Category: Developer

Apple customers who are clamoring for iOS 4.2 shouldn't have much longer to wait. Today, Apple released a gold master of iOS 4.2.1 to developers, which should get the gold master software for iPhones and iPads back on the same version after a little snafu with the iPad version of the software last week. 4.2.1 just came out, and there's no changelog, so we don't know whether any features have been ...

In a tweet yesterday, a leader of the Open Handset Alliance, Alvaro Vasquez, said that Android 2.3 will be coming "in the next few days". Roughly translated, the full tweet reads: "Prepare your Nexus One (Developer version) for Android OTA update 2.3 (Gingerbread) for the next few days :-D" While this isn't as authoritative as coming from Google itself, the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) is ...

Adobe engineer Rik Cabanier put on an extremely interesting tech demo earlier this week, showing off a Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool called "Wallaby," that would allow Flash developers to reuse many elements of their Flash projects -- including graphics, masks, and animations -- in an HTML file. The tool will also tell you which elements can't be converted, like animated masks, filters and ...

Canadian Brad Turcotte, AKA Brad Sucks, makes music. In fact, he makes open source music, and he lets people download the source files of his songs for free and remix them into all sorts of weird creations. Given his open source musical model, it should come as no surprise to you that Brad is a nerd. And as a nerd, he scratched his own itch and created the Brad Sucks Digital Download Store. The ...

One of the first things you learn about writing for the Web is that you have an incredibly short amount of time to make a first impression; it's usually said to be around three seconds. So, if you've grabbed your visitor's interest or managed to get your message across within those three seconds, you did a good job. But how do you know if you did? Clue is a new Web app from the fine folks at Zurb ...

I'm a big fan of Komodo Edit for editing PHP, HTML and other code. And now, Komodo Edit 6 is officially out! Komodo Edit 6 has been in Beta for quite some time, and I've been using the Beta versions for months. This release means Edit's older brother, Komodo IDE, also made it to version 6. Some of what version 6 brings to the table: Faster performance, since it's based on Firefox 3.5 -- It's ...

In an interview with the news service IDG, Intel's vice president of Software and Services says that the company is developing a tool to port iPhone applications to Intel's Atom-powered MeeGo smartphones. Without getting into too much detail, the processors used by Apple's devices (and almost every phone on the market) are not compatible with Intel's Atom processor. This tool would, in theory, ...

Slick, sexy and suave are just some of the adjectives that came to mind when I was testing Fillerati. This beautiful little toy is a testament to what one developer can do with modern Web technologies in just 48 hours. Functionally, it's very simple. Instead of generating Lorem Ipsum text for testing your new website or software, it lets you use excerpts from the works of famous (and long-dead) ...

Formatting text for the Web is an ongoing quest. HTML has a fairly steep learning curve, but people still need to blog, comment, and somehow format text. Personally, I'm a huge Markdown fan. In my opinion, if you're trying to write a blog post with formatting that can't be expressed in Markdown you're putting too much emphasis on the formatting. Still, not everyone likes Markdown, and sometimes ...

HTML5 is here, which means Web developers now have a whole bunch of new tags and elements to play with. The Periodic Table of the Elements is an effective visual map of what the "new HTML" looks like. It's a comprehensive table, too; it contains both existing elements (such as the hyperlink tag, a) and elements that were just introduced in HTML5. Elements are sorted by their function (root ...

Google Chrome Frame, Google's plug-in for bringing HTML5 and the latest Web apps to IE 6, 7, and 8, has reached stable status and left beta. Chrome Frame lets developers of modern sites and Web apps support legacy browsers, with the plug-in handling the HTML5 rendering when a user's old browser -- OK, old version of IE -- can't get the job done. Chrome Frame is an alternative to more complex ...

In one fell swoop, it seems like proper, contemporary 3D gaming could be coming to a Linux distro near you. Unlike Wine, this implementation of Direct3D under Gallium3D is an actual, native port of the DirectX APIs. There's no emulation involved -- Gallium3D just acts as a 'very thin wrapper,' allowing developers easy access to Direct3D's goodies. Luca Barbieri, the developer behind this new ...

Finally, someone has gone and done it: EtherCodes is a mashup of EtherPad and Skywriter (formerly known as Bespin). In simple terms, it's a collaborative, real-time, Web-based code editor, with syntax highlighting for C, C++, C#, Java, PHP, Python, JavaScript, Ruby (yay!), and HTML. It's currently in alpha, but I've played around with it, and it feels quite solid. It really feels like a hybrid. ...

CodeBurner is a neat tool for rapidly checking a ton of CSS and HTML reference information, including compatibility, functionality, and more. It's available as a Firefox add-on or a Firebug plug-in, and as an Adobe AIR application, OS X Dashboard Widget, or Opera add-on. I tested the Firebug variant, because I use Firebug for all of my Web debugging needs. And indeed, CodeBurner adds a nice, ...

Using a handy algorithm that splits a calculation into thousands of little intermediary processes, a researcher at Yahoo has used a cluster of 1,000 computers to calculate the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi. Not all two quadrillion digits -- just that one digit (which is a binary 0, if you're wondering). The calculation was made possible by Hadoop, an open source implementation of Google's ...