Download Squad

Adobe makes Flash searchable, Flash designers rejoice

Patrick Beeson — 2008-07-01T15:15:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Adobe, Google, Yahoo!, Search

UPDATE: E.W. Scripps SEM Manager Paul Petersen weighs in on the SEO impact of Adobe and Google's announcement.

Adobe's Flash technology has long been the bane of efforts to create a Web site or application that can be indexed by Google, Yahoo! or other search engines. What it lacked in search engine optimization (SEO), Flash made up in offering designers an infinite playground for creating rich-media apps, games and video.

But what good is an application that users can't find?

Yesterday, Adobe and the two search engine leaders came out with an answer: A special Flash player that opens up content within applications and translates it for search engines. Flash content owners and search-engine users should notice results immediately.

This news was also mentioned in today's Googleholic.

Continue reading Adobe makes Flash searchable, Flash designers rejoice

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Flipping the Linux switch: Linux web tools, Pt. 3 - Intro to HTML editors

Kristin Shoemaker — 2008-06-26T11:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet, Features, Linux, Open Source

An XHTML editor is a lot like a teacup dog breed or a designer pig. Okay, so they don't tremble incessantly or have the tendency to pee in the corner of your living room. They are really just highly specialized, souped-up versions of something else. Chihuahuas are pack animals, just like wolves. Potbellied pigs know instinctively how to root around for tasty things, as do wild boars. And XHTML editors edit text.

They have many tools to make editing XHTML (and other bits of code geared specifically for web use) faster and easier, but there's nothing says you need to use an XHTML editor for web coding. Text editors can do the job as well. If Kate, gedit, or Cream do the job for you, either on their own or with a few plugins, that's got you ahead of the game.

But there are some XHTML editors that manage to bundle the basic functions and a whole slew of handy extras into a nicely finished package. There are quite a few of them, and we'll be touching on more of them next week.

This week we'll take a peek at Bluefish and Quanta Plus. Why? Because they are the two most often included in Linux as the sort of "came with the distro" web development applications. Even if they aren't installed by default, many people try them first.

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Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express makes website management easy

Adam Maras — 2008-06-24T12:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Windows, Microsoft, Freeware

Our friends over at Microsoft have a knack for hiding really cool stuff right under our noses, and they certainly didn't deviate from this policy with their Visual Studio Express Edition line of products. Included with the programming and database tools that would make the layman cringe is an interesting gem called Visual Web Developer Express Edition.

While the other Express Edition products focus on programming and application development, Visual Web Developer provides a hybrid set of tools; its versatile HTML and CSS editing tools are paired with the power of ASP.NET to allow users to quickly build web applications. However, what a lot of people don't know about Visual Web Developer is that the ASP.NET development tools can be ignored, turning it into a very impressive website editor.

Visual Web Developer includes Visual Studio's powerful WYSIWYG page editor and CSS style builder functions. Also provided is Microsoft's developer sanity-preserving IntelliSense technology, which makes editing HTML and CSS a breeze by providing immediate access to things like common markup and style attributes and values. However, one of our favorite features of Visual Web Developer is that you can point it to an FTP server, and edit your website right on your web server without worrying about uploading changes or using a separate FTP client. In fact, Visual Web Developer can, for the most part, replace your external FTP client, because the Solution Explorer allows you to upload and manipulate files right in your editing environment.

All of the Visual Studio Express Editions are free of charge; they don't do quite as much as Visual Studio, but they are worth looking at if you're interested in getting started with software or web development.

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Get Twitter comments for your blog with Chirrup

Jay Hathaway — 2008-06-23T15:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Utilities, Blogging, Social Software

Back before the days of FriendFeed, it was pretty common to see people post things like, "Just wrote a new blog post. What do you think?" to Twitter. That's a good way of getting your link out there, but if anybody actually wanted to answer your question, they'd probably do it in the comments, not in Twitter. Chirrup is a way of tweeting back at someone and commenting at the same time. A neat trick!

Installing Chirrup is as simple as uploading a bit of PHP or installing it as a Wordpress plugin. Most webhosts support this, and the HowTo on the Chirrup site has straightforward instructions for getting it working. Once it's set up, Chirrup will grab any replies to you that contain a URL from your site, and associate the right comments with the right pages. It also knows how to unpack TinyURLs, which eases character-count concerns considerably.

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Versions.app - OS X Subversion with Style

Nik Fletcher — 2008-06-19T18:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Macintosh, Shareware, Beta

One of the fundamental tools for developers is not just their development environment of choice, but also their version control system of choice. The debate over just which version control system is undoubtedly set to rage on for eternity, however one of the more popular systems is Subversion. On the Mac, up until now there's been a number of choices: Terminal (command-line) which is built into the OS and includes Subversion as part of OS X Leopard, svnX - another open-source graphical user interface, or using the built-in Subversion support in Apple's OS X development IDE Xcode.

For some of us here at Download Squad, a fear of the command-line, compounded with a little loathing of the svnX interface made the announcement of Versions.app - over a year ago - more than a little exciting. Promising an elegant and truly OS X interface to work with Subversion, it's taken a long time to come to fruition - however the betas to date do appear to deliver.

After having used Versions on a daily basis since its debut 2 weeks ago, it's certainly showing a great deal of promise - and makes version control far friendlier. As others have noted, the application not only makes working with existing repositories easy, but also has quick links to Subversion web-service Beanstalk, allowing you to easily create a new online repository and add it to Versions.

Pricing for Versions will be set 'when version 1.0 ships', and currently all (free-to-use) betas expire on July 1st.

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SproutCore gets huge buzz ahead of MobileMe launch

Jay Hathaway — 2008-06-16T18:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Web services, Apple, Open Source

Since it was revealed that Apple's recently-announced .mac replacement, MobileMe, was partially built on something called SproutCore, the buzz around this hot new JavaScript framework has been growing. Although this is the first that many people will have heard about it, SproutCore has actually been around for a while, powering services like .mac's Mobile Galleries. Now it's getting so much attention that SproutCore.com has been unreachable all day, a week after the WWDC announcement.

So, why SproutCore? Daniel Eran Dilger, over at RoughlyDrafted, has a great rundown of things to love about this open source JavaScript framework: it will allow developers to build web apps that look more like desktop apps, function offline, and take advantage of modern browser features. Apple's using SproutCore to build a front end for WebDav and its own WebObjects, but other developments could easily add PHP, JSON or XML data to the mix, to name a few.

[via RoughlyDrafted]

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Flipping the Linux switch: Linux web tools, Pt. 2 - Using LAMP for testing

Kristin Shoemaker — 2008-06-13T10:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Features, Linux, Open Source, How-Tos

There was a toss up this week about whether it would be better to dig right in to the Linux HTML editors, or to wax poetic about setting up LAMP so that those choosing to go the content management system (CMS) route could test any changes they made with such editors on their local machines.

We ultimately decided to tackle setting up a LAMP testing ground. This will certainly not be necessary for every single person out there who just wants to put up a web site. If your site is not using PHP-driven content that interacts with or requires a database backend, and you just plan on designing static web pages, there is absolutely no need to do any of this.

If you are perfectly content to upload your site and integrate any supporting elements (once again, things like databases) live and on the web and make changes there, where it is possible that everyone can see your style sheet testing or things may be temporarily broken, you don't need to do this either.

Some people, though, really like to get things on their CMS tweaked to near perfection before releasing their content on the world. Other people need to know exactly what a dynamic site is going to look and act like before it goes live. The combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) makes this possible.

Continue reading Flipping the Linux switch: Linux web tools, Pt. 2 - Using LAMP for testing

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Tests confirm CSS selectors slow load times

Patrick Beeson — 2008-06-11T08:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Design, Developer

Most Web designers make liberal use of CSS selectors, but that spec's sibling, descendant and child selectors can cause what designer/developer Shaun Innman calls a "significant, negative impact on page rendering." This is confirmed in tests done by UI Specialist Jon Sykes that are published on his blog.

Fortunately for most designers, the performance impact is only in extreme situations. But it's definitely something to be aware of when writing CSS.

The test was based in part on a comment by Dave Hyatt on an entry from Inman's blog.

Continue reading Tests confirm CSS selectors slow load times

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Flipping the Linux switch: Linux web tools and HTML editors, Pt. 1

Kristin Shoemaker — 2008-06-09T19:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Features, Linux, Open Source

In many ways, I'm pretty old school. When I learned HTML, I painstakingly handcoded my pages in the esteemed Notepad. Only when I became a master of HTML-fu did I allow myself to try Dreamweaver. (Okay, fine, the ability to buy a license with educational pricing may have had a lot to do with it, too.)

I loved Dreamweaver. One of the things that always made me a little sad when I first tried Linux was that there wasn't a real Dreamweaver-esque type application. Times have changed, however. There are a number of HTML/web development applications out there that are free (as in speech and beer) and feature filled.

But I'd be really amiss if I just mentioned Linux HTML editors in a vacuum. There are a number of tools readily available in repositories that make coding, layout, uploading, and testing easy and (dare I say it) fun.

Because seriously, if it isn't fun, what's the point?

Over the next few weeks we're going to take a look at web development tools in Linux. We'll do a run down of some popular XHTML/HTML editors, FTP and transfer software, and neat little tools for creating content that make some of the drudgery of "back-end" web work less painful.

Continue reading Flipping the Linux switch: Linux web tools and HTML editors, Pt. 1

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Yahoo! Address Book API now open to 3rd party developers

Brad Linder — 2008-06-04T15:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Internet, E-mail, Yahoo!

One of the most valuable features of any good email or IM service is the contact list. Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and other companies that provide online communication tools also give you a place to store information about your friends, family, colleagues, and people who you met years ago and have completely forgotten about.

Yahoo! is making that much more useful by launching the Yahoo! Address Book API, which will let 3rd party developers create applications that can interact with your contact list. For example, you can use the API to develop an application that will scan your contact list to find other users who already belong to the social network you're signing up for, or a list of people you may want to invite. The API also supports contact synchronization, which could come in handy if you want to develop a tool that syncs online contact lists with Outlook or Thunderbird.

The API also provides the ability to create, modify, or delete contact information, which sounds a litle scary. But Yahoo! says write-acess is "available on a case by case basis," so developers will need to contact Yahoo! before creating a utility that has the ability to wipe out your address book.

Plaxo and LinkedIn have been using the API for a while, but Yahoo! is launching it publicly today.

[via Mashable]

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Ubuntu Netbook Remix gets real official

Kristin Shoemaker — 2008-06-03T19:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, OS Updates, Linux, Open Source, Canonical, Beta

At any given time on the planet, there's a technology trade show in progress. Some are more significant than others, and there's no formula to figure if any given one will be worth the airfare. We're guessing that a few ultraportable laptop manufacturers, as well as a few of us (cough) normal folk, are a little intrigued with the news emerging from the Computex exhibit halls today.

Canonical let slip some further information and screen shots of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the Ubuntu derived operating system for ultraportables. The quick and dirty information: it looks suspiciously as if the Ubuntu image is made to work solely on Intel Atom processors. How radically different is that from the other Intel processors used previously in ultraportables? Will it be a significant enough difference that it won't run with other Intel chips? Are VIA machines left in the dust? Maybe, maybe not, but we're guessing it'll affect performance on some level.

It seems that Canonical and Intel are working with various manufacturers to get Ubuntu Netbook Remix into our hot little hands, but it probably won't happen much before late 2008. They were so kind, however, as to release some screenshots of the demo version.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix looks... well, a little bit like the "Easy Mode" settings in the Eee PC's customized Xandros. Maybe not quite as simplistic, but we have this funny feeling that many people picturing "Ubuntu on an ultraportable" were thinking more along the lines of the traditional look with a few GUI tweaks. We're not sure if this is really a good or bad thing, as yet. Ultraportables are different animals, and used in a different manner than a desktop. Perhaps a different looking user interface is enough of a disconnect to make it all work (and keep us from trying to install the sorts of things on our ultraportables that they aren't intended to run due to processing limitations).

What will be interesting, and promises to push Linux on ultraportables to the next level, is all that scary stuff on the backend. The most intriguing bit of this conversation seems to focus on the use of Moblin, and the push for developers to get Ubuntu packages to work well -- really well -- with the specific requirements of the processor and ultraportable hardware.

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Googleholic for May 30, 2008

Christina Warren — 2008-05-30T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Web services, Google, Googleholic, web 2.0

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google! In this edition:

Google I/O round-up
Use Google to reference your JavaScript libraries
Google Web Toolkit 1.5 RC
Other random Google bits

Continue reading Googleholic for May 30, 2008

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CSS exploit allows detection of social site use

Patrick Beeson — 2008-05-29T14:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Design, Developer, Web services

Web developer Aza Raskin knows we visit Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Facebook without even having to ask.

No, he isn't employing privacy violating hackery, but he is exploiting a "cute" information leak in CSS that traditionally displays visited links differently than those that have yet to be visited. By loading in an iframe a list of social site URLs to see which are purple (visited) and blue (not visited), an assumption can be made on what sites to prompt users for submitting a story or blog entry.

Raskin has wrapped this functionality in a script called SocialHistory.js.

Continue reading CSS exploit allows detection of social site use

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Googleholic for May 27, 2008

Christina Warren — 2008-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Web services, Google, Googleholic, web 2.0

Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix for everything Google! In this edition:

Google Mini gets an upgrade
Google Treasure Hunt 2008
More information from forum results
YouTube is obsessed with robots
Google I/O starts tomorrow

Continue reading Googleholic for May 27, 2008

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Metosphere: create geotagged objects with Fire Eagle and iPhone

Jay Hathaway — 2008-05-13T18:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Fun, Yahoo!, Social Software, iPhone

Yahoo! Fire Eagle got a lot of attention when it launched back in March, and for good reason: a cross-platform system for building location data into an application? The buzz died down, though, because there weren't any cool applications using Fire Eagle. That's changing now, though, as the first wave of Fire Eagle stuff rolls out. Metosphere for the iPhone is one of the best of this bunch.

Metosphere has several uses. Like any app that takes advantage of Fire Eagle, it can update your location using your GPS or a WiFi hotspot. It also shows you nearby events on Eventful and Upcoming, and nearby Wikipedia pages. There's a map that shows you all of this, plus meetups, emergency alerts, and the best part: messages and geocaches you can create directly from Metosphere. There's no signup required, just use your existing Yahoo! ID.

Geocaching is going to be a big deal very soon, and Metosphere is a great way to play with it on a platform you already know how to use. Show it to your friends and leave each other messages at your favorite hangouts, or start a city-wide scavenger hunt. We'll keep covering new Fire Eagle tools as they advance -- that monthly renewal email is a good reminder to see what developers have been working on.

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Silverback brings advanced usability testing to the Mac

Jay Hathaway — 2008-05-12T08:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Design, Developer, Utilities, Video, Beta

Silverback, a new OS X application from the renowned UK-based design team Clearleft, was a mystery for quite a while. The app had a site with some neat visual tricks and a gorilla with a clipboard, and it said the application was for designers, but what did it do? The suspense was killing us! We finally had a chance to test Silverback this week, and if you design websites or application interfaces, this program is worth the wait.

Silverback basically turns your Mac into a full-featured usability testing station. Add a new project, add some users, and have them come sit down and test out your interface. Silverback hangs out unobtrusively in the background, capturing video of the the entire screen, including a cute (and useful) effect that marks where your tester is clicking. This in itself would be handy, but Silverback also takes advantage of your built-in iSight camera to include a picture-in-picture of the tester's reactions, on top of the screen capture.

This way, you can see everything the user is doing in real time, and they can speak comments aloud as they come up, rather than pausing to write them down. Usability testing the old-fashioned way generally involves expensive setups and lots of instructions, but Silverback is intuitive to use and provides straightforward and informative results. Silverback is currently in private beta, so some testers can test its testing functions (this makes our heads hurt a little bit.)

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Offshoring.com: choose profit over your country

Peter White — 2008-04-16T15:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Business, Developer

Always dreamed of running a sweatshop, but were worried about the legal ramifications? Sick of paying American workers boatloads of money just because the government says it's fair? Really, it's a free country, so you should be able to pay people whatever you feel like, no? Who cares if they need a certain wage to live, no one forced them to take the job. You're the victim here. But like Superman flying over the horizon in his confusingly bright colored outfit, a hero is coming to save you.

Behold, Offshoring.com, where you can hire cheap, skilled labour for as little as $4 an hour. How is this possible? Because the workers are in the Philippines. You can hire everything from programmers to graphic designers for a fraction of what they cost in the US. According to their website they are an American company with a headquarters in Atlanta who send people to the Philippines to run offices staffed with skilled Filipino workers. These workers will work whenever you work, Monday-Friday, and speak English. No word in the FAQ as to whether the workers are chained to their computers or not.

And, as an added bonus, you can fire any worker you want for whatever reason AND you don't even have to do it yourself. You just tell the office and they fire the worker for you. Which, one would assume, involves a large trap door and some sort of flesh eating monster. God bless capitalism.

[via wired]

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HuddleChat is dead, long live Campfire

Brad Linder — 2008-04-09T08:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Web services, Google, web 2.0

That certainly didn't take long. Just a day after going live, HuddleChat is no more. HuddleChat was a web-based multi-user chat room utilizing the new Google App Engine. It bore a striking resemblance to Campfire, a similar application from 37signals. The main difference was that Campfire used a freemium model (free for up to 4 users, fee for more users), while HuddleChat was completely free.

Now, technically, there's nothing wrong with developing an application that looks and feels a lot like a competing application. After all, is it surprising that two web-based multi-user chat rooms are going to look a lot alike? You have a chat window, a message window, a friends list window, and so on. It all seems rather obvious. But while Google App Engine is open to anybody (or at least the first 10,000 users to sign up during the beta), HuddleChat was actually written by two Google employees during their free time. And that made it hard to see as anything other than a direct strike at 37signals' Campfire. It sort of screamed "Hey, we like your product, now we're going to clone it, make it free, and drive you out of business!"

Needles to say, 37signals wasn't very happy to see HuddleChat, and now there's a message on the HuddleChat web site explaining that the application has been removed. So now if you want a multi-user, web-based chat room with transcripts and file uploads for team meetings or group chats, it looks like you'll have to stick with Campfire. Until someone else comes along with a free clone.

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HuddleChat: It's like Campfire, but free

Brad Linder — 2008-04-08T14:00:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Web services, Google, web 2.0

A lot of folks say that Google's new App Engine is basically a free clone of Amazon's Web Services. And they're pretty much right. So we probably shouldn't be surprised to find that some of the applications already making use of Google App Engine are free clones of other popular programs.

HuddleChat is a web-based mult-user chat application built with Google's App Engine. And it's almost identical to Campfire, a chat application from 37signals. But while Campfire provides free chat rooms for up to 4 users, and charges a fee for rooms with more users, HuddleChat lets an unlimited number of users chat for free.

The interface is pretty slick and offers a bunch of features that make it ideal for virtual team meetings. Chats are automatically archived, and you can upload files like images which will be displayed in the chat. They're also saved on a Transcripts & Files page. You can invite any user by sending out an email from the site, or you can share the room's URL. Best of all, users can sign into a chat room using their Google ID. So if you already have a Gmail, Google Calendar, or Picasa account you don't need to sign up for a new account to use HuddleChat.

Predictably, the folks at 37signals are less than pleased with HuddleChat.

Update: Astute blogger Emily Price noticed that there's at least one important Campfire feature missing from HuddleChat: Search. Which is kind of funny when you consider the fact that HuddleChat is hosted by Google and was developed by two Google employees.

Update 2: HuddleChat is dead.

[via Web Worker Daily]

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Google launches App Engine

Christina Warren — 2008-04-08T01:15:00+00:00

Filed under: Developer, Internet, News, Web services, Google, Open Source, Beta, web 2.0

Google has just announced the preview release of Google App Engine, which the company is describing as " an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google's infrastructure." Think of it like Amazon's web services, but as a fully integrated solution. With Amazon's services, developers can mix and match the various components with each other or with other solutions -- Google App Engine is a one-stop shop of sorts.

Most appealing, Google App Engine is free. During the preview, there are only spots for the first 10,000 developers who sign up, but Google's information page says that free accounts will be available after the initial preview. Of course, the free accounts do have resource limitations (500MB of storage and 5 million page views a month), but free is free!

Let's get into the details:

Applications can be served from the free appspot.com domain or from an external domain via Google Apps
Python is the only language supported right now -- Google says they look forward to supporting other languages in the future, but for right now -- Python is where it is at
Google's service API is built into App Engine -- so Google Accounts can be easily integrated into an application
During the developer preview users are able to register up to 3 applications
The SDK is available for Mac, Windows and Linux

From our perspective, this news is exciting -- if not for what it offers right now -- but for the potential in the future. Only initially supporting Python is a curious choice (though we are big fans of Django), but the ability for developers to execute scalable apps using Google's resources -- for free -- is extremely exciting.

[via TechCrunch]

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