beTech :: Evolve Already

Sure the iPhone is a slick piece of interface and hardware design. Yeah, I want one real bad. But, sorry, I just can’t justify the initial cost plus the monthly service agreement with AT&T. (the University didn’t want to help me out there either, drat!) Furthermore, even though there was an initial burst of buzz and tools for developing applications suited to the iPhone’s 480×320px screen (e.g., the Aptana iPhone Development Plugin), it just didn’t seem prudent to take the leap as a Web designer/developer yet.

Yesterday’s Apple Special Event announcements changed all that. The entry price for the iPhone was dropped to $399 in time for the holidays—and that was nice. But what’s really got me turning from naughty to nice for Santa’s list is the new iPod Touch. Holy Smokes! For $299 I can have the internet in my pocket! And not some mobile version of the web*—nay!—I’ll have the real McCoy! That’s right. A Wi-Fi-enabled (802.11b/g) mobile web browser (Safari) that actually renders pages as they’re seen on the laptop/desktop, only smaller (until you zoom in!).

And if I’m planning a future with my little iPod Touch buddy, my gosh, I bet the rest of you are considering the same. Holy smokes! There’s an imminent iPhone/iPod Touch critical mass approaching. It’s time to start developing!

What applications are you contemplating or already developing for the iPhone/iPod Touch? What site design changes will you make to better suit this duo? Will affect your approach to the mobile Web?

* BTW: The Office of Web Communications has a great resource for the mobile Web at UVa. It’s worth checking out!

Throw flames on anything and it instantly becomes cool. beCamp probably wouldn’t have been nearly as successful if it weren’t for the gosh-darn flame logo. Face it. If ya want to attract the edgy, hip crowd (that’s us, right?), there’s no easier way than to slap on some flames.

Well, the Mozilla gang took that idea to heart, added some flames to Firefox, and released the Firefox Campus Edition browser this past week. Sure, it’s got a swell bundle of “back-to-school” add-ons:

• FoxyTunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more with a click right from your browser.
• StumbleUpon lets you channel surf the Internet to find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests.
• Zotero helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work - in the web browser itself.

…but let’s be serious. It’s the flames that caught your eye, right?

YSlow for Firebug is the latest must-have extension for Web developers working the bleeding edge. It’s primary purpose it to analyze your pages and tell you why they’re so slow (get it?: [Yahoo||whY]Slow), but it also has some other handy tricks up its sleeve. In one cool little tool, you get:

• a performance report card (based on the Yahoo! 13 Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site)
• an HTTP/HTML summary
• a list of components in the page
• other tools including JSLint

(Those with a keen eye may notice that YSlow is an extension for Firebug—which is itself a bad-ass Firefox extension.)

Microsoft layed down the gauntlet at this week’s Mix 07 Conference with a Flash/Flex and Ajax competitor called Silverlight. This time around, the post-Gates Microsoft may have nailed it. Of course, the Microsoft faithful will love it—Silverlight provides a modern, well-designed presentation layer to leverage their .Net work.

But what’s captured the attention of the larger developer community is that Silverlight applications will work on IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari (yup, on a Mac) AND support non-MS languages. Furthermore, these apps will be delivered to the browser in Microsoft’s XAML markup language which means information within will be more accessible and findable by default than with compiled Flash/Flex apps.

What the heck is going on here? Silverlight just may be the first significant salvo from the more open, Ray Ozzie-powered Microsoft 2.0.

Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

More information:

• Channel 9: Scott Guthrie: Silverlight and the Cross-Platform CLR
• Webware: What is Silverlight, Really?
• TechCrunch: The Web Just Got Richer
• Dare Obasanjo AKA Carnage4Life: Silverlight: AJAX is now an Endangered Species
• Ed Burnett’s Dev Connection: Dissecting Silverlight

The Firebug 1.0 (beta) Firefox extension transports an already awesome web development tool into the realm of the absolutely indispensable. Check out the mind-boggling added functionality:

• HTML Editing: Edit HTML on the fly, see the changes highlighted, search HTML, and much more.
• CSS Development: Wow! Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Extension was great at composing CSS on the fly, but Firebug kicks butt! Preview colors by mousing over the CSS color values, use the up and down keys to increment numeric values, do the same with attribute values and witness Firebug’s built in CSS dictionary run through the possible choices. There are several more features in the CSS tool that would have been enough to make Firebug a must-have tool for developers.
• CSS Layout Visualizing: The box model can be a dastardly concept to comprehend. The Firebug layout visualizer saves the day.
• Net Activity Monitoring: Want to see some neat bar charts? Take Firebug to a big Ajax site and check out the network requests. Heck! Take it to your own site and see what parts of your pages are taking the longest to load. It graphs every get request—including HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and images.
• JavaScript Debugging: Firebug was already good at this as well, now it’s great. Pause execution, step, and break your JavaScript to your heart’s content.

We could say more, but we’d be delaying you from getting on with the Firebug experience. Go get it and let us know what you think.

Oh, and one more thing, did we mention it’s now available for IE, Opera, and Safari? Consider it done.

Firefox 2 is due tomorrow (October 24). But with all the hub-bub surrounding IE7, who’s had time to pay attention to FF2? Granted, the changes and new features aren’t quite nearly as dramatic as IE7’s; but, then again, Firefox isn’t playing catch up. From the Firefox 2 release notes:

• updated interface
• built-in phishing protection
• enhanced search
• improved tabbed browsing
• browsing sessions and persistent storage
• improved web feeds
• inline spell checking
• live bookmark titles
• improved add-ons (themes and extensions) manager
• JavaScript 1.7
• SVG text

Oh, and if you’re not impressed with the new stuff, add your two cents to the Firefox version 3 feature list brainstorm.

It’s heeeeere. Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 was made available for download yesterday and it will be a part of the automatic update come November 1.

So what’s new? Well, let’s let Dean Hachamovitch, IE7 General Manager, do the talking in this IE Blog outtake:

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

Have you had a chance to play with Redmond’s latest browser? What do ya think? Share your thoughts here or next Thursday at Darden when beHungry rolls into North Grounds to talk about IE7, Firefox 2, and whatever else comes up.

IE Goodies

Now, because you’ve been patient in waiting for the seventh coming of IE, we’re going to open a grab bag of IE goodies:

• TredoSoft’s Multiple IE Installer—That’s right. It promises to allow multiple IE installations on a single Windows machine. Sweet. Anyone wanna try it first and give us a report?
• DebugBar—If your livelyhood depends on making browsers dance to Javascript or CSS, you’re no doubt a fan of Firefox’s Web Developer Extension. Wish there was an IE version that had at least half the cool features? There is. DebugBar offers live CSS editing, HTTP inspector, JavaScript inspector/console, and more. It’s the “must have” plug-in for IE developers.
• IE Developer Toolbar—Microsofts interpretation of the Web Developer Extension comes up a bit short (closer in execution to Firefox’s DOM Inspector), but it was the best thing going until we noticed DebugBar.