I’m afraid PPK has gone off the deep end again. While I value his work on documenting desktop browser quirks and mobile browsers immensely, it is getting more and more difficult to take him serious when he rants about the iPhone.
iPhone webapps are not as bad as people think ✦
Friday, 27 November 2009
Earlier this week Peter-Paul Koch wrote an article on how iPhone developers were stupid for not recognizing the potential of developing webapps. I agree with many of his points why webapps are a good alternative for native applications. I also agree that some of the apps that Apple currently ships with the iPhone could be replaced with webapps. That being said I do not believe that webapps can replace native apps altogether. Even Peter-Paul changed his mind on this point based on the comments in the original article.
- Adobe AIR 2.0 scores 90/100 on the Acid3 test ✦
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Which is pretty good considering Adobe does not support SVG and at least 6 of the failed test are related to SVG.
- Firefox gets a brand new HTML5 parser ✦
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As of tomorrow the new HTML5 parser will be available in nightly builds:
If you are still comfortable with testing, download a trunk nightly build tomorrow, run it, navigate to about:config and flip the preference named html5.enable to true. This makes Gecko use the HTML5 parser when loading pages into the content area and when setting innerHTML. […] There is also another preference called html5.offmainthread that defaults to true. If you suspect a thread collaboration bug, you can try flipping the pref to false to make all parts of the HTML5 parser run on the main thread.
FYI, this doesn’t mean that Mozilla will support any of the new HTML5 features any better, it will just mean that the HTML that it tries to render is parsed according to rules specified by the HTML5 spec. The result is that the DOM generated by the parser would be the same in all browsers that support these rules.
- Microsoft started work on IE 9 and is planning to give web developers what they want ✦
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According to Dean Hachamovitch in the announcement on IE Blog:
Our focus is providing rich capabilities – the ones that most developers want to use – in an interoperable way. Developers want more capabilities in the browser to build great apps and experiences; they want them to work in an interoperable way so they don’t have to re-write and re-test their sites again and again. The standards process offers a good means to that end.
Apart from support for border-radius and a big speed up for the JavaScript engine, Microsoft did not announce any specific features. They did not make any promises to support HTML5 features such as video and canvas, but they did mention the Acid3 test as one of the areas they would work on. Again no promises that IE 9 would pass the Acid3 test, just that its score will continue to go up during the development.
Things are also looking good for a pet peeve of mine: CSS selector support. A couple of years ago I created an automated test suite for the CSS3.info website that would test support of almost all CSS selected in the CSS2.1 and CSS3 spec. At the time no browser passed the test, but that quickly changed and nowadays every browser except for Internet Explorer passes. IE 8 did improve the score quite a bit and added all of the CSS2.1 selectors. Work on the CSS selector engine in IE9 is apparently already almost finished, because the announcement on the IE Blog includes a screenshot of my test suite and clearly shows that it fails only 4 tests of the 578. It supports 43 of the 41 selectors, one is buggy and just one is unsupported.
Update:
The CSS Selector test is also mentioned in a MSDN Channel 9 video about IE 9: Standards and Interoperability.
- Adobe released the first beta of AIR 2.0 ✦
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Adobe AIR 2.0 includes an updated version of the Webkit rendering engine which should add support for some HTML5 elements and CSS transforms, transitions and animations. I did a quick check to see what is supported and noticed the following:
Present:
- CSS Animations
- CSS Transitions
- CSS 2D Transforms
- CSS Gradients
- CSS Masks
- CSS Reflections
- HTML5 Canvas
Missing:
- CSS 3D Transforms
- CSS Fonts
- CSS box-shadow and text-shadow properties
- HTML5 Offline Application Cache
- HTML5 Local and Session Storage
- HTML5 Database Storage
- HTML5 Video
Although 2D transforms are supported they look pretty ugly compared to the same effects in Safari. It looks like the transforms are done without proper interpolation and anti-aliasing. In their current state I would almost say that transforms are unusable. One thing I also noticed is that large text is also not anti-aliased, which makes it look quite bad compared to desktop browsers.
Windows Mobile Widgets are totally ridiculous ✦
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
A couple of weeks ago I went to a workshop by Peter-Paul Koch about W3C widgets. Widgets are little more than packaged HTML, JavaScript and CSS files. Technically they run on a browser, but you launch them as native applications. The best part of the W3C Widgets standard is that it is available right now and that it is available on multiple platforms. Nokia has a widget manager for S60, Opera has a widget manager for multiple platforms and even Microsoft has decided to follow the W3C standard instead of rolling their own incompatible widget standard. A widget written for one phone should in theory work on another phone. During the workshop we created some simple widgets and even tried to transfer them from a Nokia phone to a Windows Mobile phone using Bluetooth.
Today I read an article on the Window Mobile Development Blog that makes it difficult for me to take the whole widget standard seriously. And don’t get me started about Windows Mobile as a platform. One of the biggest advantages is also its biggest disadvantage: cross platform support.
- Apple introduces new Macs… but more importantly, it now uses HTML5 video on their website ✦
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Yesterday Apple introduced a new range of iMacs, Mac minis and a new Macbook. They look all great, but the first thing I noticed when looking at the product pages on the Apple website is the new video player. Previously Apple used an embedded QuickTime video player which was controlled using HTML and JavaScript. The new video player is a regular HTML5 video element with a nice HTML based controller.
Also considering the position Apple took on supporting Ogg Theora as a baseline codec for the HTML5 video element, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the video stream is only provided in H.264 format. This means the HTML5 based video player will not work in Firefox, which only supports video streams in the Ogg Theora format. The solution is simple, for those browsers it will show a plain embedded QuickTime player. No special controls, just the plain ActiveX or browser plug-in. One strange thing though… The videos won’t play in Google Chrome 3.0, even though that browser should support both HTML5 video and H.264.
iPhone Webapps 101: make your buttons feel native ✦
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
If you have read the first tutorial in this series you’ll know that an iPhone web app is just a regular web page. I explained how you could get rid of some of the default behaviours of Safari and how to make the app run full screen. Unfortunately this is just the beginning. Even if you recreate the look of a native app as accurate as possible, it will still not feel like a native app.
iPhone Webapps 101: detecting essential information about your iPhone ✦
Thursday, 24 September 2009
In this second instalment of iPhone Webapps 101 I’ll discuss some issues I ran into earlier this week during the development of my own iPhone Webapp. It deals with five separate issues, but all have something in common. Today we are detecting some essential information about your iPhone.
- Picasa 3.5 with face recognition and improved geotagging ✦
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We’re happy to announce the launch of Picasa 3.5, the latest release of Picasa photo management software. If you don’t want to wait until we autoupdate everyone to Picasa 3.5, you can download it at picasa.google.com.
A couple of years ago I wrote an article with detailed instruction on how to geotag photos using Picasa and Google Earth. This method felt a bit like it was tacked on at the last moment and not really a feature for regular users. Still it was quite workable for those who did want to geotag their photos, but didn’t have a GPS receiver. The new release has support for geotagging using a build-in map, instead of launching an Google Earth as an external application.
- Google brings Chrome’s renderer to IE ✦
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Today, we’re releasing an early version of Google Chrome Frame, an open source plug-in that brings HTML5 and other open web technologies to Internet Explorer. We’re building Google Chrome Frame to help web developers deliver faster, richer applications like Google Wave. Recent JavaScript performance improvements and the emergence of HTML5 have enabled web applications to do things that could previously only be done by desktop software. One challenge developers face in using these new technologies is that they are not yet supported by Internet Explorer. Developers can’t afford to ignore IE — most people use some version of IE — so they end up spending lots of time implementing work-arounds or limiting the functionality of their apps.
Sounds like a great plan but I do have one question: how many people are actually going to install this plugin? Unless the number is ‘millions’ you still can’t afford to ignore regular IE6 users. The only way I can see this succeed somewhat is if Google starts pushing this plugin as a requirement for many of its services, although I doubt that the individual teams of those services will be happy about that. Sure it will be a requirement for Google Wave or some small features of existing services, but I don’t expect Search, Gmail, Calendar or Docs to drop plain IE6 support.
iPhone Webapps 101: Getting Safari out of the way ✦
Monday, 14 September 2009
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on the next release of MediatankController, a simple remote application for a Networked Media Tank media player such as the Popcorn Hour. At first it started out as an application build upon Adobe AIR, but now that I actually own an iPhone, I recreated it as a web application. The first versions were little more than a proof of concept build upon iUI and a couple of simple PHP scripts to serve the content. But the next release will be something quite different. It looks like a native app, it feels like a native app, but it really isn’t. Over the next couple of weeks I will write a series of articles detailing some the problems I faced and the tricks I had to use to solve these problems.
An iPhone Webapp is little more than a website specially build or adapted for the iPhone. It’s just a standard HTML page, sprinkled with some CSS and JavaScript. While browsing websites on a phone may sound quite limited and problematic, Safari – the browser on the iPhone – is perhaps one of the most advanced browsers around and surpasses on some areas even desktop browsers. Still, the Webapp runs in a browser and that causes some problems for those of you who want to make the application look and feel like a native app. Instead of making the application feel like a webpage we want to do away with the default behaviours and interface of Safari.
- The ultimate Mac OS X 10.6 review ✦
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It’s almost a tradition. Whenever Apple releases a new version of its operating system, John Siracusa of Ars Technica writes a review. Not just a review, but a staggering 32 pages of detailed information. It’s a must read for anybody interested in the technical details behind the marketing speak.
- Opera 10 is here ✦
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Despite an impressive list of supported standards, I can help but feel a bit disappointed. Notably absent are support for HTML5 video and some popular CSS3 properties such as border-radius and box-shadow. Anyway, get it at Opera.com