It’s official! Apple took my $99, and now I can write applications and submit them to the iTunes App Store! I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Time to start reading up on PhoneGap again. Appropiately, I am writing this post from my iPhone.

For those of you still anxiously awaiting a working version of Albatross, we are one big step close!  The latest test builds of VLC 0.9.9 have fixed on-the-fly transcoding and streaming to Flash video format (.flv)!  Okay, it’s almost fixed.  They still haven’t fixed the problem where transcoding the audio to any sample rate other than the source file’s native sample rate causes the audio and video to speed up or slow down accordingly, but at least it’s working again!  You can download them for Mac OS X here:

http://jones.videolan.org/~videolan/0.9.9-test/

I’ve only tested this on the Mac so far, but history tells me that it should work in other environments as well.  Works with a stock installation of Albatross 0.5.1.

Big things are happening in the browser world these days. We haven’t seen this much action in browser development since the Netscape 4 / IE4 browser wars of the dot.com bubble, and back then it was only two browsers! Today, we have (arguably) no less than 4 major browsers, each with increasingly good levels of standards compliance. Even Internet Explorer’s latest offering looks to be reasonably standards compliant, and may finally remove that painful thorn called “Internet Explorer Compatibility” from our collective sides. Let’s take a look at what’s coming down the pike:

Firefox 3.0

We’ve got a release date! Mark your calendars for this Tuesday, June 17 to download the final release of Firefox 3.0! This is an important major release for the Mozilla organization that keeps Firefox at the front of the pack for both performance and standards compliance! Check out some of these new features:

• One-click site info
• Better malware protection
• Better and clearer ssl error pages
• Better zooming
• Improved Mac, Windows and Linux (gtk) integration!
• Tab saving!
• Resumable downloads
• Improved SVG and CSS rendering
• Better memory management
• Massive speed boosts in javascript!

And so much more! By the way, did I mention the massive speed boosts in Javascript processing? It’s true! Just run any Javascript-intensive application in FF2 and FF3 to compare. G-Mail, Google Documents, TeamSite, Toyota Dealer Locator, whatever. You’ll be blown away.

Internet Explorer 8.0 beta

IE8 is starting to shape up into a decent offering from Microsoft! With an emphasis on performance and standards compliance (wait, this is a Microsoft browser, right), IE8 is definitely looking to be the most developer-friendly browser from Microsoft to date. We were all worried when it was first announced that standards-compliance would have to be opted-in on a per-page basis. But they’ve since backed off of that after listening to the developer community and the new standards-compliance mode will be the default. In addition to their new-found love of internet standards, IE8 also introduces “WebSlices”; a new widget format for the browser. A new beta version of IE8 is expected in August, but you can check out Beta 1 at the IE8 Developer Preview page.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx

Safari

It’s been a pretty big year for Apple’s flagship browser, Safari. Based on the open-source WebKit project, it’s come a long way from it’s humble beginnings as the popular Linux web browser, Konqueror. Now up to 3.1, Safari has been leading the pack in both performance and standards compliance. They released a Windows version (though not without some controversy). Safari was the first browser that users could download (albeit as a nightly beta) that passed the new Acid 3 browser compatibility test, beating Opera to the punch by only a few days. (See the Opera post below for more details.) At the WWDC conference this week, Apple introduced the first developer version of Safari 4.0 which, in addition to Acid 3 compatibility, includes a new and faster Javascript engine named SquirrelFish. That’s right, SquirrelFish. You got a problem with that? I didn’t think so. I haven’t found any direct comparisons on the web yet, but it will be interesting to see how SquirrelFish measures up to SpiderMonkey (the current Javascript engine for Firefox) as well as Tamarin, which is speculated to be the engine for Firefox 4.

Safari is also one of the first browsers to begin supporting HTML 5, which, among other things, includes <video> and <audio> tags for inline media. Also on Safari’s slate is CSS special effects. All those cool effects that you get from Javascript libraries like Script.aculo.us, jQuery UI, dojo and others are supported in the browser using css and styles. This makes for some smooth effects that even the fastest rendering engine can’t beat.

And lest we forget, Apple’s Safari is the default browser in the iPhone and iPod touch! Apple has raised the mobile browsing bar so high that most “mobile browsers” can’t even be considered web browsers any more.

While security is pretty tight with Safari and Apple is usually pretty quick to patch things up, Safari is not without it’s problems. The so-called “carpet-bomb” attack allows a malicious web site push potentially thousands of unwanted files to the desktop. While the user still needs to execute files that have been pushed, it can still be a hassle to have to clean up the mess, and some experts have speculated that a dual-pronged attack against Windows Safari users could have Safari downloading files and IE executing them, all without user interaction beyond visiting a web site. While scary, this hasn’t yet been seen in the wild and definitely shouldn’t overshadow the other accomplishments that Apple has achieved with Safari.

Opera

Last but certainly not least, we have Opera which released version 9.5 today. Opera has been a long-time flag-bearer for the web standards cause. They’ve also been a huge player in the mobile browsing market, bringing “real” web browsing to mobile devices long before the iPhone stole the thunder with Mobile Safari. (I personally use Opera Mini 4.1 on my BlackJack smartphone.) Opera was also the first browser to pass the previously mentioned Acid 3 test. WebKit followed a few days later, but Opera’s version wasn’t available for public download. The new 9.5 release achieves an 83/100 on Acid 3, the best score to date for a final release browser. Opera 9.5 includes the following new features:

• Really fast rendering of HTML, CSS and Javascript (hmmm… I see a pattern forming here)
• Improved malware and phishing detection and prevention tools
• Improved bookmarking tools
• Skinnable interface

Opera has also released Dragonfly, a debugging and development tool for Opera. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s great to see other browsers starting to include development tools on par with Firefox’s FireBug and Developer Tools extensions, which still set the bar for in-browser developer tools.

And let’s not forget that it was Opera that pioneered tabbed web browsing, which forever changed the way we (or at least I) surf the web!

*Whew*! That’s a lot of browsing! And we have to support them all! Luckily, with a trend towards standards compliance and performance, browser makers are making things a little easier on us Rich Media Technologists.

We all know just how much “fun” it can be to test for all the different versions of Internet Explorer.  Multiple-IE kind of works, but the best solution so far is still using Virtual Machines.  Developer Jean-Fabrice Rabaute, the author of DebugBar for IE, has developed a new solution which allows you to compare web sites in different versions of IE side by side.  The software is still in alpha, so there are still some issues.  Most notably, Flash does not work under IE6; that can be something of a show-stopper for most of our sites.  IE6 may still be the anchor that drags our cool applications down into the abyss of compatibility nightmares, but when this tool is ready for prime-time it could really help make IE testing slightly less painful.

link: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
Original Ajaxian article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/testing-ie-versions-just-got-a-little-easier 

Hello.  My name is David, and I’m a FireBug addict.

Hi, David!

It all started innocently enough.  I was introduced to FireBug about a year and a half ago.  ”Hey, try this Firefox plugin.  It’ll make your web development experience incredible!  And the download is free!”  Being a modern-day developer, I was willing to try new things.  I can always uninstall it later; I’m in control.  Or so  I thought.

At first, I just added some console logs to my code.  It was great!  It didn’t interrupt my “groove” the way that alerts did.  That led to color-coding: console.log, console.debug, console.error, nesting messages.  I was using more, but it made me more productive.  Then I started “inspecting” everything.  It was amazing!  Every detail, every attribute, every nested div!  And the styles became clear, too!  I knew exactly which style sheet was causing making that green background blue.  It was all sunshine and puppies until FireFox 3 came into the picture.

Sure, FireFox 3 was fast.  Blazing fast.  But in order to ride that train, I had to leave my beloved FireBug behind because it wasn’t “compatible”.  At first, I thought I could live without it.  I developed web sites for 7 years before FireBug came along, I don’t need to use it!  I found myself absently clicking on the space where the FireBug icon used to rest at the bottom of the browser window.  I even found myself booting up FireFox 2 just so I could get a console!  I was out of control.

Then, FireBug 1.2 went into beta.  And it was compatible with FireFox 3!  I could inspect all my elements!  Write to the console at blazing speeds!  Sure, I had to turn on the debugger for every domain, but with all the load time I’m saving, I barely noticed the inconvenience.

So in the end, I haven’t kicked my addiction, but I’ve learned to live with it; thanks to FireBug 1.2.

Get FireBug 1.2B1 at http://www.getfirebug.com/blog/2008/05/22/firebug-12b1/.

After a very short-lived jQuery 1.2.4 (it was up for less than a day before being marked as a “bad build“), jQuery 1.2.5 has been released into the wild!  It contains the usual flurry of patches, optimizations and fixes which are all spelled out in the Release Notes.

Of course, what you really want to know is whether or not this release is compatible with the $.string plugin, and the answer is yes!  (Really, I’m sure that’s what was on your mind.)

I love modern JavaScript libraries.  You get a lot of bang for your buck, keep your code clean, and make my life as a JavaScript developer easier in general.  I regularly use both jQuery and Prototype in my projects.  jQuery is a fantastic javascript library with excellent CSS selector capabilities and DOM manipulation. It’s light-weight and really fast. Prototype is an excellent all-purpose library with many great utility features, including string manipulation, enumerable arrays and hashes. I love using jQuery for its speed and simplicity, but I miss Prototype’s utilities. Luckily, jQuery is very extensible with its versatile plugin system.  dotString is a jQuery plugin that aims to bring Prototype’s string manipulation functions to jQuery.

The dotString home page can be found at http://www.stilldesigning.com/dotstring/.  jQuery ports over all of Prototype’s String functions.  (Except for toArray, which is just an alias of JavaScript’s split function.), and it does it “the jQuery way”.  i.e., without extending JavaScript’s built-in prototypes.  It’s not that I necessarily think that extending prototypes is good or bad; it’s more of a “when in Rome” kind of thing.  Most functions are completely rewritten due to inner dependencies within Prototype, but some are near-direct copies of Sam Stephenson’s (Prototype’s esteemed author) original code, and credited as such.  The library weighs in at 5k compressed, and if you really want to extend the String prototype, it can do that, too.  Documentation can be found on the dotstring home page and more completely in the comments of the uncompressed library.

After four years, it was time to update stilldesigning.com and bring it into the the blogosphere.  Why does Still Designing need a blog?  Because we’re doing some really cool stuff these days, and this gives me a place to share thoughts on things that are happening with web technology.  New advances in javascript libraries and techniques allow for lots of cool things on your web page that were previously only available through Flash web sites, and Still Designing is going to be there.  Cheesy?  Maybe.  But it should be a pretty fun ride.