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Webmonkey Turns Another Page

By Scott Loganbill December 3, 2008 Categories: Other

We don’t have to tell you there’s some sort of economic troubles affecting our industry. We at Webmonkey knew it was only a matter of time before it would affect monkey_bites. Unfortunately, we were right and that time was this week.

Henceforth, Webmonkey has updated from 2.0 beta to 2.1 beta. In this update, the site will be streamlined in order to bring a little more focus towards our primary goal: being the web developer’s resource.

Unfortunately, it comes at a loss for what was the Webmonkey team. Michael Calore, Scott Gilbertson and Adam DuVander have taken their brilliant software and business news coverage over to Wired’s Epicenter blog. Scott Loganbill (that’s me) is left to maintain Webmonkey part time and continue to make the wiki the web-dev-opedia it is and was always meant to be.

With three less monkey_bites writers, the blog will change its direction slightly to cover less web software news and more web development community coverage. Also, all contributions to the wiki will be considered for promotion on the front page even more seriously. Webmonkey is all about sharing ideas and knowledge. The wiki is dedicated to putting out some of the most accessible web tutorials and resources. We think everyone should know how to build their own corner of the web, and we’re excited to provide a place for a community that feels the same way. In fact, this week we start out with a contribution by cpeterpan on how to write object-oriented JavaScript code.

If you haven’t contributed to the Webmonkey wiki, now is the time. Beyond the good feeling you get by teaching people what the web can really do, you also get the warm feeling that your tutorials are actually being read. If it’s really good, you might just find a Webmonkey t-shirt in your mailbox. If you’ve already written some tutorials elsewhere, feel free to cross-post to and from your own blog or website. Webmonkey is all set to host your content under Creative Commons so long as it is useful, on topic and not spammy. For more information, check out the Webmonkey Writer’s Guide.

As with any change, particularly in times like these, it comes as both difficult and challenging but with a healthy dose of excitement that only comes when starting a new chapter. The spirit of Webmonkey lives on in your voices and contributions. So pitch in people. After all, the web won’t build itself.


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Fedora 10 Arrives with Better Audio, GNOME Updates and a new IM Client

By Scott Gilbertson November 26, 2008 Categories: Operating Systems

fedoralogo.jpgThe Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 10, the next generation of Fedora Linux. Fedora 10 brings many of the same improvements we saw in the latest version of Ubuntu — a better network manager and updated versions of GNOME and GIMP among others — but also packs in some unique new features.

The big news for Fedora fans in version 10 is the new “glitch-free” version of PulseAudio, which improves sound in Fedora 10, and, as the name implies, gets rid of the annoying latency and dropped audio problems that plagued early release of PulseAudio.

Fedora 10 is also notable for opting to using GNOME’s new Empathy instant messaging framework. Ubuntu passed on Empathy, and having tested Empathy in the Fedora 10 RC1, we can see why. While Empathy works well enough, the interface is a bit simplistic next to other GNOME IM apps like Pidgin.

Our favorite part of Fedora, PackageKit, remains largely unchanged in this release. If you’ve never encountered PackageKit, it’s worth taking the live CD for a spin to see how well PackageKit “just works.”

PackageKit will automatically search for and install any software you need to open a file. For example, say you download a ODF file, but don’t have OpenOffice install, PackageKit will step in and prompt you to install OpenOffice and any dependancies so you can open the file.

Obviously PackageKit has its limitations — download a file for which there is no open source software, say a Word file, and PackageKit will remain silent — but for the average use case it adds a nice layer of user friendliness to the Fedora desktop.

You can grab the latest Fedora release from the Fedora site. By default the live CD will install GNOME so if KDE is your preferred desktop be sure to grab the KDE flavor.

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Google Maps Redesign Puts ‘Street View’ Front and Center

By Scott Gilbertson November 26, 2008 Categories: Software & Tools

Street ViewGoogle has revamped its popular Maps tool with a new interface that puts the emphasis on its Street View tool.

A new set of controls — looking very much like those you’ll find in Google Earth — highlights a new “Pegman” icon at the top of the zoom controls. Whenever Street View is available the pegman icon will turn orange. Dragging the icon onto the map then triggers the familiar blue lines of Street View and dropping the pegman icon onto the map will cause Street View to fill the map window.

Once Street View takes over, you can navigate using the Street View arrows or via a small thumbnail map that resides in the lower right corner of the map. There’s also a split pane view that shows Street View just above the regular map view.

Another very nice, and easy to overlook feature: zooming down past the lowest level of detail will automatically switch to Street View.

Although the changes are very slick, recognizing all the new options available isn’t immediately obvious. To help you out, Google has put together this goofy little video which shows the new features in action:

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Mozilla Mulls Adding a Third Beta to Firefox 3.1 Schedule

By Scott Gilbertson November 26, 2008 Categories: Software & Tools

The second Firefox 3.1 beta release is past due, but already Mozilla says that working out the remaining kinks in the next revision of Firefox will likely require a third beta before the final release arrives.

In a message to the Mozilla developer planning list, Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s “Phenomenologist,” says that the new features set to arrive in beta 2 — Private Browsing Mode, TraceMonkey and more — “will benefit from multiple beta releases.”

Mozilla ended up with a very similar plan for Firefox 3.0, adding a fourth beta at the last minute to ensure that all the bugs were squashed before the final release.

The good news is that Mozilla plans to make Firefox 3.1 beta 2 a stable enough release for add-on developers to start testing their code against. Mozilla has already called on add-on developers to pick up the pace when it comes to making extensions Firefox 3.1 compatible, but the addition of a third beta will give developers a bit more time to catch up.

If accepted, Beltszner’s plan calls for a beta 3 release later this year, though all the features arriving in the final release will need to be part of beta 2. The final version of Firefox 3.1 is currently set to arrive in early 2009.

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Processing Hits 1.0: Create Stunning Animations the Easy Way

By Scott Gilbertson November 26, 2008 Categories: Multimedia, Programming, Visual Design

Processing Example, WatercolorLookout Flash, the increasingly popular Processing language, which was designed in part to turn visual artists into programmers, has announced its long-awaited 1.0 release.

Processing has long been a favorite of animators — the language has been used for everything from animation in Radiohead videos, to web-based tools that can extract a color scheme from your photographs.

Processing is also widely used in academia where even those not naturally inclined to the technical side of programming (that would be us liberal arts majors) have latched on to processing’s ease-of-use and ability to create complex visualizations (for some examples, check out Complexification.net).

Because it’s open source, Processing has also been rolled into a number of other languages like Python, Rails, Javascript and many more.

Given that the new version is a 1.0 release, the focus is naturally on stability. But, while the focus may be stability, there are some new features as well, including an optimized 2D graphics engine, better tools for working with vector files, and new ways to create development add-ons to enhance the Processing production environment.

If you’re tired of Flash animation and you want to try out the new version of Processing — which is free and available for Mac, Linux and Windows — head over to the Processing website and grab the latest release.

[via Daniel Shiffman]

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Mobile Browsers Deserve Location Data

By Adam DuVander November 25, 2008 Categories: Mobile

How come my desktop browser can get my location, but mobile Safari on my iPhone acts as if it doesn’t know where I am? I hate to seem impatient, but there is a proposed geolocation standard. Mobile browsers should adopt it swiftly.

The mobile web is here. The iPhone and Android are going to duke it out, and the end result will be more users. Facebook’s mobile visitors have tripled in the last year. That’s a lot of mobile browsing.

If the location-aware services are going to be as disruptive as everyone has said, these devices need to get better at sharing the information available within them. Yes, Android and iPhone both have apps. But we shouldn’t need to wrap our web projects in an app just to access the coordinates.

The Geode plugin for Firefox and its presence as a full feature in the browser’s most recent beta have proven it’s reasonable to include it even on a non-mobile machine. Despite the flakiness of WiFi-based geolocation, innovative sites have incorporated the technology. You can shout your whereabouts or tie files to a location all with the help of browser-based geolocation. Of course, we have a Geode/Gears geolocation tutorial so you can incorporate it, too.

But we really want it incorporated in mobile devices, so we’d be able to see some real innovation. Location-based services are at the horse and buggy stage right now. Let’s give it an engine.

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Tags: android, browsers, iPhone, location
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Mashups Are Dead, But the Web is Alive

By Adam DuVander November 25, 2008 Categories: Platforms & APIs

Photo/Wikipedia mashupMashups, web apps which merge two or more data sources, essentially arose from the introduction of the Google Maps API in June 2005. APIs for easily accessing data existed before then, but a way to visualize it geographically was a huge tipping point.

Due to the popularity of map mashups, ProgrammableWeb’s mashup directory is over a third mapping-related. But something interesting has been happening: other types of mashups are becoming popular. Over the last two weeks, for example, maps mashups are only 20% of the new additions to the directory. Granted, it’s a small sample and mapping is still tops by far, but other ways of mashing up data are becoming more relevant.

How can mashups be both dead and more relevant? Consider Friendfeed, which aggregates your data using APIs of several social websites, pulling in each item you and your friends post to Twitter, Flickr, Digg, your blogs. It fits the criteria of a mashup perfectly. If Friendfeed was entered into the recent MashupCamp contest, it would have come away victorious. Friendfeed is an uber-mashup, though nobody calls it that.

Mashups are dead because the whole web is becoming a collection of APIs. In the future, showing an embedded map of liquor stores near that New Year’s party won’t be a snazzy add-on, it will be a necessary feature.

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Tags: maps, mashups
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Hide Google’s SearchWiki Clutter

By Scott Gilbertson November 25, 2008 Categories: Visual Design, Web Basics

No searchwikiGoogle’s new SearchWiki features, which supposedly make it possible to rearrange and annotate search results, is turning into something of a train wreck. First Google released the feature without offering a way to turn it off, then the company inexplicably disabled it for a while and then restored it without making any changes.

If you’ve had about enough of SearchWiki we have good news: an equally disgruntled user has whipped a Greasemonkey script to hide most of SearchWiki’s features. The aptly named No SearchWiki doesn’t disable SearchWiki but it does hide the links, which many feel clutter up the otherwise stark simplicity of Google’s search results page (especially if you use AVG, which already inserts its own links).

So if you’d just as soon SearchWiki went the way of the Dodo, you can help it along. Just grab the script from userscripts.org. No SearchWiki works wherever Greasemonkey does, if you’re on IE, check out this script which does basically the same thing.

[via Google Operating System]

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YouTube Embraces Widescreen, Paves the Way for Hollywood Features

By Scott Gilbertson November 25, 2008 Categories: Multimedia, Software & Tools

YoutubeAs we pointed out last week, YouTube is now offering HD quality video on select movies. But one of the hallmarks of HD video is the widescreen aspect ratio (16:9 rather than 4:3) and now the YouTube site has been updated so that all video is now displayed in a new widescreen player.

As the YouTube blog notes, this means that the vast majority of videos on the site — which were uploaded as 4:3 — are now displayed with black bars on the sides (the empty space not used by 4:3 videos).

You might be wondering why YouTube doesn’t auto-detect a video’s aspect ration and use the appropriate player — it’s a good question, one that many YouTube users are also asking, but so far the company hasn’t commented. We suspect the change is part of a broader move to make YouTube all HD, all the time, but it seems like giving video owners the option to choose which player is used would have been a sound idea.

But now that the groundwork is in place, with both HD converters and widescreen playback now available, look for YouTube’s video quality to improve. The service has already announced plans to host full length MGM movies and that move is likely to be followed by other partnerships.

In the past it was necessary to choose between audience size and video quality — if you wanted video quality you uploaded to Vimeo or Blip.tv, both of which have long offered HD and widescreen players, but if you wanted to reach the largest audience you uploaded to YouTube. However, that’s changed, YouTube is now a viable option for those of you wouldn’t dream of downsizing your videos to the grainy, boxy format that has long been the site’s hallmark.

Unfortunately, while the widescreen player is now the default on the YouTube site, the embed code is still written for the old, 4:3 ratio player. When we posted our write up of the HD features last week a couple people wrote to ask how we embedded a widescreen video.

I’m afraid the answer is that we manually changed the dimensions in the embed code. After a bit tinkering we found sizing the video player to 630×380 worked quite well — YMMV.

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Handbrake Still the Best DVD Converter, Now Handles Any Video Format

By Scott Gilbertson November 25, 2008 Categories: Multimedia, Software & Tools

HandbrakeHandBrake, our favorite way to convert DVDs to iPod-ready video formats, has released a major upgrade that adds support for just about any video source format, not just DVDs. The new features come courtesy of the libavcodec and libavformat libraries, which are borrowed from the ffmpeg project.

If all that sounds too geeky for you, here’s the short version: Handbrake can now convert just about any video format into something that’s ready to load on your iPod, Apple TV and other video device.

Although we would call this a major update (and the first release after a long silence from the Handbrake team), the release numbers have been only incrementally bumped — the latest version is HandBrake 0.9.3. But don’t let the version number fool you, this is a major release and ffmpeg isn’t the only news. Handbrake on Linux has also been upgraded and now has an official GTK graphical interface — there’s even available as a binary for Ubuntu. And don’t think that the new UI means just a wrapper GUI for the command line features, in fact the Linux GUI of Handbrake now has full feature parity with the Mac interface.

Of course, if you’re thinking that all this good stuff can’t come without a price, you’re right. Due to infringement concerns, the latest version of Handbrake no longer has built-in DVD decryption. The code that handles the decryption circumvents the copy protection present on commercial discs, and therefore violates copyright laws like the DMCA. We’d argue that copying a movie you own from a DVD to your iPod or iPhone falls within the bounds of fair use, but current laws state otherwise.

However, before you freak out, bear in mind that all you need to do to get it back is install VLC, which still ships with the libdvdread library which handles the dirty work of decoding.

As Handbrake project administrator jbrjake explains in the app’s user forum, “HandBrake being libdvdcss-free is something that a developer asked for over a year ago, because it made him feel uncomfortable openly contributing to the project. At the time I promised him we would try to get rid of it, and while it took quite awhile, dynaflash found a way to do it on the Mac side that I feel works very well and doesn’t make the process any more difficult in regular usage.”

He adds that since the project is open source, anyone can still build the functionality into Handbrake. The decryption code will download from VLC’s servers rather than Handbrake’s.

“Basically, we’re wiping our hands of storing and providing the decryption code ourselves. It won’t be in HandBrake’s binaries and it won’t be on HandBrake’s servers,” he writes.

The latest version of Handbrake is, of course, a free download. For more details on what’s new and changed, check out the Handbrake announcement or look through the release notes in Trac.

Frankly, we were getting worried the Handbrake project had gone dormant, so the new version is welcome, not only for the added features, but just to assure us that our favorite video converter is indeed still alive and kicking.

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