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!

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

This Wednesday, April 18th, Doug Chestnut and Mark Corum will present their latest mad, mad creation—a lightweight, low-investment XML publishing toolset using nothing more than Apache with some mods, Subversion, and a little bit of Ajaxy JavaScript. Throwing caution (and most of the documented warnings) to the wind, Doug and Mark have assembled a Content Management System (CMS) with off-the-shelf tools that has the flexibility to adapt to new technology. If you’ve been looking for a low-overhead CMS and would like to get in on the fun, come on out and see what’s cooking.

Doug and Mark work as web programmers/developers for the UVa Library Communications Department.

One of the hottest communication tools around the University these days is digital signage. While digital signage may range in size, cost, and complexity from a single LCD panel to multiple syncronized LCD or plasma panels, all flavors need content and a means to manage that content.

We spent a bit of time in the Brown Science and Engineering Library trying to decide on the best method for keeping the content on our single 32-inch LCD panel regularly updated. We identified a few key characteristics to focus on:

1. Dynamic content: Content should be refreshed regularly to keep the viewers interested.
2. Simple administration tools: Any content that is going to be updated frequently needs a simple means for inputting and editing so it doesn’t become a burden on the people managing it.
3. Consistent and coherent design: Despite the constantly changing content, the presentation should maintain a consistent appearance and brand.

Our solution for managing our digital signage content?… a WordPress blog.

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ITCWeb consists of thousands of pages that include common snippets of code for headers, footers and such via Apache’s Server Side Includes (SSI). It’s a fairly typical practice for creating templates since you just need to change a single file (the include) to immediately affect all the pages that include it. To maintain a consistent appearance across HTTP and HTTPS (SSL) protocols, our setup also connects the include files behind the scenes on the nonsecure and secure servers with symlinks. The practice worked flawlessly until we added the JavaScript for Google Analytics. The resolution required a little more SSI magic in the form of conditional expressions.

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Partly as a follow up to Steve’s recent post on Snap, and partly because ’tis the season for receiving as well as giving (;-), I recommend checking out Widgetbox. It’s the best round-up on the web of all the neat little widgets, like Snap, available for use in your website. Interestingly, Snap doesn’t seem to be listed there yet.

A sample of some of the most impressive goodies to be found at Widgetbox includes:

• Grazr — A free publishing tool for feeds. Quickly and easily display RSS, RDF, Atom, and OPML files on any Web page so they can be viewed by any visitor to the site.
• Meebo Me! — A chat client that you can embed directly in your page.
• Mapsack map — Allows you to embed an interactive google map on your blog.

Oh, and for those hoping Santa will bring them a cute furry companion this year, there’s always the CuteOverload Cutetracker if the big guy doesn’t deliver.

I’ve been a cautious fan of Macromedia Adobe Flash paper since it first came bundled with Contribute 2. There are a variety of applications where a PDF simply isn’t the best solution for content delivery, but it’s all you have to work with. Flashpaper does a nice job of bringing PDFs to the web in a Flash SWF container that can be embedded in a page, and offers some useful functions on the built-in toolbar.

I used the Flashpaper component from driverjase to create a wrapper for the flashpaper document. The component exposes over a dozen options in the API that can be used to customize the toolbar, scrollbars, and view settings.

You can see the result on the Inside UVA page.