Tag Archives: emerging technology
1. Google Introduces Dart: A Structured Programming Language for the Web
JavaScript has been the language of the web for over a decade now. It’s provided us a facility for creating dynamic experiences and complex behaviors inside of our browsers. And recent advancements in JavaScript engines (such as Google’s V8 engine that powers its Chrome browser) have allowed us to push the boundaries of what was previously impractical.
However, JavaScript developers such as myself often have a love/hate relationship with the language. While JavaScript is simple, dynamic and usually a pleasure to write, it arguably lacks the structure, speed, security and features of many other languages. However, this shouldn’t be a surprise, considering JavaScript was created in essentially 10 days back in 1995.
Google’s recognized these weaknesses in the language that powers the web — which is why they’ve created the Dart programming language. Dart’s goals, as mentioned in Google’s blog post, are to ensure the language is structured yet flexible, familiar and natural to developers, and (probably most importantly) high performance. To accomplish this, Dart borrows ideas from languages such as Java, JavaScript and Smalltalk. 
But Dart faces a number of challenges. First is developer adoption. One reason JavaScript took off so quickly was it’s ease-of-use and low barrier to entry for developers. In order for Dart to fully gain support from developers, it first needs to be widely supported in browsers which I see as Google’s biggest obstacle. JavaScript is already so prevalent. Why should browser makers go through the trouble of supporting another language? Google needs to come up with some compelling reasons and examples of what Dart is capable of.
Adobe Acquires TypeKit and PhoneGap to Broaden its HTML5 Toolset
Adobe made some big announcements yesterday at their Adobe MAX conference. Adobe announced two new acquisitions: Nitobi (creators of PhoneGap) and Typekit. PhoneGap is an impressive platform for developing native mobile applications using web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. TypeKit is a popular service used for enabling developers and designers to embed custom font faces on websites – enabling web content to be beautiful as well as accessible and search engine-friendly.
With these acquisitions, Adobe’s clearly proclaiming their support for web standards and sees standards as playing a large role in their future. There’s been an obvious controversy around Adobe’s position on standards-based web technologies like HTML5 when they’re also promoting the use of their Flash product. But today, it’s even more clear that Adobe is vying to maintain their position as a leader in publishing for the web.
After watching the responses around the web regarding these two acquisitions, it’s clear there is some hesitation and doubt that Adobe will be able to maintain the integrity of these two companies. There are some questions around whether or not Adobe will simply just introduce more corporate bureaucracy and ultimately be the demise of these acquisitions.
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Tiered, Adaptive Front-end Experiences
We all know that HTML5 is the new black — and there’s no question it’s here to stay. But there still remains a challenge for developers and designers to leverage these new technologies while not marginalizing users of less capable browsers. This is a paradigm shift from what we’ve typically created, which are experiences that work and look exactly the same in all browsers. Instead, we must create “adaptive experiences”. 
This movement isn’t a new one by any stretch, but it is finally hitting the mainstream. And for good reason too. We’re faced with the task of deciding how we should handle experiences in a browser like Internet Explorer 7 (released in October of 2006) along with Google Chrome 13 (released August 2011). Should the experience be exactly the same in both browsers? If so, we can only do one of two things:
● Spend a considerable amount of effort on ensuring compatibility with our complex experience on the fading IE7 and IE8 platforms or,
● Cripple the entire experience down to a much simpler one IE7 and IE8 can handle, while ruining it for those who are on more modern platforms
One way to avoid both of those situations is to develop experiences that are “tiered and adaptive”.
Paul Irish, citing a handful of other industry experts, wrote up a great post called “Tiered, Adaptive Front-end Experiences” explaining the benefits of NOT creating a “one experience fits all” solution. He mentions Nicholas Zakas’ brilliant metaphor using televisions. Zakas reminds us how we don’t broadcast black and white pictures just because that’s all that’s possible on least capable TV. We should be treating our web experiences the same way: don’t limit them based on the least capable browser. Read More
There’s no denying it. Social Media has taken center stage in the day-to-day activities of our lives – From tweeting on the morning commute, to sharing photos of life’s precious moments with your Facebook friends. The social media extension to mobile devices has only escalated our omnipresent connection to our online profiles.
Which begs us to ask the question…what’s next?
In a world of seemingly endless connectivity to our social networks we can expect to see even deeper social media exposure and integration into many of the common products we use everyday.
Products such as a coffee mug, bicycles, or televisions have the potential of becoming viable channels for reaching out to our social networks. This concept may reach far beyond the usage in expensive goods such as cars and down to something as simple as a travel coffee mug. The rouge wave of social innovation seems to have endless possibilities in the ways we interact with our social media networks.
So we want to know – What do you think will be the next consumer good to have a social media feature?
We will take the most creative idea or concept submitted and create a prototype!
All entries will be shared at http://goodsgoingsocial.tumblr.com/
Adobe Edge beta brings Flash-style design to HTML5
Adobe announced a beta version of what appears to be a basic HTML5 animation authoring tool. It’s called “Adobe Edge”. Edge, sporting a very similar interface to many other Adobe products such as Flash and After Effects, allows developers and designers the ability to create and manipulate simple shapes and typography — with the final product rendering HTML5 code.
I’ve always hoped Adobe would take this direction with their authoring tools, instead of putting all their chips in on Flash. But the beta of their Edge tool still leaves me uncertain. In it’s current infant state, the tool is more of a proof of concept by Adobe — asserting their interest in open web technologies. Its creations are not compatible with older browsers, renders code not exactly easy to manipulate without Adobe’s tool, and is quite limited in its capabilities. Some have even created demos using Adobe Edge poking fun at the new tool. With all that aside, I’m optimistic Adobe will find a solution to ease the burden of creating HTML5 animations. There’s certainly a void in this space right now that needs to be filled. But for the time being, it’s back to doing by hand.
The HTML5 boom is coming. Fast.
So you’ve probably heard about this HTML5 thing. It’s a pretty big thing. Developers such as myself salivate at the chance of getting to play with some HTML5. Unfortunately, we also have to be realistic and accept that not all of our users are on modern platforms that support the latest and greatest HTML5 technologies. Read More
Google releases “Swiffy” tool to convert Flash SWF files into HTML5
In their quest to push more standards-based technologies like HTML5, Google has released a new tool that will convert certain Flash SWF files into “HTML5” (more specifically, SVG and JavaScript). Playing off the common pronunciation of the acronym SWF, they’ve called the tool “Swiffy”.
It’s a very interesting project but, due to what I would assume are some technology restrictions, the tool can only be used on older SWF 8 files using Actionscript 2.0. Most Flash projects built in the past few years are likely to be SWF 9 or 10 using Actionscript 3.0 — so don’t expect to convert that fullscreen Flash site using this tool. However, I can see some obvious uses to convert some Flash-created banner ads as they’re generally very simple and likely trivial to convert using this tool.
A couple of months ago I mentioned Adobe’s Wallaby project which is also an attempt to turn Flash projects into HTML and JavaScript. It has a wider range of capabilities and will probably be of more use to more developers — where Swiffy is more useful for simple conversions.
