The Expressive Web

The Expressive Web is a site focused on demonstrating the features and benefits of CSS3 and HTML5. Visitors can play a version of Brick Breaker, compete in hurdles, watch seasons change on a tree, build a burger, etc. all while learning how movements, colors, transitions, shadows and other treatments can be used on the web. If one of the features strikes a visitor’s fancy, the site also provides real world examples of the tool in place, as well as tutorials on how to implement it.

In their own words, “This site is a resource and showcase of some of the newest, and most expressive features being added to the web today.”

Kicksend MailCheck

Kicksend is a jQuery plugin that suggests corrected domains when a user misspells their email address. In the world of email marketing and email capture forms, one of the most common reasons for bounces and undeliverable messages is address errors.

The Toolbox

The Toolbox is “a collection of the best time-saving apps, tools, and widgets from around the web.” The directory is curated by one man, but visitors and fellow time-savers may submit a site to be included in the collection. With tools to compress images, generate sprites, produce subtle pattern backgrounds, and more, the site is a good resource for designers and developers alike.

Users can also keep up to date with new tools and tricks by following The Toolbox on Twitter.

Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics is open-source software used to track and analyze web traffic for sites and applications. It can be hooked up to sites using simple Javascript, PHP, or REST based APIs and is compatible with frameworks like WordPress and MediaWiki.

The software has a remarkable likeness to Google Analytic’s interface, which makes switching from Google all the easier. Open Web Analytics allows users to track visitor behaviors, visitor demographics, page by page ranking/behavior, and overall traffic stats.

So if you are looking for a powerful analytics tool but aren’t up for supporting Google in their hegemony, Open Web Analytics may be for you.

RubyMotion

RubyMotion is a toolchain to create apps in iOS. Ruby has become known in the development world as a concise and flexible language that has an immense amount of power. It hasn’t been used in the mobile world because it is also known for being too slow for smaller devices. However, RubyMotion takes what is great about Objective-C (speed) and combines it with the flexibility and power of Ruby.

RubyMotion is controlled from the command line, can be used with almost any text editor, has gems that can be used to extend an apps performance, and has great debugging and testing capabilities. So, if you have stayed away from iOS development because you are so in love with Ruby, your time has come to jump into the world of iOS apps.

Adobe CS6 Release

Creatives rejoice! The latest version of the Adobe Creative Suite has officially been released to the world. While Adobe CS6 will likely have some great incremental upgrades for each of its products, the biggest news to note is that this release marks the first time some of the products will be available for download through Adobe Creative Cloud. Instead of buying a one time installation, as is typical with software, Adobe Creative Cloud will allow users to have a 1 year subscription plan for ~ $50 a month. This method of purchase will allow users to access all products available through the Creative Cloud as well as any upgrades to products during their year subscription.

Xobot OS: Android Ported to C#

Xobot OS is an operating system for Android devices that are looking for that extra boost in performance and longer battery life. The project was started last summer by a team called Xamarin, who were looking for the two things their work has provided, longer battery life and better performance on Android devices.

Unicorn

We’ve recently been experimenting with Unicorn, an HTTP server similar to Mongrel or Thin. It’s fast, light, and configurable. If you’re a Rails developer and haven’t yet tried out Unicorn, we think it’s worth a look.

Apache Solr

Apache Solr is a Java based search platform that uses a REST-like API, “making it easy to use from virtually any programming language.” Solr uses the Lucene Java search library, which makes it so robust that it powers some of the largest and best web services. Solr has an extensive set of features that set it apart from competition including: Full-Text Search Capabilities, Extensible Plugin Architecture, Standards Based Open Interfaces, Geospatial Search, and others.

Apple Confirms iPhoto Using OpenStreetMap Data

OpenStreetMap just got another big endorsement. Apple confirmed last week that it has been using OpenStreetMap’s data since March for its iPhoto app. Previously, iPhoto had been using data from Google Maps to geotag photos taken with iPhones or iPads. After OpenStreetMap’s team discovered the update, they released a blog post and screenshot proving the change. Apple then confirmed the switch.

LG Announces the Latest Round of Google TV

LG has officially confirmed the May 21^st release of a new TV powered by Google TV. Speculation on a collaboration between LG and Google has been swirling since November 2011. LG debuted this news at CES in January but a date was never set. It seems that we only have to wait a little over a month to determine whether or not the device will live up to the manufacturer’s, and public’s, expectations.

LG is not the first manufacturer to release a TV powered by Google TV, but the previous attempts by other companies have revealed themselves as flops. However, LG could be the secret ingredient missing from previous attempts.

Siasto Project Management

Siasto claims to be “the best way to manage your projects.” We’re still on the fence, as we’ve only been trying it out for the last few days. But with features like Google App integration (Utilizes Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar), Dropbox connection, intuitive design, and pricing that is cheaper than Basecamp, we’re motivated to check it out. Coming from Basecamp, there are two obvious things that we’re missing: there is no “Messages” area (although messages can be loaded as documents) and no time tracking capabilities.

Foresight.js

Foresight.js helps with smart delivery of high-resolution images. Unlike image delivery solutions which automatically send high res images to a device capable of displaying them, Foresight.js checks for a high-res screen AND a speedy network connection, and only if both requirements are filled are the high-res images delivered. This means a user with a retina display iPad and a fast network connection will see the big, beautiful images the iPad is so good at displaying, while a different user who doesn’t have either a high-res device or an adequate network connection will see smaller images optimized for their device.

RequestMaker

If you’ve ever had to build or consume an API that hasn’t been properly tested, you’ll appreciate Request Maker. Our fine friend Drew Wilson, who created the Pictos tool we mentioned in a previous post, made a handy-dandy tool for testing the data an API gives you when you are making a request, or the data you are sending if you own the API. In his own words, “There is nothing complex or special about this service. It just makes testing…much easier.”

Thanks Drew!

Layer Cake

Layer Cake offers to simplify the process of slicing and exporting images/graphics from  your layered PSD. From the Layer Cake website:

Bye bye, “Save for Web/Devices”. To turn PSD elements into images for your website or app, simply flatten, select, copy, make a new document, paste, save; or hide others, measure, crop, save, undo name your layer groups once and let Layer Cake do its magic.

Octogit

The short and sweet of Octogit is that it is an easy-to-use interface for Github from the command line. Developers, you can now use the time you usually spend copy and pasting between command line and Github to grab yourself another Mountain Dew or read the latest dev joke on Reddit.

Octogit also allows you to store your Github authentication data, create repositories on Github and locally, track issues in your repository, and inspect & close an issue.

Efficiency for the win.

Jekyll

Jekyll is a Rails blogging gem we’ve been checking out. Here’s a description copied from the project’s Github repo:

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server.

Dragscrollable

Dragscrollable is a jQuery plugin we recently used on a project where we needed to “scroll a large nested layer within a viewport using native scroll from the container.” That’s a quote from the plugin page and it worked exactly as advertised. Performance with this plugin is much better than with other similar plugins we’ve tried.

Our team came across this when building a customized map feature for a client. With 10,000 map pages to load, all other tools we used would slow down, become choppy, and some not load at all. Once we implemented Dragscrollable, we got the seamless user experience we were hoping for.

Beercamp

Beercamp is part of the Front-Trends Conference, which focuses on front-end development. Note that their site isn’t using any Flash. It’s great to see developers pushing the envelope of web technologies like this.

Newest Version of Firefox Disables Flash

Description

Mozilla’s upcoming release of their popular browser, Firefox, will have Adobe Flash disabled by default. This means on any of those pretty restaurant or beauty sites that use Flash technology to show large images or play relaxing elevator music, visitors will not be able to be able to see the content.

The movement away from Flash isn;t new (iOS users are all too familiar with the “Flash not supported message”, but Firefox’s abandonment of the technology is noteworthy, because it is the first desktop browser to make the move away from Flash.

In large part because of HTML5, Flash has a much lower implementation rate than it did several years ago. However, Mozilla’s move may be more of a marketing move (disliking Flash is a trendy position to advocate) than a usability move.

DIY Apps from Apple

Description

Apple recently filed a patent relating to DIY app building. Although no one knows for certain if or when Apple will release a product based on this patent, it stands to reason that making app creation available to the masses could be in the near future.

If This Then That

Description

IFTTT is an online tool that lets you create event driven program links, that makes the internet work for you. If you are like me, and yawned while reading the previous sentence, think of it as “Digital duct tape … allowing you to connect any two services together.” In some ways IFTTT reminds us of Yahoo! Pipes, another tool you can use to mashup services and data.

Applications

The example IFTTT gives is a connection between Instagram and Dropbox: If a friend uploads a picture to Instagram, then the uploaded photo is saved to Dropbox. Another usage would be to link your favorite-d tweets to a Buffer app account. When you favorite a tweet, it gets saved automatically to your buffer app queue for timed tweets.

Passpack

Description

Passpack is an online password manager and password generator.

Applications

Secure your accounts from prying coworkers’ eyes, phishing scams, forgetfullness, and a lack of creativity.

Related News

If you have a site that requires user authentication and you want to show your users the strength/security of their passwords, try this script called zxcvbn.

OpenStreetMap (OSM)

Description

OpenStreetMap is an open source, editable map of the world. Think of it as the Wikipedia of maps. By using user generated data from multiple sources (geotagged photos, location-based check-ins, satellite images, etc.) OSM hopes to be the most comprehensive resource for mapping.

It was started in 2004 and has been growing its user base and data library ever since. It has received greater attention by the development community over the last couple of years due to the flexibility it offers over widely-used Google maps. Recently, sites and applications such as Foursquare, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Flickr have chosen OSM over Google maps, with Wikipedia being the newest mega member to join the movement (as of this past weekend). An endorsement such as this should give some credibility to OSM as a viable alternative to Google Maps and Bing Maps.

Application

OSM, as an open source platform, could provide some interesting plugin and application uses for companies interested in more refined mapping capabilities without having to pay for access to a commercial API such as the one offered by Google. Beyond simple location maps for websites, companies and organizations could use OSM for photo-based maps for projects or locations, travel tracking maps, disaster relief maps, trekking/guided tour maps, the list could go on and on.

Mozilla WebRTC Video Chat

Description

WebRTC is an open source project that enables browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.) to use Real-Time Communication (RTC), ie video chat. The team at Mozilla recently gave a demo of their browser using this technology. As stated on their page, RTC is still in the early development stages, but it offers developers a hope of being able to things like video chat in the browser without requiring plugins. Instead of using a browser to chat, email, and communicate on social media and a separate video chat client (skype, facetime, etc.) or bulky plugins for video chats, users will be able to leverage real-time communication within the browser.

Application

Browsers with RTC technology will enhance the user experience by allowing for direct communication without plugins. The technology could enhance social sites, customer support, project collaborations, etc.

Detection of Flashback Trojan for Mac

Description

Trojan BackDoor.Flashback (Flashback Trojan) is a virus that has been infecting computers running Mac OS X. It is linked to a vulnerability with devices running Apple’s version of Java. A patch was released in February by Oracle, but was not addressed by Apple until April 3. It is believed that around 600,000 devices have been affected.

To check if your device is one of the infected lot, visit ARSTechnica and follow the steps provided.

Application

It may save your life. Well, your computer’s life at least.

Hieroglyph

Description

Hieroglyph is a Ruby gem that allows designers and developers to create an SVG font from a directory of SVG icons. If a website uses icons for navigation or user interaction those icons can now be turned into a font, which provides more flexibility with sizing and colors (goodbye sprites!)

Application

A site like Jauntaroo that uses icons for every step of the user experience (selection, description, rating) benefits by using a more scalable and dynamic approach to icons. It could reduce design time (no more sprites) and development time (fewer steps to make the site responsive).

Pictos

Description

Pictos is a hosted icon library that allows a developer to build a font of icons and have it served to a website from the Pictos server. Because it works as a simple CSS <link> tag, users don’t have to worry about running JavaScript on their site. By using the icons as a font, users will see faster load times because a site only loads the icons it needs, not an entire library. Pictos is a hosted alternative to the above-mentioned Hieroglyph gem.

Application

Using icons for common actions on sites is becoming more and more common: The Facebook “Like” button, Twitter’s “Tweet” bird, Google’s +1. Leveraging common icons for user interaction on sites allows for minimal user input (no reading text). Using an image library like Pictos allows sites to leverage those icons with minimal input from designers (no creating icons) and developers (keyboard shortcuts allow for icons instead of coding for images).

For examples, see sites like Dribbble and airbnb.