•
Will popular websites, especially those from news and entertainment companies, work on the iPad? Apple, in an arguably brilliant PR effort now has an answer: an online collection of iPad-Ready sites . The Cupertino-based maker of iPods and iPhones made a bold, potentially Internet-changing decision when it decided that the upcoming slate computer known as the Apple iPad would not support Adobe Flash technology. This browser plugin, used across the Web for everything from streaming video to casual games, is slowly being phased out by HTML5, the next revision of the core markup language used in the creation of Web pages. The video support included in the upcoming Web standard requires no downloadable, installable plugin in order to work. But HMTL5 is still new, and details - including what video codec it will support - have not been ironed out. Sponsor Apple's New "iPad-Ready" Collection Initially spotted by the eagle-eye bloggers at The Next Web , the new "iPad Ready" resource available at www.apple.com/ipad/ready-for-ipad is a collection of websites that now officially work on the iPad. According to the site's description, this collection includes websites that take advantage of standards like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. In other words, these are sites that have been designed just for the millions of new iPad owners expected to be online by the end of the first quarter this year. Included in the list are CNN, Reuters, New York Times, Vimeo, Time, Major League Baseball, The White House, Virgin America, Sports Illustrated, Flickr, People Magazine and TED. Site owners who want their website listed can use the included submission form to be added to the list. Also, at the bottom of the page, there's a link to the Safari Technical Library documentation detailing how to get your Web content ready for the iPad . Flash vs. HTML5: Did Apple Make this a War? This "iPad Ready" site's launch seems all the more relevant in light of yesterday's news from Apple's newest rival Google : the Internet giant announced it would begin integrating Flash into its Web browser Google Chrome . Was that a shot at Apple? Or was Google genuinely interested in making Web browsing less complex for everyday users? It's a valid question. The debate about Flash's future on the Internet is so hotly charged at the moment, that even WSJ reporter Walt Mossberg seemed afraid go into detail in his otherwise stellar, in-depth iPad review . The only mention he made was this: "I probably used the laptops about 20% as often as normal, reserving them mainly for writing or editing longer documents, or viewing Web videos in Adobe's Flash technology, which the iPad doesn't support, despite its wide popularity online." Perhaps he honestly doesn't think the iPad's inability to display Flash content will be an issue...and maybe it won't be. But to ignore the burning question that many soon-to-be iPad owners have - that is: will my favorite websites work? - seems like an oversight at best. These days, the Flash vs. HTML5 discussion is being framed as a "war" (and if you read through the comments of a post detailing video performance test results, you would think it certainly is). But the truth is, HTML5 isn't displacing Adobe Flash anytime soon. It likely will...eventually...but that day is years away. This is according to Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire , whose company is helping website owners prepare for iPad. The issue, said Allaire, is that the percentage of Web browsers that support HTML5 is "tiny," and those that do so haven't yet settled on one video codec as the default. Until there's uniformity in the implementation of HTML5 video, he said, publishers will offer multiple versions of their websites, dependent on what device, browser and operating system is in use by their website visitors. So in the meantime, that means desktop Web surfers will see Flash, iPad Web surfers will see HTML5 on some sites and the " Flash broken blue lego " elsewhere. Even if that's the case, it won't, in the end, take away from the iPad's relevance in the new age of touch-based computing. It will just be a temporary setback until the rest of the Internet catches up with its own future. Discuss
Continue reading here:
Worried About Flash on the iPad? Apple Tries to Ease Your Fears
Tags:
adobe-flash,
apple,
Apple iPad,
browser,
collection,
flickr,
iPad,
ipad owners,
library,
major league baseball,
people,
people-magazine,
sports,
upcoming,
virgin-america,
words
•
Cloudkick is a cloud monitoring start-up that helps system admins manage cloud servers. Today, the company announced it is getting physical, bringing its cloud monitoring capabilities to internally hosted servers and virtual machines. The company has had a lot of success in helping companies who startup in the cloud and start to achieve scale. It already has a host of hot startup companies including Posterous , Bump Technologies , and Urban Airship . Through listening to users, the company decided to offer local server support to merge its view of all server assets for these organizations. Sponsor What is CloudKick? Cloudkick enables a company to manage internally hosted servers and run the Cloudkick's agent and report into the same console as your cloud computing infrastructure from AWS, RackSpace, SliceHost and others. When installed, the CloudKick agent will respond to status checks from the Cloudkick monitoring solution, which itself is a distributed cloud application. Cloudkick supports a host of cloud provider solutions and shares a report of feature. We met with the company at their offices in San Francisco. Upon entry to the warehouse, called " The Farm " near the Mission District, we realized that was a true technology startup , founded by system administrators trying to make their jobs easier. The team participated in Y-Combinator and has received an initial capital infusion by Avalon Ventures. The Cloudkick system offers consolidated server reports and shows server events by polling registered clients in cloud (and now data centers) and piping them to Cloudkick's multi-tentant event aggregator. The tools are modeled after administrative tools like Cacti, Nagios, and Munin, but are delivered on on top of an agent-driven real time view of the underlying assets of server infrastructure. When checking out the demonstration, we also noted that the browser is updated in real-time as events are polled. This keeps the information fresh without having to re-check and brings the best of browser based real-time communication to system administrations. Cloudkick's implementation is simple and elegant. The young company is demonstrating product leadership by living the mantra of simplicity and utility. Here's a sample of the graphs from CloudKick's feature inventory . Monitoring Every Server The goal of this release is to bring servers from the datacenter to power of cloud monitoring. It allows a larger and larger region of infrastructure to rely on outside controls to monitor it's health and well being. One feature we we intrigued by with Cloudkick was the ability to tag and filter groups of hosts, and to then set rules across them. For example, tagging all servers "web apps" allows a rule to quickly set custom rules for checking up time. The company offers an API for its services and uses 2-legged OAuth for API authentication. OAuth is "an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.". The company also offers a proxy service that streamlines and secures the connections for hosts that will connect to the Cloudkick services. Cloudkick is a cloud company monitoring clouds and shows us in many ways the architecture of the future. In one of the blog posts from company, they share " love affair with cassandra " and how multi-master database technology is an enabler for co-location of server assets in infrastructure clouds. Where does Cloudkick go from here? Discuss
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Cloudkick Broadens its Scope: Now Monitors the Datacenter
Tags:
announcements,
api,
architecture,
brings-the-best,
browser,
cloud,
Cloudkick,
cloudkick-tools,
connections,
demonstration,
jobs,
tools
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Fennec , the mobile version of the Firefox web browser, is now available in an early build designed for Android handsets thanks to a fan-compiled download posted on an Android developers forum . And by early, we mean unofficial, pre-alpha, device-specific and downright buggy. But for anyone interested in mobile browser developments, this port is an interesting sneak peek into the future of Firefox's mobile plans. Sponsor Fennec for Droid German developer Martin Schirr's version of Fennec is ideal for Droid users because it requires a hardware-based keyboard. Without support for touch input or multi-touch, it won't work on all flavors of the Google Android mobile operating system. It's also a hefty download - 41 MB in size. And it freezes upon first boot. Plus, it's slow and prone to crashes and bugs. But that's what pre-alpha means - especially a pre-alpha that wasn't released by the Mozilla organization itself. So what can you do with the Android version of Fennec? Well, you can test out its features, like tabbed browsing, tab synchronization between desktop and mobile and browser add-ons. Right now, there aren't too many add-ons available, but given the stage of development, that's not surprising. Fennec: Slow to Launch? We first heard of Mozilla's plans to bring Fennec to Android back in June of last year when Google announced a change in how software can run on Android. After the release of a new Android NDK that used C/C++ programming languages - the same as Firefox - Mozilla began to consider the possibilities of bringing the Fennec browser to the Google-branded mobile platform. In October, Mozilla CEO John Lilly re-confirmed the organization's plans to build an Android version, while touting its many features like support for "Javascript, CSS, Flash, SVG, video and audio." It would be "the first mobile browser to support add-ons," he said. Now it's nearly 9 months later and there's still not a usable version of the browser for Android devices - just pre-alpha builds like this. Should we be concerned? Should Mozilla? While waiting for a real version of Fennec, the popularity of Webkit-based browsers continues to grow, Opera gains mobile ground (especially on feature phones), and last month, Microsoft announced a new mobile OS launching by year-end, Windows Phone 7 Series. This OS will include an updated version of Internet Explorer Mobile that offers multi-touch gesture support and tabbed browsing, among other features. Mozilla is expected to release a working build of Fennec around the same time, but depending on the exact launch dates, they may not get to claim "first" anymore - at least among the top web browsers out there. (Third-party apps already deliver tabbed browsing on various mobile devices). That being said, support for Mozilla is still strong. And once functional, it may have a lot more to offer than its competitors. In the meantime, intrepid Android geeks will be definitely be interested in giving this new fan-compiled Fennec build a look. However, general Android users should probably stay away for now - this version is by no means meant for daily use. Discuss
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Mobile Firefox Comes to Android (Sort of)
Tags:
browser,
browsers,
css,
Fennec,
flash,
internet,
Microsoft,
mobile,
mozilla,
Opera,
possibilities,
windows
•
Fliptop , a new content subscription service, is one of several companies presenting at this week's DEMO conference in Palm Springs. Among a large group of startups, this was one of the first to catch my eye, making me think "wow, I need that!" In short, what Fliptop offers is a simple way to subscribe to a website's content. But unlike traditional RSS feeds, which just offer a direct feed which must be added to an RSS reader like Google Reader or FeedDemon , Fliptop's service provides more features, like the option to filter content by keyword, follow only select topics or categories and the ability to receive email digests of the just content you're interested in. Sponsor For Web Publishers The Fliptop service is available in two formats - one designed for website publishers and another designed for web surfers . The first provides an embeddable button that publishers can add to their site. When clicked, this button prompts the user as to which topics they want to follow. A sports site could set it up so fans could just check boxes next to their favorite team names, for instance. Another option below the checkboxes lets you further refine the content you choose by keyword filters. So, here on ReadWriteWeb.com , for example, you could follow news about "mobile, real-time web, apple" etc. (Keywords are separated by commas). After picking your options, you click "Next" and then choose how you want to be alerted - either via a traditional RSS feed or by email, Twitter, Facebook, or SMS text. If choosing the email option, you can even configure how often you want to be alerted - once per day, once a week or immediately. For Consumers However, you don't have to rely on publishers to begin using Fliptop before you can try it. A browser bookmarklet is available which lets you drag-and-drop a Fliptop button to your web browser's bookmarks. Click the new "Subscribe" button it creates when you're on any page that has an RSS feed (look for the orange icon in the address bar of your browser). When clicked, you can configure how you want to follow that site. At the moment, your only options here are email or RSS. The service is simple, incredibly easy to use and useful for anyone who feels overwhelmed by their news feeds. (Gadget blog readers, rejoice! This product is perfect for you!). The only downside to the service as it stands right now is that it requires you to fill out CAPTCHAs when signing up. These spam blocking tools force you to type in the blurry words you see into a text box before confirming your subscription. And if requesting an email subscription, you then have to click yet another confirmation sent to you via email to assure Fliptop that you really did want to subscribe. We appreciate that the company is looking out for us, but two confirmations is at least one too many for what should be a speedier service, in our opinion. Will Fliptop Make Website Subscriptions More Mainstream? The real question now is whether something like Fliptop will encourage more people to follow a website's content via an automated mechanism, be it a customized, filtered RSS feed or an email digest. The idea of subscribing to a website directly via an RSS feed is one that, for whatever reason, never quite caught on with the general public. However, those same folks probably use RSS without even knowing it - like when they follow their favorite blog on Facebook, for example. The updates they track there are, in most cases, automated via RSS technology. Fliptop could potentially reach these same sort of non-technical users too, thanks to its simple terminology (publisher buttons say "follow" not "subscribe"), a clean layout and easily understandable filtering options. Now it's just a matter of waiting to see if any web publishers pick this up and place it on their site. Discuss
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Fliptop Makes RSS Easy, More Configurable
Tags:
browser,
confirmation,
demo,
facebook,
Fliptop,
news,
opinion,
option,
Reader,
sms,
subscription,
user
•
At the time of this writing, it's been just over two hours, 21 minutes and 14 seconds since Opera submitted Opera Mini to Apple for inclusion in the iTunes App Store. How do we know this? Opera is putting Apple's notoriously slow response time and browser monopoly on center stage today as part of its announcement that it is coming to the iPhone. Sponsor Opera first announced that it was planning to bring its mobile browser to the iPhone at the beginning of February. As we noted then, Apple's response is uncertain, as it has yet to allow any browsers that use alternative rendering engines on the iPhone. While other apps work on top of Safari, there are no other independent browsers. Opera Mini is already available for Symbian and Android and Mozilla has been working on apps for Android and Windows Mobile. A primary difference between Opera and Safari is the browser's server-side rendering, which downloads a web page to a server and compresses it before sending it to the client, in this case your phone, for viewing. This method can reduce page load-times dramatically and could be even more important for mobile browsing than it is for web viewing at home. The following sneak-peek video shows a full-featured, tabbed browser that certainly looks a lot faster than Apple's native Safari. Even if we end up trying Opera Mini and decide to stick with Safari, in the end we feel it's always better to have options when it comes to software and platforms. But then again, that's not exactly what Apple is known for, is it? Hopefully, Opera Mini will pass muster and it will be the beginning of the browser revolution for the iPhone - or, at very least, we'll have two browsers to choose from. Discuss
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Opera for the iPhone? We Sure Hope So.
Tags:
apple,
browser,
client,
independent,
iphone,
Opera,
opera-mini,
phone,
safari,
time,
viewing-at-home,
writing