Archive for the 'General' Category
Firefox 3 to ship Tuesday, June 17
Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday, June 17, 2008, and you’re invited to the party! From the Mozilla Developer News blog: ‘After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 — the best web browser, period.’”
Flash? We don’t need no stinkin’ Flash…
John Resig, creator of the JavaScript library jQuery, today released a new library: Processing.js. A port of the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, one application of this library is to provide an alternate to Flash for animation and interactive graphics content. Among the drawbacks are browser support (the library is specifically targeted to the latest beta versions of Firefox and Opera) and the inefficient nature of JS engines (which are not designed to process this type of data), but it’s pretty cool, anyway. Be sure to view your CPU’s performance as evidence of the latter when viewing any of the numerous demos available on Resig’s blog.
“Get Out of Jail Free” Twitter
When James Karl Buck was detained at an anti-government rally in Mahalla, Egypt, he got the diplomatic cogs turning with a simple message via his cell phone to Twitter: “Arrested.”
Over the next several hours, Buck was able to update friends and family using the micro-blogging site, some of whom then transposed his messages to other blogs of their own. Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, told CNN that there have been more and more stories of people using the service during natural disasters. In Buck’s case, the speed at which news of his situation was disseminated led to his school hiring a lawyer on his behalf. Less than 24 hours after his arrest, he left the station with another one word blog entry: “Free.”
Read the whole story at CNN.com.
Stylin’
Checked out edustyle? The site is described as a “web design gallery dedicated to higher education websites and powered by higher education web design professionals. Users submit, review, and comment on sites they like (or don’t like). The aim is for higher ed web professionals to learn from and be inspired by the work of their peers. Once a month two sites are selected as Noteworthy based on user votes and feedback.” Consider me inspired. Some of the featured work–particularly from smaller liberal arts schools and seminaries–is exceptional. Some crowd pleasers:
IE8: Standards-Compliant By Default
With the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 scheduled for release in the “first half of 2008,” Microsoft announced Monday it has rethought the dominant browser, and plans to make the program more friendly to Web standards. The software maker said that a planned standards compatibility mode will now be the default rendering engine when IE 8 makes its debut, and that the new browser is capable of passing the Acid2 rendering test. Seems crazy, right? Imagine this: a video of IE’s GM Dean Hachamovitch and Architect Chris Wilson, as the two discuss the importance of standards, compatibility and interoperability with the upcoming browser.
W3C Publishes First Public Working Draft of HTML 5
The W3C announced today that after nine months, the HTML Working Group has published the first working draft of HTML 5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. “HTML is of course a very important standard,” said Tim Berners-Lee, author of the first version of HTML and W3C Director. “I am glad to see that the community of developers, including browser vendors, is working together to create the best possible path for the Web…”
Firefox struggling amongst business users?
An article in ComputerWorld describes some of the obstacles Firefox is facing while competing with Internet Explorer for business use. From the article:
Janco Associates Inc. in Park City, Utah, currently gives Firefox a 16% usage share among visitors to 17 business-to-business Web sites that it monitors.
Curiously, these metrics seem to be supported by several sites we monitor: The Enterprise Resource Planning site, likely used heavily by a business audience, shows Firefox to be used by 18% of its visitors, while other ITS sites show the metrics for Firefox to be anywhere between 39 and 56%.
Options for event registration functionality
We recently found a great hosted solution for event registration for a client needing this functionality. Web Services built the client’s site which is managed using Adobe® Contribute™, so finding a plug-in or component to address this need was not an option. The free service met virtually all the needs of our client. Among the features provided by EventBrite.com are:
- Highly customizable look and feel of the front-end registration piece
- Tools to promote and email an audience about the event as well as keep track of registrants
- The ability to charge for event and collect payment through several sources including PayPal and Google Checkout
- Customizable event URLs and password-protected events
We also discovered a solution here on campus provided by Research Information Systems.
