Archiv für den Monat August 2008

Internet Explorer 8: Wieder konkurrenzfähig

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Die Konkurrenten Firefox, Safari und Opera knapsen dem Platzhirschen unter den Windows-Browsern, dem Internet Explorer, kontinuierlich Marktanteile ab – wohl auch, weil sie wesentlich konsequenter weiterentwickelt werden. Mit Release 8 des Internet Explorers findet Microsoft aber wieder Anschluss an die erste Browser-Liga, wie die Feature-vollständige Beta 2 zeigt. Sie steht auf den Microsoft-Servern für Vista, XP und Windows Server 2003 zum Herunterladen bereit.

Vollständiger Artikel bei heise.de

T3Cast zu DEV3: Eclipse basierte FLOW3- und TYPO3-Entwicklung

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T3Cast zu DEV3: Eclipse basierte FLOW3- und TYPO3-Entwicklung: “David Brühlmeier ist Robert Lemke per Skype aus einem Park in Zürich zugeschaltet. In knapp 20 Minuten zeigt Brühlmeier Robert Lemke beispielhaft, wie die von ihm im Rahmen seiner Masterarbeit geschaffene Entwicklungsumgebung DEV3 zu bedienen ist.

Gezeigt werden alle für die Arbeit notwendigen Schritte: Nach der eigentlichen Installation des Plugins wird die weitere Einrichtung gezeigt. Darüber hinaus geben Robert Lemke und David Brühlmeier einen Einblick in die Arbeit mit DEV3.

Das Projekt DEV3 verfolgt das Ziel, Entwicklern eine auf Eclipse und den PHP Development Tools (PDT) basierende Entwicklungsumgebung für TYPO3 zur Verfügung zu stellen.

Entstanden ist DEV3 aus den zuvor unabhängig gestarteten Projekten tyClipse von Sebastian Böttger und Eckhard M. Jäger sowie FLOW3DE von David Brühlmeier. Auf Anraten von TYPO3 5.0- und FLOW3-Entwicklungsleiter Robert Lemke haben sich die Projekte zur gemeinsamen Arbeit entschlossen.”

(Via t3n.yeebase.com – Open Source, Web & TYPO3.)

Is It Time to Ditch IE6?

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Is It Time to Ditch IE6?: “On August 27, 2001, almost exactly 7 years ago, Microsoft unleashed Internet Explore 6 upon the world. Despite version 7 having been out now for almost two years, and version 8 already in public beta, usage of the 2001 release remains strong. W3Counter reports that it is still the most popular browser in the world at 34.6% of all visits, while TheCounter.com has it second to IE7, but only barely and still commanding a whopping 36% market share.

Because so many people still use the older version of Internet Explorer, many web sites have made the choice to continue supporting it (including SitePoint — where about 12% of our visitors still come to us using IE6). But is it perhaps time to ditch IE6 support and start forcing people to upgrade?

Web application developer 37signals made the decision to drop IE6 support in July (actual support for Microsoft’s last generation browser ceased on August 15). ‘IE 6 can’t provide the same web experience that modern browsers can,’ wrote 37signals of the decision. ‘Continued support of IE 6 means that we can’t optimize our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our apps. Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress.’

According to 37signals, supporting IE6 was holding them back. And 37signals isn’t alone in their dislike of IE6. In 2006, a few months before Microsoft released their last major browser, PC World magazine ranked Internet Explorer 6 as the 8th worst tech product of all time, citing its terrible track record when it comes to security.

Security is such a big issue for IE6, that one blogger recently reported that 95% of all bots accessing his site use Internet Explorer 6 as their user-agent. ‘Most blog spam comes from bots that either fake or, as a trojan, use Internet Explorer 6 of infected systems,’ he wrote, ultimately deciding to block IE6 completely to alleviate the blog spam problem.

Of course, security isn’t the only reason web developers are sour on IE6. Internet Explorer 6 is also dismal when it comes to standards compliance. So why do people continue to use it? As Nick La wrote a year ago, the reason people still use IE6 is that developers go out of their way to make web sites work in it. So most people don’t realize that IE6 isn’t a good browser.

‘We all know that IE6 is outdated and has horrible CSS rendering engine. However, most average Internet users haven’t realized that yet. Why? Because we put our hard work on it and patch the bugs by various IE hacks,’ La wrote, urging people to drop support for IE6.

A third of the Internet is a lot of people to just leave behind, though. So support for IE6 continues at most web sites, especially large ones. What we need to move us forward, however, is a bold move, not too much unlike the one Apple made in 2001 when it decided to forgo backwards compatibility when it released OS X. In order to save the Internet from IE6, perhaps we need to stop supporting it.

What do you think? Should web developers stop supporting Internet Explorer 6? Vote in our poll and then leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

(Via SitePoint Blogs.)

iPhone GUI PSD

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iphone_gui.jpg

Over the past few months we’ve had to create a few iPhone mock ups for presentations. The problem we’ve encountered is the lack of resources to help us design something efficiently. Up until now we’ve used a nice PSD from 320480.com but we still found ourselves having to build out additional assets or heavily modifying bitmap based buttons and widgets.

Since we know we’ll be doing more of this, we created our own Photoshop file that has a fairly comprehensive library of assets – all fully editable.

(via fscklog.com)

Open-Source-Plattform für Social Networks: Elgg v1.0 startet

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Open-Source-Plattform für Social Networks: Elgg v1.0 startet: “ Elgg ist eine Open-Source-Social-Network-Plattform, die Blogging, Networking, Messaging, Communitys, RSS-Feeds und Filesharing miteinander verbindet. Die webbasierte Anwendung wurde auf der Grundlage von LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) entwickelt.

Ein wesentlicher Bestandteil von Elgg sind die ‘Views’. Damit werden die einzelnen Seiten für unterschiedliche Anwendungsfelder aufbereitet. Neben Standard-HTML sind beispielsweise Views für mobiles Internet, iPhone oder als eingebettetes Widget möglich.

Das Konzept von Elgg beinhaltet die Erweiterung der Plattform über Plugins. Damit diese Möglichkeit einfach und schnell umsetzbar wird, wurde das Framework von Elgg so geschrieben, dass viele Komponenten eines Plugins schon enthalten sind, wie beispielsweise ein Benachrichtigungssystem, Import/Export-Filter, Sprachanpassung und eine API.

Die Möglichkeit zum Datentransport zwischen unterschiedlichen Social Networks wurde in der nahen Vergangenheit immer wieder gefordert und von einigen Netzwerken auch schon angegangen. Elgg präsentiert in diesem Bereich mit der openData Definition (ODD) schon zum Start ein fertiges Konzept, mit dem die Nutzer in der Lage sein sollen, ihre persönlichen Daten von einem Netzwerk in ein anderes zu kopieren.

Die Social-Network-Plattform Elgg verfügt über einen hohen Funktionsumfang und ist als webbasierte Anwendung crossplattformfähig. Das vom Start weg enthaltene Konzept zur Data Portability macht Elgg zukunftssicher und hält eventuell vorhandene Einstiegshürden niedrig. Die vereinfachte Möglichkeit zur Entwicklung von Plugins sorgt zudem für eine zusätzliche Anpassungsfähigkeit der mit Elgg entwickelten Social Networks.

Heute (18.08) startet Elgg nun die finale Version 1.0. Einen ersten Eindruck kann man sich mit einer Testseite von Elgg verschaffen.”

(Via t3n.yeebase.com – Open Source, Web & TYPO3.)

A Closer Look at YUI 3.0 PR 1: Dav Glass’s Draggable Portal Example

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A Closer Look at YUI 3.0 PR 1: Dav Glass’s Draggable Portal Example: “

YUI 3.0 Preview Release 1 was made available on Wednesday, and with it we provided a look at how the next major iteration of YUI is taking shape. Among the elements we shipped with the preview is a new example from Dav Glass, the Draggable Portal, which exercises a broad cross section of the preview’s contents.

The Portal Example in the YUI 3.0 preview release.

The Draggable Portal is a common design pattern in which content modules on the page can be repositioned, minimized, removed, and re-added to the page. The state of the modules persists in the background, so a reload of the page or a return to the page calls up the modules in their most recently positioned state. You see variations of this design pattern on many personlizable portals like My Yahoo, NetVibes, and iGoogle.

In this article, we’ll take a look under the hood of this example to get a richer sense of YUI’s 3.x codeline and the idioms and patterns it establishes. We’re just pulling out some specific code snippets to examine here, but you can review the full code source for this example — and for 66 others — on the YUI 3 website.

(more…)

(Via Yahoo! User Interface Blog.)

Werde zum Manga …

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Werde zum Manga …: “Ohne Fotovorlage, allein mit einer Palette von Gesichts- und Oberkörperelementen, lässt sich binnen weniger Minuten ein Comic-Selbstportrait erstellen. Jeder kann den Service der italienischen Agentur Pixelheads kostenlos nutzen; eine Registrierung ist keine Voraussetzung. Die 178 x 178 Pixel große Grafik wird entweder per E-Mail gesendet, oder man macht sich einen Screenshot vom Endergebnis. Wer seinen Avatar in höherer Auflösung wünscht, kann für wenig Geld einen Ausdruck bestellen.

(Via Fontblog.)

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Why People Pirate Software

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Why People Pirate Software: “

Cliff Harris, the man behind one-man UK computer game development shop Positech, wondered recently why people were pirating his games. So a few days ago, Harris posted on his blog asking people to tell him why they downloaded his games without paying. Harris said his only motive was to learn about why people do it, and promised to ‘read every single [email], and keep an open mind.’ He promised not to rat anyone out for pirating.

Harris’ blog post got 206 comments and hundreds of emails — long ones, he said. ‘Few people wrote under 100 words. Some people put tolstoy to shame. It seems a lot of people have waited a long time to tell a game developer the answer to this question,’ he said.

Today, Techdirt noticed that Harris had posted his promised summary and response.

So why do people pirate software (specifically games)?

  • Money – ‘A LOT of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating. Many were kids with no cash and lots of time to play games, but many were not,’ wrote Harris. Positech’s games are priced between $19-23, and Harris said that he was surprised that so many people thought that was too high.
  • Quality – ‘Although there were many and varied complaints about tech support, game stability, bugs and system requirements, it was interesting to hear so many complaints about actual game design and gameplay,’ Harris said. Many people agreed that though today’s games look fantastic, they ‘got boring too quickly, were too derivative, and had gameplay issues.’ Another quality complaint: Demos are too short and people feel that they’re often not representative of the final product.
  • DRM – ‘People don’t like DRM, we knew that, but the extent to which DRM is turning away people who have no other complaints is possibly misunderstood. If you wanted to change ONE thing to get more pirates to buy games, scrapping DRM is it.’
  • Ease – Writes Harris: ‘Lots of people claimed to pirate because it was easier than going to shops. Many of them said they pirate everything that’s not on [Valve’s] Steam. Steam got a pretty universal thumbs up from everyone.’ (Harris said that he would love to get his games on Steam, but it’s not open to everyone.)
  • Because I Can – 5% of the replies, said Harris, came from people who admitted that stealing games online was easy to do because it was easy to get away with.

To his credit, Harris did just what he said he would and considered the responses he fielded. He plans to make a number of changes, including ditching DRM completely, creating longer game demos, considering a drop in price (though he seems most hesitant about that change), and working harder to create higher quality games. ‘I’ve gone from being demoralized by pirates to actually inspired by them, and I’m working harder than ever before on making my games fun and polished,’ he wrote.

One of the lessons to be learned from Harris, beyond the interesting look into the reasons why people pirate software, is the value of having a good corporate blog. We wrote last week that properly done a corporate blog can have tremendous value. Harris’ Positech blog proves that. By opening the channels of communication with his customers and users, Harris was able to get honest feedback that he is putting to good use to make himself more money and make his customers happier.

(Via SitePoint Blogs.)