Archive for December, 2010

31st Dec 2010

The Top 8 Web Development Highlights of 2010


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This year brought quite a few headlines of note to the developer world. While we each have our favorites, from new releases of classic tools to astounding announcements from tech companies, here in no particular order are a few stories that stood out to us this year.

In the comments, we’d love to know what stories stood out most to you this year, partly to indulge our sense of gratuitous end-of-year nostalgia and partly to help us hone our coverage for 2011, when we hope to bring you more fascinating web dev news than ever before.

What were your favorite dev-related headlines of 2010?

1. The Release of Rails 3.0

Early in February, the Ruby on Rails core team took the wraps off Rails 3.0, a long-awaited release of the popular Ruby framework.

Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson wrote on the Rails blog, “We’ve had more than 250 people help with the release and we’ve been through almost 4,000 commits since 2.3 to get here. Yet still the new version feels lighter, more agile, and easier to understand.

“It’s a great day to be a Rails developer.”

2. Salesforce’s Acquisition of Heroku

Earlier this month, Salesforce bought Heroku for a staggering $212 million, giving another token of legitimacy to the growing Ruby community as well as to cloud-based programming tools.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at the time, “The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time… Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position Salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers.”

3. Facebook’s Release of HipHop for PHP

In February, Facebook rolled out HipHop, an internal open-source project intended to speed up PHP for large-scale applications.

HipHop isn’t quite a compiler. “Rather,” wrote Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao, “it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it.”

The project was the culmination of two years of work by a small team of engineers; in the end, it got a thumbs-up from PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, who said, “”I think it is a cool project and it will certainly be a good option for some sites.”

4. The Rise of Node.js

Node.js has been around for a couple years, but 2010 was the year awareness and use of the JavaScript framework really blew up.

Commits have grown, as has the number of committers. Traffic to the project website has steadily climbed through the year, and downloads for Node.js from GitHub have predictably grown, as well.

As the organizers of the annual Node Knockout wrote, “It’s at the bleeding edge of a technology stack that allows developers to blur the lines between software, the web and the new like never before.”

5. Microsoft’s Release of Visual Studio 2010

The latest version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio, a big release by any standards, launched this year to impressive reviews from all corners of the web. InfoWorld said the release “marks a major advance in functionality and ease,” and The Register wrote, “It is hard not to be impressed by Microsoft’s tool suite.”

The IDE was overhauled, completely rewritten from the ground up. Support for Silverlight was added, and Microsoft also took this opportunity to release F#, a new programming language developed by Microsoft Research.

6. Facebook’s Release of the Open Graph API

Facebook and social app developers have long wrestled with Facebook integration for third parties. In the spring at its f8 developer conference, Facebook rolled out a brand new model for tapping into the social web, and it did so to unprecedented fanfare.

Dubbed the Open Graph, Facebook’s changes brought instant gratification and familiarity for Facebook users as they surfed the web — and they brought a fast and easy way for devs to integrate with the social network, as easy as a single line of HTML in many cases.

7. The Android/Java/Oracle Saga

What a year it’s been for Java! Not only is the language a key part in the programming stack of the fastest-growing mobile OS out there; it’s also the star of a big, potentially spendy lawsuit between two of the giants of the tech industry.

Sun, which developed the language in-house back in the dark ages, was acquired by Oracle. That deal became official in January, and Oracle wasted no time in getting litigious with Google over that company’s use of Java in the Android platform and the Dalvik virtual machine that stands in for the JVM on mobile OSes.

The lawsuit began in August with Oracle claiming that Google “knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property.”

Google quickly countered that it was shocked — shocked! — that Oracle would make such claims over an open-source technology. It followed with the assertions that Oracle’s patents are unenforceable and that if there had been “any use in the Android platform of any protected elements” of Java, Google itself “is not liable” due to the face that such violations would have been committed by third parties and without Google’s knowledge.

We’ll continue to keep an eye on the lawsuit and on Java’s role in the Android platform throughout 2011.

8. Apple Declares War on Flash

Tensions between Apple and Adobe ran high this year, beginning in January when the iPad launched without support for Flash. Then in February, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told employees why: “No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.”

These were the words that launched a thousand blog posts. Throughout the spring, the two companies waged a war of words — and one sweet antitrust inquiry with the Department of Justice over Apple’s banning of Flash for iPhone app devs.

Steve Jobs dropped the bomb of the year in a passive-aggressive missive on Flash in which the Apple co-founder stated that Adobe’s programming technology “no longer necessary” and waxed hypocritical about open technologies.

But while he may have been passive-aggressive and hypocritical, he also may have been right. With HTML5 making a strong showing early in its lifetime, it was only a matter of time before a public figure of Jobs’s stature would make a statement or two about the death of Flash.

Of course, this tension has made for a convenient cozying-up between Google and Adobe along the way.

What Are Your Picks?

Again, let us know in the comments what your favorite stories of 2010 were — and Happy New Year from the geeks at Mashable!

With special thanks to our Twitter friends who made suggestions for this list: Jordan Runnin, Leon Gersing and Jeremy Bray.

Reviews: Android, Facebook, Google, Mashable, PHP, Twitter

More About: 2010, developers, News, programming, Web Development

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30th Dec 2010

Another Holiday Gift For The Practitioner

We hope your holiday season is going well, and you're full of good cheer and data driven egg nog (which doesn't really exist unless you love web analytics and have imbibed too much egg nog).

For those of you who really do dig web analytics and use Google Analytics specifically - you're going to really like our next gift. It's from the Santa Claus of the web analytics industry, Avinash Kaushik, the analytics evangelist here at Google. Avinash has written a must-read post that you should curl up with next to a roaring fire while you have time to relax over the holidays. In the post, he's basically done a ton of work for you. It's called 3 Awesome, Downloadable, Custom Web Analytics Reports and it showcases the power of Google Analytics and custom reports. In Avinash's words,
I love custom reports. They allow us to step away from the oppression of standard reports (/data pukes) and bring an increased amount of relevancy, calm and focus to our day-to-day work and to our beloved data consumers.
As you may know, you can create your own reports within Google Analytics. Here's a help article from our blog explaining how. In Avinash's typical style, he makes powerful analysis techniques accessible and understandable, and the best part is that he's created the reports for you allowing you to take action right away. You can click on a link that populates the report template right within your Google Analytics profile. Thanks for the holiday gift Avinash.

To give you a sneak peak and get you salivating to read Avinash's post, the three reports are:
  • Page Efficiency Analysis Report
  • Visitor Acquisition Efficiency Analysis Report.
  • Paid Search Performance Analysis Micro-Ecosystem!
If you're doing web analytics, these reports will be of use both educationally, and practically. Enjoy, and stay tuned for one more gift from Avinash.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

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29th Dec 2010

“World of Warcraft” + Xbox Kinect = Magic [VIDEO]

A group from the University of Southern California has created the coolest Xbox Kinect hack yet: gesture-based spell casting and controls for World of Warcraft.

USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies has created and released FAAST, or the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit. It’s a middleware toolkit that helps integrate full-body motion controls for games via the Kinect’s sensors. Essentially, ICT makes it possible to map full-body gestures to different keyboard commands.

A YouTube video demonstrating and explaining the technology has already generated over 350,000 views. In it, an ICT team member demonstrates how its hack can target enemies, cast magic spells, control the camera and move across the World of Warcraft landscape using only body movements like leaning forward or moving the left hand side to side.

Currently FAAST is only available for Windows, but the Institute intends to develop a Linux version. It also plans to open-source the project so other developers can create more dynamic projects with the toolkit. The Institute hopes that FAAST will help open a whole new world of healthy gaming.

While the World of Warcraft hack only allows for basic controls, it’s still amazing to behold. We can see a world where gaming is done through dynamic motion controls, rather than through the mouse and keyboard.

More About: Activision Blizzard, gaming, kinect, microsoft, video, world of warcraft, xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox Kinect

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28th Dec 2010

1,000-Core Chip Could Make PCs 20 Times Faster


Scottish scientists have built a 1,000-core processor, claiming it will run 20 times faster than today’s chips while using less power.

Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede led a research team at the University of Glasgow to create the futuristic processor using a programmable chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA).

Instead of the built-in circuitry of conventional desktop computer chips, these processors can be customized. So with some extremely clever programming, the research team was able to divide the processor into 1,000 cores, each capable of its own computation.

To give you some perspective, the fastest consumer processors such as Intel’s Core i7 tops out at six cores. According to the Daily Mail, the 1,000-core processor processes 5 gigabytes data per second, and that’s “20 times faster than modern computers.”

The researchers gave each one of the cores its own dedicated memory, speeding it up even more. Remarkably, they were able to leverage all this extra speed and power without using more energy. Because they’re using those more energy-efficient FPGAs, Dr. Vanderbauwhede calls them “a greener option.”

Will we be seeing these processors in our laptops anytime soon? Not exactly. The team will present their research at a symposium next March, but according to Vanderbauwhede, “I believe these kinds of processors will only become more common and help to speed up computers even further over the next few years.”

Image courtesy Flickr/Oliver Hammond

Reviews: Flickr

More About: 1000-core processor, computing, Glasgow, research, scientists

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27th Dec 2010

Is Android 3.0 the Answer to Google TV’s Problems, or Is It Already Too Late? [OP-ED]


It was clear from the day Google TV was revealed that the search giant had huge ambitions to bring the web to living room screens across the world. Google stood to make billions of dollars through both its partners and through TV advertising (a fulfillment of the Google Revenue Equation). You can’t say Google doesn’t dream big with its products.

At the time of its launch, we praised Google for its attempt to reshape the future of TV, but warned that it had to get things right the first time to succeed.

Here’s what we said in May:

“As one of the Googlers said in the demo, one of the key aspects of television is that it “just works.” For connected TV to work — whether it be from Google or someone else — it has to be reliable, usable and consistent. I can deal with rebooting my computer if it starts acting weird. I don’t feel the same way about my television set. As it stands, I already curse my cable company provided HD-DVR box for being finicky and having performance issues; if I have to reboot my entire entertainment system because an Internet video gets out of control, I’m not going to be very happy. I also have no desire to have to play tech support for my family when the TV stops working.

Not having had any hands-on time with Google TV, I can’t speak for how well it works compared to the competition — but this is an area that Google needs to absolutely have at 100% at launch. Release early and often may work on the web, but users don’t want to have to troubleshoot their devices in the living room.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. Initial reviews have been lackluster, mostly because the OS feels like an unfinished piece of software. From the few times I’ve used it, it’s navigable but not intuitive. It’s usable but complicated.

In other words, they pushed an unfinished product out of the door, and now Google is scrambling to fix its TV product and save the project from implosion. A recent report claims that Google has asked its partners to hold off on launching Google TV devices at CES so that it can tweak the software. We’ve been hearing the same thing from our sources.

Is It Already Too Late?

Google’s going to try to rectify the mistakes it made in the previous release with upgrades it will likely launch in February, we’ve heard. Part of that upgrade will come in the form of “Honeycomb,” the Android 3.0 OS. Unlike version 2.3 (“Gingerbread”), 3.0 is designed for bigger screens. While it’s focused on tablet devices, it will also come with upgrades for Google TV.

We’re not sure what Honeycomb will include to fix Google’s television device, but we expect it to make the interface less complicated, to improve the quality of video search results (Google says it’s working on this) and to add the Android Marketplace to Google TV. These are relatively safe bets for what will come in “Google TV 2.0,” courtesy of Android 3.0.

Will that be enough, though? The core of the problem lies in the speed, fluidity, and intuitiveness of the software. Google TV can be agonizingly slow and the interface can be gut-wrenchingly confusing. I don’t know how Google, Logitech or Sony expected the average blue collar, stay-at-home parent to understand it.

Can Google transform its interface enough to get Google TV started? Google should take a page from Apple’s playbook: Apple TV has been far more successful, thanks to its lower price point and far more intuitive interface.

Maybe I’m asking the wrong question. Perhaps the more appropriate question is whether it’s too late for Google TV to make a comeback. The clock is ticking for Google TV.

More About: android, Google, google tv

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26th Dec 2010

290+ Social Media Resources From 2010

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We’ve provided you with nearly 300 in-depth features, galleries and how-tos in the past year to help you navigate the social media world.

Here you’ll find a comprehensive list of all of those posts, covering everything from how to enhance your Facebook profile, find videos and music, contribute to a charity and just about any other topic you can think of.

We’ve broken the posts into categories including the big ideas about social media, the most popular social sites, including Facebook and Twitter, music, videos and photos, geo-location services, education, privacy and safety, social good, activism and government, among others.

If you’re looking to get caught up on — or re-read — Mashable’s social media resources from the past year, here’s your chance.

About Social Media

Facebook

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26th Dec 2010

290+ Social Media Resources From 2010

social media stamps image

We’ve provided you with nearly 300 in-depth features, galleries and how-tos in the past year to help you navigate the social media world.

Here you’ll find a comprehensive list of all of those posts, covering everything from how to enhance your Facebook profile, find videos and music, contribute to a charity and just about any other topic you can think of.

We’ve broken the posts into categories including the big ideas about social media, the most popular social sites, including Facebook and Twitter, music, videos and photos, geo-location services, education, privacy and safety, social good, activism and government, among others.

If you’re looking to get caught up on — or re-read — Mashable’s social media resources from the past year, here’s your chance.

About Social Media

Facebook

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26th Dec 2010

HOW TO: Land a Job at Microsoft


Everyone has a dream job. Whether it’s a company you’ve been pining to be a part of or a new product you’re dying to throw your creativity into, there’s always a line of work that seems like the perfect fit.

Though recognizing your ideal position is easy, actually getting the job is the hard part. For those looking to start a career at tech giant Microsoft, the sheer size of the company makes the hunt seem even more overwhelming. Resumes can get lost in a sea of applications, and finding the right contact to reach out to can be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

But that doesn’t mean you should give up on your dream of working at one of the most successful and dynamic corporations in the world. Here are some tips and resources from the company’s recruiters and employees for landing a job at Microsoft.

Getting Started

With so many locations and products, the first step in starting your Microsoft job search should be deciding where you want to work and what you want to create. Visiting the Microsoft Careers website can help answer these questions. There you can look for a specific position in the navigation bar or choose a country from the drop-down menu. On the Find Your Fit page, details on the company’s various professions and technologies are laid out to help you explore opportunities.

Once you apply by uploading your resume to a specific job posting on the site, it’s up for review. So how do you get that resume noticed?

Standing Out

Many recruiters use keyword searches to pull up resumes — but that doesn’t mean every other word needs to be “motivated” or “team player.” Be sure to list the names of certain technologies and programming languages you’ve used in each project you include. This will allow a recruiter to see what you know and how well you know it.

When putting together your resume, think about how you affected your environments and less about the basic facts of what you did. “Often, applicants write their resumes like a list of job tasks, but it’s even more important to call out your major achievements and the difference you made: what you did, how you did it, and why it mattered,” said Gretchen Ledgard, communications manager for Microsoft Recruiting.

Doing Your Homework

Microsoft is known for its difficult interview process and obscure questions. The best way to nail it? “Do your homework on us,” Ledgard said. Candidates who come in with knowledge about the role, team and location tend to already have an idea of how to frame their answers and are ready to ask solid questions.

Thom Mitchell, a Microsoft account technology strategist who was hired earlier this year, couldn’t agree more. He researched each person who was interviewing him and read up on the products he would be responsible for in the role and the competition for those products. He even prepared a short PowerPoint presentation about Microsoft products in case he was asked to present something on the fly (he wasn’t). When Mitchell asked questions, they were substantive and role-related — not “How are the health care benefits?” or “Is there a gym reimbursement?” More importantly, when he didn’t know an answer to a question he was asked, Mitchell simply said so and didn’t try to talk around the issue or come up with a fake answer.

Following Up

If you have questions after submitting your resume, many Microsoft recruiters are open to being contacted via social media, Ledgard said. Microsoft Careers is also open to connecting through social networks and has resources for potential job candidates on its advice hub JobsBlog.

But how do you strike a balance between keeping your name on the radar and being a nuisance? For Mitchell, the key was checking in as needed. He followed up with the recruiter after each screening interview and sent brief thank you notes to the hiring manager he interviewed with in person — but not to each person who interviewed him. Mitchell said his recruiter let him know what would happen every step of the way, so there wasn’t a need to over communicate.

Finding a Fit

There’s a big focus on not only job fit, but also company fit at Microsoft. Recruiters look for people who go above and beyond in everything they do, whether that’s taking the most difficult computer science courses or working on extracurricular projects, Ledgard said.

Still, there’s no fool-proof formula for landing a job at Microsoft. Even though the position you’re applying for might feel like the perfect match, sometimes it’s just not. Microsoft’s recruiters and hiring managers are the experts on what type of person will be a good fit for both the job and the company culture. The best advice? Relax. If it’s meant to be, it will.

Have you scored a job at Microsoft or are you trying to? What has your experience been like? Tell us in the comments below.

More Job-Related Resources from Mashable:

- 19 Resources to Help You Land a Job in 2011
- The Future of Human Resources and Social Media
- HOW TO: Score a Job Through Facebook
- 5 Ways to Get a Job Through YouTube
- HOW TO: Use Twitter Hashtags to Boost Your Job Search

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, Tomazl; Flickr, Pawel Niewladomski

More About: advice, careers, hiring, how to, interviewing, job recruiting, jobs, microsoft, resume, social media

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24th Dec 2010

Mashable Awards Facts From Baratunde Thurston [HUMOR]

If you didn’t already know that the 2010 Mashable Awards will be the event of the season, we’d like to give you a few more reasons to reserve yourself a seat.

In this video, awards show host and comedian Baratunde Thurston shares some (not so factual) facts about Mashable and the Mashable Awards Gala that will take place January 6 at the New York New York Hotel in Las Vegas.

Can’t get to Vegas? Don’t fret; we’ll be live streaming the event too, and if you take a peek at the video, you’ll find out why you should plan to tune in.

The Mashable Awards Gala at Cirque du Soleil Zumanity (Vegas)

In partnership with Cirque du Soleil, The Mashable Awards Gala event will bring together the winners and nominees, the Mashable community, partners, media, the marketing community, consumer electronics and technology brands, and attendees from the 2011 International CES Convention to Las Vegas on Thursday, January 6, 2011. Together, we will celebrate the winners and the community of the Mashable Awards at the Cirque du Soleil Zumanity stage in the beautiful New York New York Hotel. The event will be hosted by comedian Baratunde Thurston, The Onion’s Director of Digital, and the remix masters, Eclectic Method, will get the crowd in a party mood. The Awards Gala will also include acts and performances from our partner Cirque du Soleil Zumanity.

Date: Thursday, January 6, 2011 (during International CES Convention week)
Time: 7:00 – 10:00 p.m. PT
Location: Cirque du Soleil Zumanity, New York New York Hotel, Las Vegas
Agenda: Networking, Open Bars, Acts, Surprises and the Mashable Awards Gala presentations
Socialize: Facebook, Foursquare, Meetup, Plancast, Twitter (Hashtag: #MashableAwards)

Register for Mashable Awards Gala at Cirque du Soleil Zumanity stage (Las Vegas - 2011 International CES convention) [Ticketed Event] in Las Vegas, NV on Eventbrite

Thanks to Our Sponsors

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23rd Dec 2010

HOW TO: Make the Most of TextMate


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For web developers, a key part of the toolkit is a solid text editor. Vi and Emacs wars aside, there are lots of good choices for web developers, ranging from the ultra-sparse to the full-on IDE.

One of the most popular text editors for Mac OS X among coders is TextMate. Despite not receiving many major updates since 2007, TextMate is still a favorite amongst developers, front-end coders and even writers (a few of Mashable’s bloggers use TextMate to compose first drafts of blog posts).

On its own, TextMate is a good program. With the right add-ons and modifications, however, TextMate it can be a dream come true. Even if we never see a TextMate 2, here are some tips to making the most out of your TextMate installation.

Install Some Themes

Out of the box, TextMate comes with a handful of themes, but there are many more options for your text editing enjoyment.

In a previous post, I compiled some of my favorite TextMate themes from over the years and put them together in a handy package on GitHub.

To install a theme, just double click it. TextMate, like other text editors, is designed for monospaced fonts. Mac OS X comes with several choices, including Menlo, which made its appearance in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

If you want to further explore your programming font choices, check out this article, written by my friend Dan Benjamin, which provides a great overview of some of the most popular choices.

Add Some Plugins

Despite not receiving any major updates for well, years, TextMate remains a favorite amongst old and new developers. If I had to pick a single reason, it would be the extensible nature of the program.

Simply put, TextMate can be extended and improved via the use of plugins and bundles. Plugins can impact the program as a whole, whereas bundles are specific collections of commands, snippets and shortcuts.

Some of my favorite TextMate plugins include:

  • WebMate — This lets you preview and edit HTML content in TextMate.
  • MissingDrawer — This adds a better project window interface to TextMate.
  • SVNMate — A nice SVN integration for TextMate.

What’s even better than just downloading the plugins is downloading the plugins and a set of UI modifications. One of my favorite TextMate “packages” is Green Moleskine, which has recently been updated to version 1.2. The new version includes Snow Leopard support for some of the UI modifications.

Green Moleskine also includes SVNMate, WebMate and MissingDrawer, but the link to MissingDrawer on GitHub has an updated version of that plugin.

For new TextMate installations, I usually just start with Green Moleskine and then build out.

Get GetBundles

Without a doubt, bundles are my favorite part of TextMate. I never thought I would be the type of person who got religious about my text editor, but the bundles feature in TextMate has made me a disciple.

Over the years, TextMate bundles have been created for practically every web framework and task you can imagine. You can find these bundles online and double click the *.tmbundle file to install.

But what if there was a better way to discover and install bundles, within TextMate itself? There is, and it is called GetBundles. GetBundles has a graphical interface that allows you to search the official TextMate bundle repository, the review queue and GitHub. The GitHub support is really slick, because these days, that’s where most of the updates and new code ends up being released.

The easiest way to install GetBundles is to pop open Terminal in Mac OS X and paste in the lines that Trey Piepmier thoughtfully setup on his blog.

Once GetBundles is installed, you can search the various repositories and click on a bundle to install it — and also check for updates to the bundles you already use.

Bundle Bonanza

Once GetBundles is installed, the final step to an awesome TextMate experience is track down some bundles.

These are a few of my favorites:

  • Blogsmith Bundle — Back when I wrote for TUAW and DownloadSquad, my colleague Brett Terpstra created a bundle to help us with our blogging. He did this because the backend of the publishing tool we used was unable to connect to XML-RPC clients like MarsEdit. This bundle, which included things like the ability to select a group of words and quickly insert a link, search archives or add tags and other information to a post, became something that I was so reliant on, I commissioned Brett to write me a Mashable-specific add-on bundle when I started working here. If you do any type of web writing, this Bundle, which works with MultiMarkdown, is an absolute gem.
  • MultiMarkdown Bundle for TextMate — John Gruber’s Markdown syntax is a format for writers who want markup that is readable and fast. MultiMarkdown adds even more features in the form of a TextMate bundle.
  • CSS3 Bundle — David DeSandro (of jQuery Masonry fame) created this excellent CSS3 bundle for TextMate, complete with browser-specific prefixes.
  • HTML5 Boilerplate Bundle — Darren Wood made this bundle, which puts all the HTML5 Boilerplate goodies at your fingertips.

How have you tricked out your TextMate install? Let us know in the comments.

More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:

- Hacker Web Design: Words of Wisdom for Building Great Apps
- 5 Better Ways to Read “Hacker News”
- A Beginner’s Guide to Integrated Development Environments
- 10 Chrome Web Apps to Check Out
- HOW TO: Make Your WordPress Blog More Like Tumblr

More About: IDEs, mac apps, mac software, software, text editors, textmate, web development series


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