at least in a basic fashion – <header> tags, that sort of thing. I like a lot of what HTML 5 promises, but so far I’m not sure what the advantages are to you, the reader. Semantic improvement is great, but many of the advantages of HTML 5 seem to be in areas that I just won’t be using – audio, video etc.

Hosting

There are a bajillion hosts offering everything under the sun to anyone with a dollar to their name. The small print for each is, it seems, a bit of a minefield. What’s the point in offering unlimited bandwidth when CPU usage is capped at such a low level that 6 people visiting on the same day will put you over the limit?

Equally, what’s the point of hiring support people without basic technical hosting knowledge? In the course of my regular work, I’ve encountered support staff at one major international host who told me that it was normal for a site to go offline for three days while it was moved from shared hosting to a VPS. Three days to move an ecommerce site? Normal? Last time I had a site moved by a host it happened in off hours, cost nothing and there was no downtime. The same support staff have told me that it is impossible to host a site with one company and the DNS with another.

I’m in danger of veering off into ranty territory here, so I’ll pull myself back from the bring and leave you with what I’ve taken away from the experience. That being that there is an unholy triangle for web hosting – you want a cheap price, high capacity and great support? Pick two.

Ultimately, I’ve gone the self-managed route (with Slicehost) for a couple of reasons. First, hosting management is something I dabble with occasionally when a client requires it, but my knowledge is spartan at best and I can increase my own value to an employer if I bring server management skills and experience to the table. Second, I wanted to be forced to fix my own mistakes. When something breaks now, I’m not going to be able to simply file a support ticket and have it fixed. Baptism by fire.

Typography

I’m lucky enough to work with some great designers at GSBA, and have been picking up little bits and pieces along the way. One thing that I have come to realise is that adjusting typography is a neverending mission. One minute you’re playing with line heights and word spacing … the next you’re worrying about orphans and adjusting margins to line up letter stems.

You’re Awesome

Within a couple of hours of launching the new site I had a collection of emails from people pointing out problems. And these were good bug reports – including a URL, an explanation of what they saw … sometimes a screenshot. Made replicating and fixing problems a doddle. So thanks!

Character Sets Can Ruin You

The old site’s database stored data in ISO-8859-1. The data was actually UTF-8. PHP was running as ISO-8859-1. The site was rendered as UTF-8. I think. I’m still not entirely sure. Moving that data to a system running entirely as UTF-8 was a painful experience. Character sets can be a nightmare, especially when you’re setting things up yourself. Pick one and stick with it, for everything. One day, when I can bring myself to (or am forced to) revisit the problems I had with this, I’ll write up what I learned and how I got things working.

Listen to Other People

Especially when they tell you that when you’re working on your IP tables configuration, it’s important not to log out until you’ve verified everything works. Because if you log out before you check and something’s broken, you cannot get back in. Tough lesson, that one. Which brings me to …

Backup from the Beginning

Seriously, it’s never, ever too early. If you start out by grabbing snapshots and organising them effectively, you’ll be much more likely to be in a position to revert a bad change. With self-managed hosting in particular it is very easy to rush a change that looks innocuous but ends with it utterly destroying everything you’ve worked on so far.

Separation is Good

I moved my email to Google Apps a couple of years ago (and it’s been great so far). I dread to think how complicated this would have been if I’d kept my email at the same place as the site. Having the email handled elsewhere hugely reduced the work involved in moving things around. Same with the DNS – it’s entirely separate from everything else. The move involved just changing A records around – minimal risk and easy to reset.

Launching Feels Good

It feels good, but nerve-wracking, to press the button and make a move. It feels even better when, a few days later, you haven’t had to revert the entire process.

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Today I would like to thank all our sponsors for their support to 2ExpertsDesign month after month. Please take a little of your time to check their awesome services.

2ExpertsDesign has in the Month of Nov, 2009 154,500 Page Loads, 114,943 Unique Visitors & 98,277 First Time Visitors.

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ElegantThemes: Each WordPress theme comes expertly coded in valid XHTML and CSS, and all are made compatible with the latest version of WordPress. I make sure that each template performs flawlessly in each of the most widely used browsers to ensure maximum functionality. Furthermore, all sidebars are made widget ready for your convenience. You get unlimited access to all elegant themes for $19.95

LearnPhotoshopVideos: is the official website of my strategic video tutorial system: Graphics Champ. I have created an easy-to-follow method that will give you the skills you need to design anything you want. That’s right- I’ll give you the skills you need to design websites, album covers, T-shirts, download buttons, banners, flyers, ecovers, and you will learn FAST! Once you try my time-tested formula, you’ll experience the Graphics Champ difference. Try it today- IT’S POWERFUL!

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We work from your source files: Adobe Illustrator (ai), Adobe Photoshop (psd), Adobe Fireworks (png), or even from existing sites to the following specifications: W3C Valid (X)HTML (both transitional and strict) and W3C Valid HTML 4.01. Making sure at every step that the site is completely optimized for search engine performance and render/load speed.

VivaThemes: We create quality and professionally designed wordpress themes. We offer themes for your business, blog or personal sites. All of that comes with our excellent free support.

We are also thankful to those advertisers who purchased favicon ads.

Do you want us to say Thank You in this special way? So help us to help you!

Become one of our sponsors and get your site noticed by our readers.

2ExpertsDesign has thousands of visitors each day and one of the main perks of becoming one of our sponsors  is that your company or product will be noticed by thousands of people each month. Each Month we write a post dedicated to our sponsors thanking them for their support making our readers aware of our sponsors and chance for our reader to learn a bit more about who and what are sponsor.

You can visit our buyandsell (BSA) ads page to become a sponsor and find out current sponsor spots which we currently have available on 2ExpertsDesign.

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CodeRun features native support for C#/.NET (3.5), PHP (5.1), JavaScript, HTML and CSS. C# support includes ASP.NET, WCF, Silverlight and WPF browser application development and deployment. Database support includes SQL Server 2005 and Amazon SimpleDB. This means you do not have to learn anything new in order to begin working with CodeRun. Simply upload you existing code, or start from one of the built-in templates.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.coderun.com/ide/
License: License Free

Sponsors

Pixmac: Stock Photos, Royalty Free Pictures and Images

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For those of you viewing Mashable stories on the iPhone, Droid, Palm Pre and a host of other phones, we’re pleased to announce that Mashable’s new mobile site went live today.

With a growing number of Mashable readers visiting from the iPhone – by far the most popular device among our readers – we’ve focused on making Mashable load fast and look great on iPhone screens. But we’ve also supported as many smartphones as possible, while there’s a WAP-based theme for WAP browsers.

All this works automagically: just visit Mashable stories on your phone and we’ll serve up the best version for you. One caveat: we’re still working on the best solution for those using the BlackBerry, and we’ll roll out support for you guys as soon as we can. If you’re still seeing the old site on your handset, meanwhile, let us know and we’ll aim to add support if possible.

Special thanks to our friends at nclud for their development time on this project!

Tags: mashable, Mobile 2.0

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The next big revision of HTML, HTML5, is on the horizon, promising a whole host of new conveniences, including offline support for popular Web applications–something you’re already familiar with if you’re using the Google Gears browser add-on.

In a statement to the L.A. Times via email, a Google spokesperson confirmed that Google is shifting its focus away from Gears toward HTML5, and encourages developers to do so, too. This means that while they’re looking forward to a time when users can enjoy an offline-supported Web experience courtesy of HTML5, they’re “letting the sun set on its Gears project.”

Part of the shift in focus pertains to Google’s Chrome browser. While Google Chrome for PC includes Gears, the Mac version (which should be released any day now) won’t support the program. Apparently, there were technical issues that would make using Gears in Chrome for Mac problematic, especially since Gears isn’t compatible with the Snow Leopard operating system.

The following is the original statement from Google, as well as a subsequent assertion made after the L.A. Times published their story:

“We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites.”

“We’re continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it’s a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers.”

Bottom line: Google Gears will continue to work for existing PC users, but Mac users running Snow Leopard may not get offline support for Web applications until HTML5 makes it debut. The article does point out, however, that Apple software developer David Hyatt is also an editor on the HTML5 specification, so there is an expectation that HTML5 could be made available to Mac browsers before the new language is even finalized.

Image from justinsomnia on Flickr

Tags: apple, David Hyatt, google gears, HTML5, LA Times, mac, pc

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Ever since Twitter Lists started rolling out to all users, there has been a big race to add the feature to all the popular Twitter clients.

Web apps and Adobe Air-based apps got in on the action first and some native-platform clients are also on-board, but what about the platform that is responsible for much of Twitter’s explosive growth: mobile?

It has taken some time, but now Twitter List support is making its way into some iPhone apps. Just yesterday, Twittelator Pro (iTunes link) pushed out List support and very soon that same feature will be available to Tweetie 2 (iTunes Link) users.

When we first previewed Tweetie 2 at the end of September, many of Twitter’s newest features, like native support for retweets and geolocation support, were still being implemented into the system. Twitter Lists were officially announced a few weeks after Tweetie 2 hit the App Store and its developer Loren Brichter got to work right away.

The next update to Tweetie 2 won’t just bring Lists support, it will also add some enhancements to the Retweet functionality as well as some other UI enhancements and tweaks.

Twitter Lists in Tweetie 2

Lists support is a big deal and thus far, it looks like Tweetie 2 for the iPhone handles the process in a very robust and intuitive way. When you click on the “More” tab in Tweetie 2, you are now presented with a listing of every list you subscribe to (whether you created it or just subscribe to it), making it easy to view the contents of that list with one click.

You can view the details of the list, including the owner, how many people the list follows and how many people follow the list and you also have the option to share that list with others. As of right now, there isn’t a way to view a listing of who is on that list within Tweetie 2, but I imagine that feature will become available if the API opens up.

You can also create a new list directly from your More tab. Clicking on “New List” brings up a screen that lets you choose a title, description and whether you want the list to be public or private.

After you create a list, you can add users to it by going to their profile page and then selecting “Manage Memberships.” At this point, you can add them to any of your own lists by clicking on its title. If you want to remove someone from a list, just click on the list name to remove the checkmark.

As with viewing list memberships, all you can do right now when managing your own lists is delete the list, change the name or description or alter the privacy level. It would be nice to have the ability to bulk uncheck users, but I imagine there are API limits to that. Maybe in the future.

Finding new lists to follow is pretty intuitive. Visit a users profile page and you can see what lists they have created. Click on a list to view it, and then click the follow link.

If you view your own profile in Tweetie 2, you are given the option to see your own lists, lists you follow and lists that follow you.

Retweets

Twitter’s native retweeting feature was implemented in many of the beta versions of Tweetie 2, but was disabled in the first shipping version because the feature hadn’t been rolled out extensively. Now that the new Retweeet system is in full effect, it’s back in Tweetie 2. When you view your profile, you now have an option to view your retweets, retweets by others, and even your tweets, retweeted.

It’s a nice way to monitor what is going on.

Coming Soon

Tweetie 2.1 should be submitted to the App Store soon and after that, it’s only a matter of time before you see it available for use on your own iPhone.

Twitter Lists offer a unique challenge for Twitter clients because it works against the number of API calls that a user is allowed to have within a certain period of time. As such, expect to see some timeouts and limitations if you are a heavy list user until some of these details can be sorted out.

What do you think about Twitter Lists and how they are being implemented across Twitter clients? Are you excited about the Tweetie 2 update? Let us know!

Tags: iphone, tweetie, tweetie 2, twitter, Twitter Lists

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Samsung have introduced a new, upgraded version of its Samsung STORY Station in the form of the Samsung STORY Station Plus which, along with offering the same USB 2.0 interface as its predecessor, additionally boasts eSATA support offering enhanced data transfer rates.
(…)
Read the rest of Samsung STORY Station Plus [Samsung STORY Station Plus External HDD Boasts eSATA Support, Offers up to 2TB Capacity]

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Can We Do ARIA Today?

Yes.

Firefox and IE (he didn’t say which version) have really good support for ARIA. And Opera, Chrome, and Safari. Likewise for the screenreaders – JAWS, Windows Eyes, NVDA – also have good support. An the libraries – YUI, Dojo, JQuery-UI – all have good support baked in, one of the benefits of using ARIA is automatic support.

Improving Perception – ARIA and Screenreaders

Websites can have problems in perception when rendered with a screenreader; it’s hard to get the big picture about what the words refer to. With ARIA, we can close the gap in perception. This is another example of progressive enhancement – augment the item by adding properties, markup or Javascript if required:

Improving Usability – Keyboard Focus, ARIA, and YUI support

Keyboard access. For some people, it’s a necessity, and for others it’s still an option or preference (think Vim). To support it, you must be able to tab to the element to get focus, so you should control tabbing with tabindex. A good application of controlling tabbing is, amazingly enough, moving through tabs. Another is modal dialogs; the browser doesn’t “know” it’s modal, so we have to control focus to make sure it doesn’t slip out of the thing that’s the only thing users should be able to click on!

Todd shows us just how many steps are required to perform a task in a complex application like Yahoo! mail, using just tabs to navigate through – 19 steps in this example, walking through the toolbar; and even more, when you consider the wider picture of entering the app in the first place. To help with this, he introduces a pattern whereby tabIndexes are updated dynamically to control what comes next, as you move through a toolbar. A negative tabIndex will ensure the element is skipped over.

You can also use the “focus” pseudoclass to ensure focus appearance is consistent for all elements. But, and it’s a big one, it’s not very well supported; even IE8 doesn’t support :focus on <a>, for example. Doing it manually with Javascript has problems, in particular performance. Fortunately, PPK has worked out how to handle focus and blur with event delegation, so that it’s much more performant, and the resulting technique is built into YUI3.

Device-independence with markup was also advocated to further improve accessibility:

Improving Discoverability – ARIA

Essentially, this is about “random access” and keyboard shortcuts; jumping straight to areas in this page and activating them. The key ARIA feature here is “landmark roles” to identify particular points on the page. This is still something where users aren’t aware of the feature, and Todd points out it’s not surprising as most screen reader users are self-taught (just under 75% according to the study he showed). Also, not every user is a geek, and the same applies to screen-reader users.

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In the month or so since Twitter started rolling out its Twitter Lists feature, a number of web and Adobe AIR based clients have added support for it.

However, we haven’t seen any native Twitter apps support Lists. Today Realmac Software released Socialite Beta 3 for Mac OS X, including, among other enhancements — basic list support. Realmac acquired Socialite (then named EventBox) back in October and expects to release the first version of the program by the end of the month.

Socialite is a multi-purpose social media client, and like Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck and Brizzly, it lets you track and update your Facebook and Twitter accounts. But Socialite goes a little further — adding support for Google Reader, Flickr, Digg and even RSS feeds.

The nice thing about Socialite is that it is a native Mac OS X app, which means it runs faster and has better performance and stability than some of the other multi-service clients. In Socialite 1.0, Beta 3, Realmac has fixed some bugs, changed how some of the authorization system works and added some new features.

The biggest new feature is support for reading Twitter Lists. Right now you only have the ability to watch lists that you’ve created because the Twitter API doesn’t let developers access all subscribed lists. If that changes in the future, Realmac will update List support accordingly. For version 1.0, Socialite won’t have the ability to add or edit your own lists, but that’s something the team is working on for future releases. Finally, although not in Beta 3, Retweet support (as Twitter officially supports it) is due in the final release of Socialite 1.0.

You can try out Socialite for free right now if you have Mac OS X 10.5 or Mac OS X 10.6. The program has come along way in just the last six or seven weeks and we look forward to seeing what else the app brings.

What do you think about the state of list and retweet support in different Twitter clients? Let us know!

ALSO: Be sure to check out Mashable’s Lists on Twitter!

Tags: realmac, Socialite, twitter, Twitter Lists

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That sounds like good news, right? After all, IE8 has its moments, but it isn’t exactly a cutting-edge browser. Certainly, any improvement would seem welcome.

Yet, judging by the reaction from the web-development community on Microsoft’s IEBlog, you’d think Microsoft just announced the release of a major virus.

To understand why web developers — and even ordinary users — aren’t particularly thrilled with this early preview of IE9, we need to start by taking a look at IE8’s shortcomings:

• Speed — This is all that matters for the average user, and all of IE8’s competitors are faster, something even Microsoft doesn’t deny.
• Emerging standards — Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera have all begun implementing support for HTML5 and CSS 3, while IE8 has not. As more and more web apps take advantage of HTML5 tools, IE is in danger of becoming a second-class citizen on the web.
• Web apps — In addition to lagging in overall page-rendering speed, IE8 is well behind the competition when it comes to JavaScript performance. Though Microsoft has been quick to challenge the relevance of JavaScript benchmarks, regular users of Gmail, Facebook and other JavaScript-heavy web apps do not.

Now let’s take a look at what improvements Microsoft is planning to make in IE9.

Speed

The first item of business on the IEBlog post is IE9’s speed improvements. There are two basic elements, page-rendering times (including JavaScript improvements) and a proposed hardware-acceleration layer that hands off complex rendering tasks to the graphics card.

After a rather lengthy treatise on why JavaScript benchmarks aren’t really an accurate measure of page-load speed, Microsoft goes on to tout IE9’s improved JavaScript performance. Microsoft offers a graph of IE9 running the SunSpider JavaScript test, a common way of measuring JavaScript performance.

The results are split over two graphs, one with IE8 versus the browsers its competitors are currently shipping,  and the other charting IE9 against other experimental builds.

However, what’s really interesting is combining the two graphs. Doing so shows IE9’s JavaScript speed is roughly on par with Firefox 3.5, but still much slower than Safari 4 and Chrome 3.

Microsoft’s chart showing JavaScript rendering speeds in various browsers. Shorter bars are better.

Why advertise the fact the latest and greatest builds of Internet Explorer still can’t beat the actual shipping versions of the competition? Frankly, we’re not sure. But we assume Microsoft plans to continue improving IE9 before it finally ships. Unfortunately for IE9, we assume Mozilla, Apple and Google plan to do the same with their experimental builds.

And that cuts to heart of why developers and anyone with an interest in the using the web of the future today has long since lost faith in Internet Explorer: The competition continues to deliver improvements at a pace that far outstrips Internet Explorer.

Standards and HTML5

While speed is probably the most obvious and important feature of a web browser, the faster development time of IE’s competitors also means they are able to add new, experimental features long before IE.

That’s why Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome already have support for large portions of HTML5 and CSS 3, while IE 8 has next to none.

IE8 saw Microsoft catching up and finally getting the basics of HTML 4.x and CSS 2.1 right (we’ll overlook IE8’s lack of support for CSS pseudo element syntax), but unfortunately for IE8, the web is already moving on to HTML5 and CSS 3.

The good news is that IE9 will finally support most of CSS 3. There’s a screenshot on the IEBlog that appears to show IE9 rendering 41 out of 43 selectors in the CSS 3 selector test.

That’s great news for web developers, because it means less work building standards-based websites — provided IE9 delivers on this front.

However, when it comes to HTML5 support, IE9 appears decidedly less progressive. Microsoft appears to be sticking to its rather hard line on HTML5 — it’s not an official recommendation, so we’re not going to build support for it until it is.

While Microsoft is technically right about HTML5 (it is expected to become a recommendation in about a year), the truth is the web moves at the speed of the people actually building and using it, not the speed of recommendations from the W3C. At this rate, the lack of HTML5 support is looking more and more like Internet Explorer’s death knell.

The IEBlog does mention the HTML5 storage API, which was included in IE8, but ignores other elements already enjoying support in IE’s competition. For example, there’s no mention of HTML5’s audio, video or canvas tags, nor is there any discussion of the Geolocation API, Web Workers or SVG tools.

The thing to remember is that HTML5 support isn’t just a question of making web developers happy. If Microsoft wants IE to continue to be relevant to the future of the web, it’s going to have to step up its HTML5 support. The lack of support for the emerging standard gives Google a great way to attack IE — simply build sites that don’t work in IE and offer a link to download Chrome Frame.

That’s exactly what happens if you try logging into Google Wave with IE8. Clearly, Google and others are planning to use HTML5 with or without IE at the party. The short story, from what Microsoft has revealed thus far, is that IE9’s standards support will be catching up to where Firefox, Safari and Opera were two or three years ago.

Other Features

The IEBlog also touts the fact that IE9 will use Windows’ DirectX APIs to move graphics and text rendering from the CPU to the graphics card using Direct2D and DirectWrite. That means that IE 9 should be faster at rendering pages, particularly on PCs that have more-powerful graphics cards.

Of course, once again, the competition is already moving in the same direction. In most cases, the other browsers are using WebGL, which handles not just 2-D rendering, but also 3-D as well.

The IEBlog also touts IE9’s improved text-handling with sub-pixel positioning and much better anti-aliasing. Again, nice to see IE9 catching up with the competition.

Conclusion

Microsoft needs to hit a home run with IE9, or the IE franchise is going to go the way of Geocities. Unfortunately, based on what Microsoft has shown so far, IE9 looks to be a base hit at best. Certainly IE 9 will be good news on several fronts, notably the speed improvements and the increased CSS 3 support. But once again IE is catching up, not leading the way as it once did.

The typical rebuttal to IE’s shortcomings is that it doesn’t matter — IE still maintains a dominant market share, and will continue to do so, because it ships alongside Windows on new computers. It’s true that IE controls a majority share of the web. Microsoft got that majority because it bested the competition. Keep in mind that IE’s majority share used to be much, much larger, and it continues to slip with every passing month.

While we’re sure there are plenty of people who would love to dance on IE’s grave, the truth is that competition is a good thing. We want to see Microsoft make a better browser. Sadly, thus far, IE9 doesn’t look very competitive.

See Also:

• A Brave New Web Will Be Here Soon, But Browsers Must Improve
• Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5

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Twitter announced it would be adding locations to your tweets back in August, and they’ve been making changes to their API to enable the functionality since late September. The geolocation functionality is now complete, and a number of developers of third-party apps who have been working on building location support into their applications should begin rolling out the new features soon.

As we reported earlier, all of the location information is completely opt-in. To enable it and allow Twitter to attach geographic information to your tweets, head to the Account section of your Twitter settings and scroll down to the location section. There’s a checkbox for enabling the geotagging, and a button that will allow you to delete all the historical location data from your tweets if you want to erase your tracks.

Along with enabling the geolocation support, Twitter tweaked its privacy policy to explicitly include geotagging and to remind users that what they post to Twitter is (unless protected) public in nature. In a world where tweeting can get you robbed or sued, it’s a not superfluous reminder that we should participate in our own sensible privacy policies when using social media tools.

Will you be turning on geolocation support for your tweets? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: geolocation, geotagging, lbs, location, privacy, twitter

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At today’s Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC), Microsoft unveiled the first beta version of Silverlight 4, its answer to the domination of Adobe Flash. This is a developer beta — no end-user runtime is available at the moment — but the new beta offers up some new features developers can play with to make web apps using Silverlight more robust.

Silverlight 4 brings a slew of new features, including support for printing, webcams and microphones and rich text and custom menu options, as well as the ability to interact with local files in trusted applications. Although sometimes dismissed, Silverlight as a technology has a ton of potential, especially in the area of cross-platform support.

Info on the New Silverlight Beta

Silverlight 4 applications are said to start faster and run 200% faster than the equivalent Silverlight 3 apps. Silverlight 4 also adds support for Google’s Chrome browser, which is good news for anyone who wants to use Chrome with Silverlight powered sites like Netflix.

With Silverlight 4, it looks like Microsoft is blurring the lines between WPF desktop apps and the Silverlight space. The advantage here is that developers can essentially write one app and deploy it either on the Windows desktop or put it on the web where it can be run cross platform. By adding the ability to access local files for trusted apps and have custom context menu and rich text support, Silverlight might finally present itself as a platform for web apps that need to be more powerful than just the browser, but still cross platform and light weight.

If you’re interested in what is new, check out this video (Silverlight required). It’s a little dry for non-techies, but the information is still valuable.

What do you think about Silverlight and Silverlight 4?

Tags: microsoft silverlight, Silverlight, silverlight 4

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We caught wind of some sort of Facebook integration coming to Sony’s flagship Playstation 3 console last week, and now the news is official. Facebook support will be introduced to the console in the next firmware update, version 3.10, and Sony provided some details on what that will entail in a short video preview (embedded below).

Once you link your PlayStation Network account to your Facebook account, you will be able to turn on options to automatically update your Facebook profile in 3 different areas: trophy information, purchasing information, and game event information. You’ll have to manually sync your Trophy Collection to send the information to Facebook, but when you do your PS3 will update your Facebook profile with any of the new trophies you’ve earned since your last sync.

Enabling the second option will update your Facebook profile when you make purchases from the PlayStation Network, while the latter option will vary by game. Sony left it up to game developers to enable support for Facebook updates and determine what game events qualify for a post, whether it be specific in-game accomplishments, stat milestones, or other event. In each case, you’ll always be presented with the option of declining any particular Facebook update if for whatever reason you don’t want to make it public to your contacts.

Sony also made some improvements to the built-in web browser to render Facebook profiles more accurately, and helpfully reminded users they can access their Twitter accounts from the browser as well. And yet, considering that today Microsoft launched a more thorough Facebook integration as well as significant Twitter and last.fm support, it’s hard not to read the PS3 social network integration news as weak by comparison. On the other hand, support for Facebook updates from within games is something the Xbox 360 doesn’t offer (yet — although Microsoft has indicated that will be coming in a future update). Not to mention that Microsoft’s console doesn’t even have a built-in web browser.

At the end of the day, it will still be a nice bonus for PlayStation 3 users on Facebook when it launches, on a date we only know will be “soon.” Check out the video below and let us know your thoughts: will you be excited to generate Facebook updates from your gameplay and PSN purchasing activities on the PS3?

[via NewTeeVee]

Tags: facebook, playstation 3, PS3, PSN, trophies

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While the language itself is almost fully baked, HTML5 won’t fully arrive for at least another two years, according to one of the men charged with its design.

“I don’t expect to see full implementation of HTML5 across all the major browsers until the end of 2011 at least,” says Philippe Le Hegaret, interaction domain leader for the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), who oversees the development of HTML5.

He tells Webmonkey the specification outlining the long-promised rewrite of the web’s underlying language will be ready towards the end of 2010, but because of varying levels of support across different browsers, especially in the areas of video and animation, we’re in for a longer wait.

Most web pages are currently written in HTML version HTML 4.01, which has been around since the late 1990s. The web was mostly made up of static pages when HTML was born, and it has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Now, we favor complex web applications written in JavaScript like Gmail and Facebook, we stream videos in high-definition, we consume news in real-time feeds and generally push our browsers as far as they’ll go. These developments have left HTML drastically outdated, and web authors have resorted to using a variety of hacks and plug-ins to make everything work properly.

HTML5 — which is actually a combination of languages, APIs and other technologies to make scripted applications more powerful — promises to solve many of the problems of its predecessor, and do so without the hacks and plug-ins.

We’re already close. All the major browsers are providing some level of support for HTML5.

“There’s strong support already in Firefox and Safari. Even Microsoft IE8 has some partial support,” says Le Hegaret, referring to some code within HTML5 that enables the browser to pass information between pages.

Browser makers are approaching support incrementally, adding features little by little with every subsequent release. Some, like Mozilla, can build new features into the next release in a matter of months. For others, like Microsoft, it takes much longer.

Google Chrome is maturing extremely quickly and already supports most of HTML5. This is mostly because Google didn’t start from scratch — the company chose to use the open source Webkit rendering engine, the same one used by Safari. Still, this doesn’t mean both browsers support HTML5 equally.

“Video support between Safari and Chrome, despite the fact that they are both using the same underlying engine, is totally different because video support is not part of the Webkit project at the moment,” says Le Hegaret.

It’s actually this very issue — support for playing videos inside the browser — that continues to be one of main factors blocking the broad adoption of HTML5.

The way the specification is written now, website authors will have the ability to link to a video file as simply as an image file. The video plays in the browser without using a plug-in, and the author can create a player wrapper with controls.

But browser vendors are stuck arguing over which video format to support. Mozilla, Google and Opera are interested in the open source Ogg Theora video format. Apple has substantial investments in its Quicktime technology, so it’s pushing for the Quicktime-backed H.264 format. Microsoft wants people to use its Silverlight plug-in, so Internet Explorer isn’t supporting native video playback in the browser at all.

Google has voiced support for Ogg, but it has also recently made a bid to purchase On2, a company that makes a competing video technology. Rumor has it Google might release On2’s video technology under an open source license once the sale is complete.

Until these issues are sorted out, consumers and content providers alike are forced to rely on plug-ins. Le Hegaret says that while these plug-ins have certainly helped the web arrive where it is today, they continue to be a burden on the user.

Setting up any browser to support both H.264 and Ogg Theora requires at least one plug in, which harms the user experience.

“It’s hard today to ask people to install a plug-in unless the payoff is huge,” he says. “What’s driving the most successful plug-in, which is Flash, is video support. If you can’t see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You’re missing a lot.”

Plug-ins aren’t just harder on web users, but they’re hard on web developers, too.

“Building with Flash or Silverlight in a way that lets you share information between the content appearing inside the plug-in and the rest of the page presents some challenges,” says Le Hegaret.

Unlike its predecessor, HTML5 has been designed with web applications in mind. The current HTML5 specification includes a media API that makes it easier to connect animations or video and audio elements — things traditionally presented within a Flash player — with the rest of the content on the page.

“You get a smoother application if you use HTML5. You’re not crossing a software layer. It’s all part of the same application.”

Unfortunately, the YouTubes of the world aren’t going to make a baseline switch from Flash to HTML5 unless they know there’s strong support for it in the browsers.

But they are testing the waters: Wikipedia is experimenting with HTML5 video support by serving Ogg Theora video to browsers that can handle it, and Flash to everyone else. YouTube and the video site Dailymotion have also set up special demo pages using this technique.

Le Hegaret says we’ll be in this period of transition — a dual-experience web where content sites serve HTML5 video along with a Flash fall-back — for a while.

“Web developers will continue to have to understand that not everyone is using the latest generation web browser, and that’s OK in the short term.”

As far as being able to make the switch to a pure HTML5 web altogether, Le Hegaret says that’s only possible once browser vendors sort out their differences.

Once that day arrives, the final switch to HTML5 will be in the hands of the content providers. It’s up to them to begin coding for HTML5 standards and ditching support for old browsers.

“There are still a significant amount of people out there using IE6,” says Le Hegaret. “As a developer right now, you can’t really ignore it. Hopefully, in two or three years, you will be able to start ignoring IE6.”

See Also:

• Tim Berners-Lee Sees Promise, Challenges in HTML5
• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• Adobe Fights Off HTML5 Threat With New Flash Player 10.1
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5

The great promise of HTML5 is that it will turn the web into a full-fledged computing platform awash with video, animation and real-time interactions, yet free of the hacks and plug-ins common today.

While the language itself is almost fully baked, HTML5 won’t fully arrive for at least another two years, according to one of the men charged with its design.

“I don’t expect to see full implementation of HTML5 across all the major browsers until the end of 2011 at least,” says Philippe Le Hegaret, interaction domain leader for the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), who oversees the development of HTML5.

He tells Webmonkey the specification outlining the long-promised rewrite of the web’s underlying language will be ready towards the end of 2010, but because of varying levels of support across different browsers, especially in the areas of video and animation, we’re in for a longer wait.

Most web pages are currently written in HTML version HTML 4.01, which has been around since the late 1990s. The web was mostly made up of static pages when HTML was born, and it has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Now, we favor complex web applications written in JavaScript like Gmail and Facebook, we stream videos in high-definition, we consume news in real-time feeds and generally push our browsers as far as they’ll go. These developments have left HTML drastically outdated, and web authors have resorted to using a variety of hacks and plug-ins to make everything work properly.

HTML5 — which is actually a combination of languages, APIs and other technologies to make scripted applications more powerful — promises to solve many of the problems of its predecessor, and do so without the hacks and plug-ins.

We’re already close. All the major browsers are providing some level of support for HTML5.

“There’s strong support already in Firefox and Safari. Even Microsoft IE8 has some partial support,” says Le Hegaret, referring to some code within HTML5 that enables the browser to pass information between pages.

Browser makers are approaching support incrementally, adding features little by little with every subsequent release. Some, like Mozilla, can build new features into the next release in a matter of months. For others, like Microsoft, it takes much longer.

Google Chrome is maturing extremely quickly and already supports most of HTML5. This is mostly because Google didn’t start from scratch — the company chose to use the open source Webkit rendering engine, the same one used by Safari. Still, this doesn’t mean both browsers support HTML5 equally.

“Video support between Safari and Chrome, despite the fact that they are both using the same underlying engine, is totally different because video support is not part of the Webkit project at the moment,” says Le Hegaret.

It’s actually this very issue — support for playing videos inside the browser — that continues to be one of main factors blocking the broad adoption of HTML5.

The way the specification is written now, website authors will have the ability to link to a video file as simply as an image file. The video plays in the browser without using a plug-in, and the author can create a player wrapper with controls.

But browser vendors are stuck arguing over which video format to support. Mozilla, Google and Opera are interested in the open source Ogg Theora video format. Apple has substantial investments in its Quicktime technology, so it’s pushing for the Quicktime-backed H.264 format. Microsoft wants people to use its Silverlight plug-in, so Internet Explorer isn’t supporting native video playback in the browser at all.

Google has voiced support for Ogg, but it has also recently made a bid to purchase On2, a company that makes a competing video technology. Rumor has it Google might release On2’s video technology under an open source license once the sale is complete.

Until these issues are sorted out, consumers and content providers alike are forced to rely on plug-ins. Le Hegaret says that while these plug-ins have certainly helped the web arrive where it is today, they continue to be a burden on the user.

Setting up any browser to support both H.264 and Ogg Theora requires at least one plug in, which harms the user experience.

“It’s hard today to ask people to install a plug-in unless the payoff is huge,” he says. “What’s driving the most successful plug-in, which is Flash, is video support. If you can’t see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You’re missing a lot.”

Plug-ins aren’t just harder on web users, but they’re hard on web developers, too.

“Building with Flash or Silverlight in a way that lets you share information between the content appearing inside the plug-in and the rest of the page presents some challenges,” says Le Hegaret.

Unlike its predecessor, HTML5 has been designed with web applications in mind. The current HTML5 specification includes a media API that makes it easier to connect animations or video and audio elements — things traditionally presented within a Flash player — with the rest of the content on the page.

“You get a smoother application if you use HTML5. You’re not crossing a software layer. It’s all part of the same application.”

Unfortunately, the YouTubes of the world aren’t going to make a baseline switch from Flash to HTML5 unless they know there’s strong support for it in the browsers.

But they are testing the waters: Wikipedia is experimenting with HTML5 video support by serving Ogg Theora video to browsers that can handle it, and Flash to everyone else. YouTube and the video site Dailymotion have also set up special demo pages using this technique.

Le Hegaret says we’ll be in this period of transition — a dual-experience web where content sites serve HTML5 video along with a Flash fall-back — for a while.

“Web developers will continue to have to understand that not everyone is using the latest generation web browser, and that’s OK in the short term.”

As far as being able to make the switch to a pure HTML5 web altogether, Le Hegaret says that’s only possible once browser vendors sort out their differences.

Once that day arrives, the final switch to HTML5 will be in the hands of the content providers. It’s up to them to begin coding for HTML5 standards and ditching support for old browsers.

“There are still a significant amount of people out there using IE6,” says Le Hegaret. “As a developer right now, you can’t really ignore it. Hopefully, in two or three years, you will be able to start ignoring IE6.”

See Also:

• Tim Berners-Lee Sees Promise, Challenges in HTML5
• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• Adobe Fights Off HTML5 Threat With New Flash Player 10.1
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5

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Unfortunately for the mobile platforms, the key enhancements to the current beta release are limited to desktop environments. However, an Adobe spokesperson tells Webmonkey that support for Palm’s webOS will arrive later this year with Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian and Nokia support arriving in early 2010. Due to Apple’s developer restrictions, Flash will not be available on the iPhone.

The final release of Flash Player 10.1 is expected during the first half of 2010.

For now you’ll have to content yourself with improvements to the Flash desktop experience, and fortunately there are several welcome new features in Flash Player 10.1:

• Support for multitouch and gestures — Flash Player 10.1 understands gestures on hardware that supports touchscreen interfaces. However, since the mobile support is still lacking, we’re having a hard time seeing where multitouch is useful beyond Windows 7 devices with touch screens (which are scarce).
• GPU acceleration for H.264 video in Windows — This is good news for Windows users, but leaves us scratching our heads as to why the same isn’t available for Mac and Linux when plenty of other apps on both platforms already offer GPU-based acceleration.
• Support for local microphone access — This may well be the best news for developers since it paves the way to create online audio editors capable of the same sort of sophistication we’ve seen with online image editing apps.

The GPU acceleration is particularly noteworthy since is means that underpowered PCs like netbooks will be able to offer smoother video playback while also cutting down on the battery drain. Flash Player 10.1 also offers much improved buffering that lets you drop offline and still keep watching a video.

However, while Flash Player 10.1 offers some new features, this beta release is almost as significant for what it doesn’t include. Although Adobe says it’s in the works, you won’t find support for 64 bit operating systems, nor, if you happen to be on Mac or Linux, will you be able to take advantage of the new GPU acceleration.

Adobe already plans to have several updates to the beta before Flash Player 10.1 is officially released, but with mobile support still not ready and Flash Player 10.1 features varying considerably by platform it’s obvious that Flash still has a long way to go before it will fulfill Adobe’s goal of making Flash work everywhere.

And that’s an important goal, since there’s a new player in the multimedia world of the web that also plans to work everywhere: HTML5.

HTML5 has been touted as a “Flash killer,” making the ubiquitous plug-in unnecessary with new tags to embed video and create animations directly within HTML. The only problem is that HTML5 is not finished and browser support is far from complete.

But judging by today’s beta release, Flash Player 10.1 is also far from complete. If Adobe hopes to continue fending off HTML5 — which has strong support from the likes of Google and Apple — the pressure is on to deliver something more impressive than this beta by the time final release in 2010.

While Flash may be struggling a bit, Adobe AIR 2, the company’s runtime environment for making web-like native apps on the desktop and on mobiles, fares much better in this beta release. In fact, the new version of AIR, has some welcome new features and none of the cross-platform confusion.

In this release, AIR, which is perhaps most notable for its Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Alert Thingy or Twhirl, gains a very nice a native process API that will enable AIR apps to communicate with OS-native tools.

For example, TweetDeck could tap into Spotlight on Mac OS X to deliver search results from your system’s hard disk. The nice thing for developers is that the native process API means that the application itself is still cross platform. Also welcome is the ability to deliver OS-specific installers like .exe, .dmg, or .deb instead of the somewhat confusing .air installer.

AIR applications can also now detect and use attached USB devices — for example, plug in a USB stick full of photos and an AIR-based image editor can now import them for you.

Other AIR improvements include support for drag-and-drop file exporting, a faster version of WebKit (for AIR’s HTML support), as well as the same microphone and multitouch support found in Flash Player 10.

Webmonkey editor Michael Calore also contributed to this report.

See Also:

• Adobe Fights Off HTML5 Threat With New Flash Player 10.1
• Adobe Debuts New Flash Tools for Building and Tracking Social Apps
• Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5
• How HTML 5 Is Already Changing the Web

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