WebProNews

Category: Developer

App Development, Web Design & Web Development News

  • $100K Raised by Code Hero Developers Through Kickstarter

    Coding is not fun for most people, and one of the most frustrating parts of coding is learning how to do it! Several sites such as Code Academy try to teach people in a fairly simple way, but Primer Labs has devised a thrilling, yet educational way to get involved: Code Hero! Primer Labs official website says it perfectly: “Code Hero is a game that teaches you how to save the world with a code gun that shoots Javascript.” The problem became funding, so they pushed the project to the worlds largest funding platform, Kickstarter, to help. You may know Kickstarter as the company that helped Tim Schafer get the funding for his new game.

    Tasked with the goal of reaching the $100,000 mark, the internet community went head first in supporting this venture. Through sites such as Reddit, the objective was easily reached and then surpassed, so much so that the boys at Primer Labs put a new goal in front of their supporters. $200,000 for an MMO Multiverse in addition to the single player version. While they didn’t reach their new goal in the allotted time, some big name gaming celebrities are on board with their support so I imagine that they will be successful.

    @noobde
    Ed Boon    I absolutely LOVE the Kickstarter (game dev) surge that has been happening. So exciting to see the new projects!
    http://t.co/mzloTa47 54 minutes ago via web ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    Code Hero teaches you how to code in JavaScript in a first person shooter format similar to the game Portal from developer Valve. Instead of traditional controls, the game uses commands such as (HitObject.rigidbody.AddForce(transform.forward*5000000)) to kill things.

  • Google Drive To Support Third Party Apps

    Google’s upcoming cloud device, called Drive, might support applications developed by third parties. Drive might add support for third party apps and will also include a software development kit. Users would be able to open files stored in Google Drive using non-Google apps. The below shot of the Google Docs source code, grabbed by Alex Chitu, mentions “SDK” in connection with Google Drive and the “open with” feature:

    This suggests that Google Drive will integrate even more with Gmail – The blog Google Operating System speculates users might “say goodbye [to] email attachments and hello to real time collaboration. Drag anything shared with you to My Drive for easy access.” This would make Google Drive an important upgrade to Google Docs, detaching its present online storage service, and making it more useful by adding space, syncing apps and third party integration.

    The Wall Street Journal recently mentioned that Google Drive “is expected to launch in the coming weeks or months and will be free for most consumers and businesses. Google will charge a fee to those who want to store a large amount of files.”

    Drive will be in competition with Dropbox, Microsoft’s Skydrive and Apple’s iCloud, and will replace its existing Google Cloud Storage.

    Interestingly, SafeGov has recently questioned the general security of Google’s cloud device.

  • Facebook Drives Traffic To Mobile Apps

    Facebook mobile has been a huge success for the company and it has even brought the riches to mobile app developers who are on Facebook.

    James Pearce took to the Facebook developers blog to give some tips on how developers can grow their mobile apps and games with the Facebook platform. Pearce says that Facebook has 425 million monthly users which in turn sends 60 million users to various mobile apps and games.

    Pearce rightly points out that to be discovered on the app store, one has to already have a presence or some kind of marketing/editorial muscle behind it. Facebook can help those lesser known apps get the traffic they want.

    The most successful apps are those that are built using Open Graph. The use of Timeline combined with Open Graph allows users to share apps naturally by recording their lives for all to see. When something exciting happens in their life, a user can use an Open Graph app to share their experience and the app with their friends.

    As an example, Foodspotting, an app that lets people find, record and recommend food dishes, has seen a three-times increase in traffic since integrating with Open Graph.

    Yahoo! also implemented Open Graph into their desktop Facebook app. It sends traffic to their mobile app as well which has seen the Yahoo! News web app increase its traffic to 1.6 million visitors a day.

    The lesson to take away from this is that integrating your app with Open Graph and Facebook Timeline could increase the traffic your app receives.

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Getting More Visual With Updates

    Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Getting More Visual With Updates

    Developers take note – Microsoft is introducing some big changes to Visual Studio 11 that will hopefully make your job easier.

    On the Visual Studio blog yesterday, Monty Hammontree, Director of User Experience in the Microsoft Developer Tools Division, laid out the changes the team is making to Visual Studio 11. The changes are focused on increasing efficiency of the developers working on new code. Microsoft has found that with the current set of tools, developers are only spending 15 percent of their time writing code.

    To increase efficiency and fix what they perceive as problems with the program, Microsoft has outlined three problem areas:

    Coping with tool overload. Visual Studio provides a large amount of information and capabilities that relate to your code. The sheer breadth and depth of capabilities that Visual Studio provides, at times, makes it challenging to find and make effective use of desired commands, options, or pieces of information.

    Comprehending and navigating complex codebases and related artifacts (bugs, work items, tests etc.). Most code has a large number of dependencies and relationships with other code and content such as bugs, specs, etc. Chaining these dependencies together to make sense of code is more difficult and time-consuming than it needs to be due to the need to establish and re-establish the same context across multiple tools or tool windows.

    Dealing with large numbers of documents. It is very common for developers to end up opening a large number of documents. Whether they are documents containing code, or documents containing information such as bugs or specs, these documents need to be managed by the developer. In some cases, the information contained in these documents is only needed for a short period of time. In other cases documents that are opened during common workflows such as exploring project files, looking through search results, or stepping through code while debugging are not relevant at all to the task the developer is working on. The obligation to explicitly close or manage these irrelevant or fleetingly relevant documents is an ongoing issue that detracts from your productivity.

    Dealing with the first problem of tool overload, the Visual Studio team is changing four areas of the UI to make to reduce visual clutter. The four areas are command placements, colorized chrome, line work and iconography.

    For command placements, the team has reduced toolbar command placements throughout the entire program by 35 percent. As an example, they have removed the cut, copy and paste commands from the toolbar because most developers use the keyboard shortcuts.

    In previous versions of Visual Studio, many of the tools were colorized with bright colors and bold images. They have moved to a monochromatic color scheme in Visual Studio 11 so that users can focus on the tools instead of the colors.

    To give users a choice, the Visual Studio 11 UI can be changed from light gray to a darker gray color. This allows users to choose which color compliments their work best.

    Light UI:

    lightui

    Dark UI:

    darkui

    Line work has always been important to the UI for Visual Studio. The team at Microsoft, however, found that using boxes and gradients “drew attention away from developer content.” They are now using more typography and whitespace to create structure and emphasis.

    The team has also changed the iconography to be more simplistic thus making it easier to understand each tool’s intended function. They do understand the change may confuse some users, but found through their own studies that users could still identify the tools based on the new glyph style.

    Finally, the team is making it easier to find what they need to do their job. To this end, the team has made it possible to search for commands and configuration options through quick launch. Users can also search within tool windows and open files.

    Microsoft hopes that the changes will make Visual Studio 11 feel lighter and less complex. It should also allow more room for developers to see their content.

    As developers, what do you think of the changes coming to Visual Studio 11? Do they make the tools easier to use? Let us know in the comments.

  • Mozilla Introduces “Personas” Sign-Ins

    Mozilla has introduced Personas, a project formerly called BrowserID. It is a multi-browser website authentication mechanism that is similar to Facebook Connect. The procedures set up by Personas allow users to login to websites that support their BrowserID signing and avoid lengthy verification processes.

    From the Mozilla Identity Blog:


    “The Persona name resonates with the idea of personhood as well as online identity as a facet of our lives, and therefore strongly tied to user identity. We’re very excited about this new name and the new features our identity system will offer. Some of the things we’re planning: an identity dashboard, user data interconnect features, and more.”

    What about the old Firefox Personas?

    “For the past few years, many Firefox users have enjoyed “Personas”—a quick and fun way to theme the background of the Firefox toolbar. The Addons team blogged about changing their name a couple of weeks ago. No doubt there will be some confusion during this transition, so if you have ideas for how to make the transition smoother, definitely let us know! We believe the long-term value of the Persona name will far outlast the short-term discomfort of change.”

    Mozilla demonstrated the use of the thing back when it was still called BrowserID in this video.

  • Twitter Offers Tips On Smooth Animation For iPhone

    Twitter Offers Tips On Smooth Animation For iPhone

    Is your iPhone app plagued by slowdown when attempting to scroll down pages? Does the animation hit lag? Twitter could have potentially hit similar problems with their newest app update for iPhone, but avoided it with some simple tweaking.

    Twitter’s engineering blog addressed the concern above in a blog post titled, “Simple Strategies for Smooth Animation on the iPhone.” The entry explains what causes slowdown in animation on the iPhone, how they avoided it and what others can do to make their apps run smoother on the device.

    The post first explains how the iPhone handles animation. They say that animation on the iPhone is powered by Core animation layers. The GPU is not optimized to animate layers, so the CPU handles all the cell drawing. It then hands off the rest of it to the GPU as a texture to be displayed on your screen.

    The problems with can come from two sources – either the GPU is being overloaded with too many operations or the CPU is not drawing the cell fast enough.

    The team displays a simple short tweet as an example for how they fixed the problem of a GPU being overworked. Under normal circumstances, every element of the tweet from the avatar to the text would have to be drawn as separate cells by the CPU. The Twitter team fixed this problem by compiling all the text and the image into a single cell. This reduced the amount of work the CPU and GPU had to do.

    Another way to reduce lag is to avoid blending. They point out that tweets on the iOS app have a “drop shadow on top of a subtle textured background.” They avoided the problem of blending by “reducing the area Core Animation has to consider non-opaque, by splitting the shadow areas from content area of the cell.”

    They also suggest that developers check for pixel alignment. If the the width of the pixels is set an odd number, the program will set out to apply anti-aliasing to smooth out the edges. Anti-aliasing is one of the most expensive operations to operate on GPUs.

    The team goes on to provide some code that will help solve an animation problem called a “pop” that occurs when a cell is about to scroll into view. They say that a cell only has 17 milliseconds “to provide content before you’ve dropped a frame.”

    At the end, they point out that sometimes you just can’t apply any tricks to make animation go smoothly. The biggest problem comes from pictures in the “Discover” tab on Twitter for iOS. They succeeded in keeping smooth animation on these pictures by turning them into a pre-rendered image and storing them in a cache.

    Hopefully these tips will help you to develop smoothly animated apps for the iPhone. I don’t know much about app development, but I know that a smooth framerate in video games keeps the player invested. I’m going to assume it’s the same in the app development world.

  • Mozilla Marketplace Opening To Developers At Mobile World Congress

    Mozilla Marketplace Opening To Developers Next Week

    Mozilla has announced that the new Mozilla Marketplace will be open for developers beginning at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Developers can begin submitting apps in a wide variety of categories at the conference next week.

    The Mozilla Marketplace is intended to be a completely platform-independent app store. All apps will be HTML5 web apps, and as such will work on any device – mobile, desktop, or otherwise – with an HTML5-capable browser. The program’s goal is to close the gap between the kind of native apps – like those found in Apple’s App Store or the Android App Market – and web-based HTML5 apps.

    The web-based nature of the platform promises users and developers alike a much smoother and simpler development and deployment process. Web apps eliminate the developer’s need to worry about coding for separate platforms, and the users need to worry about whether a certain app is available for their phone or computer’s operating system.

    Apps in the Mozilla Marketplace will come in a wide variety of categories, including games, productivity, media, and music apps. While the Marketplace will be open to developers next week at the Mobile World Congress, it will not launch for consumers until later this year. Look for an update to Mozilla’s Firefox browser sometime in the coming months that will enable access to the Marketplace.

    What do you think of the Mozilla Marketplace? Can web apps really compete with platform-native apps like the ones you find in the iOS App Store or the Android App Market? Tell us what you think in the comments.

  • Adobe Outlines Future Of Flash Player And AIR

    Adobe Outlines Future Of Flash Player And AIR

    Adobe has been a leading player in creating tools for Web content creation for the past decade with Flash Player. With the emergence of HTML5 and other similar technologies, Adobe has to refocus their strategy on what Flash will mean two or three years from now.

    Adobe did just that today with the release of a roadmap for the future of Flash Player and AIR The white paper contains some interesting points on how Adobe will be changing the role of Flash when it comes to Web content.

    Right from the beginning, Adobe concedes that Flash isn’t the only player in town anymore when it comes to creating content on the Web. They recognize the rise of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and other technologies as competitors. While they feel that Flash will continue to be a primary tool for Web creation, they say that what Flash is used for will change.

    The company says that they will be focusing on what Flash is best at doing – creating games and displaying high quality video. While Flash can be used for other applications, Adobe will be focusing all of their efforts on these two areas.

    Speaking on gaming first, Adobe boasts that Flash is the platform of choice for the creation of gaming content for the Web. They feel that as browser-based games become more complex, Flash will be able to keep up with changes in technology faster than their competitors. The company then lists the reasons why they feel Adobe is best suited for browser-based gaming:

    Near universal reach on the desktop via the Flash Player browser plug-in, and on mobile devices via Adobe AIR

    Ability to quickly add new features and make them available to the widest audience

    Fully hardware-accelerated 2D and 3D rendering support that provide console quality graphics

    Rich gaming developer ecosystem

    Robust, object-oriented programming language

    World-class creative and developer tooling including Adobe Flash Builder, Adobe Flash Professional, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator

    With Flash, Adobe says that game developers will be able to reach 99% of personal computers. They also say that developers can use Adobe AIR to reach 500 million portable device owners. With that in mind, Adobe lays out their plans for the future of game development using Flash. They plan to offer a formalized game developer program and game services. The most exciting thing for game developers, however, is that Adobe will be adding official support for C and C++ code for Flash based games.

    Flash is more well known for its video content delivery and Adobe knows it all too well. Flash will be expanded to cover current online video needs, but also those of expanding markets like smartphones and tablets. Their current plans for Flash video are as follows:

    Bringing Adobe’s video streaming and content protection technology to more platforms in native formats

    Supporting the needs of premium content owners

    Closer collaboration with hardware vendors to provide high-performance quality experiences

    Adobe believes that Flash has a number of fundamental and unique advantages for video:

    Single and consistent player and codec support across browsers, platforms, and operating systems

    Support for content protection (single DRM), which enables premium video content to be licensed for online distribution

    Mature, full-featured, proven solution that provides a “mission critical” video platform for premium content owners, including support for ad insertion and analytics

    Adobe then goes on to lay out their technology roadmap for various products. The first of which is Adobe AIR which they said used to suffer from Flash Player getting updates first and then AIR getting those same updates at a later date. They want to move towards getting out updates to both Flash Player and AIR at the same time so both runtimes can be on the same level.

    Flash Player 11.2 will be launching in the first quarter of 2012. With the release, Adobe plans on adding new functionality like mouse-lock support, right and middle-click support, context menu disabling, hardware accelerated gracphics, stage 3D support for iOS and Android via Adobe AIR, support for more video cards, new Throttle event API, and multithreaded video decoding for desktops.

    Adobe has the future of Flash Player already laid out as well with planned releases of “Cyril,” “Dolores” and “Next.” Some of the features in these future releases include keyboard input support for full-screen mode, new APIs that will boost performance and updates to the ActionScprit language.

    Flash Player “Next” will be the big release for Flash Player in 2013 that will update everything about the player to keep it relevant to developers over the next five to 10 years.

    Flash support will continue on for all operating systems and mobile platforms as usual. The only major change is how Flash support will be continued on Linux.

    Adobe detailed their plans with Google to provide a single API that will host plug-ins for Chrome. After the release of Flash Player 11.2, further updates will only be available from Google on Linux-based machines. Adobe has also dropped support for Adobe AIR on Linux machines.

    Adobe also said that Flash Player 11.1 is the last release of the player for mobile browsers. They will continue to provide bug fixes, but leave any further improvements up to source-code licensees. Adobe will now devote all mobile development towards AIR.

    Finally, Adobe announced support for Flash-based video and gaming on future smart TVs. They will release Adobe AIR for TVs as well as an HTML application that will use Flash Player to playback video content.

    With the reveal of their roadmap, do you see Adobe staying around as a major player in the web content creation industry? Or is HTML5 going to dethrone Adobe? Let us know in the comments.

  • Amazon: Simple Workflow Service Webinar March 13th

    If you’re a web developer, Amazon has created an exciting new product for you. Simple Workflow (SWF) is a service for building scalable, resilient applications and it makes creating and managing them much easier than it has been in the past. The service allows users to administer, scale, tune, patch and upgrade without any hardware or software. Amazon takes care of everything.

    If you want to learn how to use Simple Workflow either with new applications or existing applications, Amazon is offering a brief seminar on Tuesday, March 13th. It will be held between 10 and 11am consisting of a 40 minute presentation followed by a brief Q&A session.

    Here’s a little about what Amazon promises with the service and functionality of the product:

    Using Amazon SWF to manage workflows within your application is easy. The Amazon SWF service acts as the coordination hub for all of the different components of your application:

    *Maintaining application state

    *Tracking workflow executions and logging their progress

    *Holding and dispatching tasks

    *Controlling which tasks each of your application hosts will be assigned to execute

    To use Amazon SWF you simply:

    *Use the AWS Management Console or the Amazon SWF APIs to specify the names of workflows.

    *Use the Amazon SWF APIs to “start” a new workflow, which results in a particular sequence of workflow tasks, called a “workflow execution,” being kicked into action.

    *Use the Amazon SWF APIs from your worker machines (a “worker” is a component of your application which handles specific tasks) to establish the task order, manage conditional flows, and execute loops for a workflow execution.

    *Use the Amazon SWF APIs from your worker machines to request and execute workflow tasks in the cloud or on premises.

    *Monitor the status and progress of workflow executions and their associated tasks in the AWS Management Console.

    Here are Service Highlights according to Amazon:

    Simple – Amazon SWF replaces the complexity of custom-coded workflow solutions and process automation software with a fully managed web service. This eliminates the need for developers to manage the infrastructure plumbing of process automation so they can focus their energy on the unique functionality of their application.

    Scalable – Amazon SWF seamlessly scales with your application’s usage. No manual administration of the workflow service is required as you add more workflows to your application or increase the complexity of your workflows.

    Flexible – Amazon SWF lets you write your application components and coordination logic in any programming language and run them in the cloud or on-premises.

    If You Are Interested:

    It sounds like this could be a real time saver for a lot of developers. Hopefully it doesn’t put anybody out of work. The best thing is that Amazon will do most of this work for free. You can get started right away with Simple Workflow or you can wait to take the webinar in mid March and learn more about it first.

  • Google Video Indexing Videos

    Google Webmaster Central has released a few Youtube clips describing the best methods for indexing video content, to supplement their Webmaster Tools dialogue. Google states that when video content is marked up in the body of the page, search engines and other sites can recognize it, and may use it to improve the display of video content on a page or in search results. Marking up content provides information about videos that allows Google and other sites to index them. Along with a description of common video indexing mistakes webmasters make, Google also added tips on video indexing markup, as well as a clip on video platform restrictions.

    Google also added a clip about schema.org, a set of standards that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have jointly initiated.

    Search engines are utilizing on-page markup in a number of ways. For example, Google uses it to create rich snippets in search results. Not every type of information in schema.org will be surfaced in search results, but over time, one can expect that more data will be used in more ways. Google currently supports rich snippets for people, events, reviews, products, recipes, and breadcrumb navigation, and the new schema.org markup can be used for these types.

  • Facebook Improves iOS App Distribution

    Facebook Improves iOS App Distribution

    Do you have an iPhone app that gets traffic from Facebook for iOS? Maybe you want to start directing people from Faebook for iOS to your app? Either way, Facebook released some new tools for developers today that should make directing traffic to your app much easier.

    For people who want to take advantage of these development tools, Facebook has detailed the process on their development blog. The first thing that developers are going to want to do is change the settings on the Dev app:

    Enter an iOS Bundle ID that corresponds to your app

    Enter an iPhone and/or iPad App Store ID

    Enable the “Configured for iOS SSO” setting

    fbiosapp

    The settings by default will link any news feed or open graph stories back to the provided story URL. App developers can link these stories to their mobile Web site or to an intermediate page that then redirects to a variety of options.

    Developers can even have their stories link to their app or their app store page. To do this, you have to enable the “iOS native deep linking” on the dev app.

    fbpinapp

    Facebook does want to remind developers that links in their stories should be compatible on all devices. Deep linking is an added incentive for app developers who want to link back to their apps.

    The rest of the blog post shows the actual code that developers can implement into their apps that should improve the experience for their users and their traffic. Check it out and become informed!

  • Developing For Chrome For Android: Google Engineers Speak

    Google launched Chrome for Android earlier this month. It’s in beta, and is only available for select countries and languages for devices running Ice Cream Sandwich, but an Android version of the browser has been long awaited. It’s bound to be popular as availability expands.

    It could even prove to be the first step in the convergence of Google’s two operating systems: Android and Chrome OS. Google has suggested in the past that the two would probably come together eventually, and they have to start somewhere.

    Google has uploaded the following video of engineers from the Chrome for Android team discussing the product for nearly an hour. If you’re developing for Chrome (or Android) you might want to take the time to watch.

  • Twitter Hashbang URLs Will Soon Be A Thing Of The Past

    Favstar.fm founder Tim Haines had a Twitter conversation with Twitter engineer Dan Webb, and found that Twitter is apparently moving away from hashbangs in its URLs.

    Haines shared the conversation at a Storify link, but here are the relevant tweets:

    @timhaines
    Tim Haines    Reading a gazillion articles on hashbang URLs (#!). 99% of them seem to be over-emotionalized FUD. 22 hours ago via Twitter for Mac ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @danwrong
    Dan Webb    @timhaines read mine. It’s all facts. danwebb.net 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    In that post, Webb writes (though he expresses that the opinions are his own, and not necessarily that of his employer’s):

    A few months back there was a flurry of blog posts and conversations over Twitter both for and against the now fairly common practice of using hashbang urls (example) and JavaScript routing in favor of traditional URLs and full page loads. There is also growing interest around several JavaScript MVC frameworks that are make heavy use of this technique. Since people started doing this kind of thing I’ve been pretty squeamish about the idea. At the time that this discussion erupted across the web I really wanted to comment on it but until recently, although I was almost certain that hashbang URLs were destructive, I found myself unable to put in definite terms why.

    As you probably know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, I have for a long time been an avid proponent of progressive enhancement and as many people correctly pointed out many of the arguments against hashbang URLs seemed to fold this philosophy in which clouded the issue quite a lot. In a well reasoned post, my colleague, Ben Cherry pointed this out and expressed that it wasn’t really hashbangs that were the problem and that they were merely a temporary work around until we get pushState support. As he put it, “It’s Not About The Hashbang”.

    After quite a lot of thought and some attention to some of the issues that surround web apps that use hashbang URLs I’ve come to conclusion that it most definitely isabout the hashbangs. This technique, on its own, is destructive to the web. The implementation is inappropriate, even as a temporary measure or as a downgrade experience.

    He goes much more in depth in the post itself.

    @danwrong
    Dan Webb    @timhaines plus, now I’m in charge of undoing twitters hashbang URLs I can confirm that all the issues in that article are very real. 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @timhaines
    Tim Haines    @danwrong x months from now (when your project completes) Twitter will no longer use hashbangs? 22 hours ago via Twitter for Mac ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @danwrong
    Dan Webb    @timhaines correct. All gone. It was a mistake for several reasons. PushState or bust. 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @timhaines
    Tim Haines    @danwrong You’re going to revert to page refreshes if the browser doesn’t support PushState? Adding PushState support progressively? 22 hours ago via Twitter for Mac ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @danwrong
    Dan Webb    @timhaines yep. 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    @danwrong
    Dan Webb    @timhaines although I’m not sure why everyone is so adverse to page refreshes these days. You can make them fast too. 22 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

  • Apache HTTP Server 2.4 Now Available

    Apache HTTP Server 2.4 Now Available

    The popular Apache HTTP Server software has just received a long-overdue update. According to an announcement from the Apache Software Foundation, Apache HTTP Server 2.4 is available now.

    The update includes several major improvements, including better overall performance, asynchronous I/O support, better timeout and rate/resource limiting capability, and more. Apache HTTP Server was originally released in seventeen years ago. Since then it has gone on to power almost 400 million websites world wide, making it the most popular web server software available.

    The Apache Software Foundation’s statement on the new release can be found here. A full list of enhancements and new modules in Apache HTTP Server 2.4 can be found here. Apache HTTP Server is free and open source, and is available for download from the Apache Software Foundation’s website.

  • Android Passes iOS In UK Market Share

    A new study shows that Android has overtaken the iPhone as the most-used smartphone in the UK. Among smartphones in use by consumers on a daily basis – not just sales – Android has 36.9% of the market, compared to 28.5% for Apple’s iPhone.

    The survey data comes from Kantar WorldPanel ComTech and was published earlier today in The Guardian. The data covers the four week period ending on January 22nd, and shows that Android use surged past iOS to take the top spot. During the same four week period last year Android had just 20.1% of the installed base, compared to Apple’s 29.2%. In the twelve months since Android gained 16.8%, while Apple and RIM lost 0.7% and 0.6%, respectively. The biggest loser by far was Nokia’s Symbian operating system, which plummeted from 26.7% of the user base in January 2011 to just 13.1% in January 2012.

    UK Smartphone Installed Base

    Market share data paints a similar picture. According to Kantar’s data, Android currently has nearly half of the smartphone sales market in the UK, while Apple has roughly one third. RIM’s market share has shrunk dramatically in the last twelve months in Britain, while Symbian has all but disappeared.

    The data for other countries surveyed is similar. Android’s market share in Germany grew by over 25% (again, mostly at Symbian’s expense). Growth in Italy, Spain, and Australia was similarly dramatic. While Android’s market share in France also grew, it did so far more modestly than elsewhere. Only one country surveyed actually saw Android lose market share. In the U.S. the iPhone’s market share soared, at the expense of both Android and RIM.

    Smartphone Market Share

    The market share data comes from a snapshot of smartphone sales during the four week period ending on January 23rd, and is compared to a similar snapshot taken during the four week period ending on January 23rd, 2011. The study also found that over half of all phones in Britain are now smartphones.

  • Barcode Hero Makers Kima Labs Acquired By Groupon

    As previously reported, Groupon acquired Hyperpublic,which could help it compete with Google and Foursquare. The company has also acquired Kima Labs, creators of Barcode Hero.

    The following message appears on the Barcode Hero site (via TechCrunch):

    We’re excited to let you know that Kima Labs, the team behind Barcode Hero, has been acquired by Groupon. We’re looking forward to jumping in and focusing our efforts there, but in order to do that, we’ll be shutting down Barcode Hero.

    The Barcode Hero iPhone app and web site will be unavailable after Monday, February 20. Your Barcode Hero data will be available for you to download now through March 16. See below for details.

    Thanks for using Barcode Hero—whether you were a loyal scanner or just trying it out. It was amazing to see those of you who scanned thousands of items in your first week, and the variety of items you scanned, from DVDs to gadgets to hot sauce. We had fun creating the app, and we hope you had fun using it.

    Thanks also to our investors, advisers, friends and family, who have supported us over the last two years. We couldn’t have done this without you.

    Yours,
    Blake, Jason, and Andrew
    The Barcode Hero Team

    Check out what else Groupon has been up to on our Groupon page.

  • The Anti-SOPA System Administrator’s Todo List

    The Anti-SOPA System Administrator’s Todo List

    Todo lists are a great way to plan ahead for the day’s events. It gives an idea of how to divvy up your time. What, however, would such a list look like for a systems administrator who is firmly against SOPA/PIPA and any other Internet regulation the United States government introduces?

    It might look something like this, courtesy of the news section at YCombinator.com:

    Today’s sysadmin todo list:

    0. Get corporate membership with EFF.
    1. Identify all applications with user-generated content.
    2. Move all associated domains to a non-US based registrar.
    3. Migrate DNS, web serving and other critical services to non-US based servers.
    4. Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country.

    I’m sorry for US sites and users. Your government is hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV, easily regulated and controlled. The population will be required to sit quietly and keep their eyes glued on the screen so they don’t miss the ads, with any infringers deemed terrorists and pedophiles and thus deserving of summary punishment by DHS squads.

    Hopefully the internet will route around the damaged segment, and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the amazing interactivity it has brought our society.

    As TechDirt points out, the attitude of the government, as well as the content industry’s lobbyists, is one that doesn’t seem to mind if these very valid criticisms exist. TechDirt refers to at as the “what’s the big deal” attitude, and it’s quite fitting, especially when you consider the haphazard disregard federal law enforcement couldn’t care less about the multitude of gigabytes worth of legitimate content on Megaupload.

    All they cared about was taking down a notorious file-infringing service.

    There is one caveat to the sysadmin todo list, and it concerns moving to a non-US DNS servers and registrars. After SOPA took its initial public relations beatdown, Lamar Smith quickly surfaced to amend the bill to only target foreign sites. So while the government might not be able to seize a site with the characteristics the todo list describes, if SOPA were to pass, they could very well block it.

    Whatever the case, if you’re at all worried about getting seized, perhaps a move to another non-US-based service might be in order.

    Lead image courtesy.

  • App Store Approaches 25 Billion Downloads, Apple Announces Contest

    Apple’s iOS App Store is approaching its 25 billionth app download, the company announced today. In celebration of the milestone, they’ve announced a contest. The person who downloads the 25 billionth app will win a $10,000 gift card to the App Store (not, unfortunately, to the Apple Store). Of course, the gift card will also work on music purchases and purchases in the iBookstore.

    If you don’t feel like downloading an app for your chance to win, never fear. Apple’s contest page includes a link to an official entry form, where you can enter the contest “without purchase or download.” Of course, there is a bit of a catch. You can’t just fill out a form today and maybe win tomorrow (or in a week, or a month, or whenever that big counter finally clicks over to 25 billion). According to the official rules, a winning entry form must be submitted immediately following the download of the 24,999,999,999th app. And, if you don’t want to enter by downloading an app or by submitting an online form, Apple has even set up a toll-free phone number you can call to submit an entry. Yes, really.

    You might not want to rush out and start downloading right away, though. If the counter on Apple’s contest page is even close to being accurate, as of right now there are still 700 million downloads to go before somebody wins.

    What would you do with $10,000 in App Store credit? Let us know in the comments.

  • Google Launching Android 5.0 Jelly Bean Soon?

    Reports are circulating this morning that Google is preparing to launch the next major update to their Android operating system sooner than expected. Android 5.0 Jelly Bean may be coming as sometime in the second quarter of 2012, possibly at Google’s I/O conference in late June.

    According to a report from DigiTimes, the launch will be timed to coincide with the launch of Windows 8. Jelly Bean will increase Android’s tablet optimization, and may allow dual-booting with Google’s Chrome OS on tablets. While Android is extremely popular, Chrome OS’s performance has been somewhat lackluster. Google may be looking to hitch Chrome OS to Android’s wagon. Two weeks ago Google launched an Android version of their Chrome browser. This fed speculation that they may be planning to merge the two operating systems at some point in the future. If Jelly Bean tablets can dual-boot to Chrome OS, it may be another step down that road.

    Things are still in the early rumor phase at this point, so things could well change. We’ll post more information as it becomes available.

  • Computer Engineers Help Scientists With RNA Code

    Computer engineers may have just provided the medical community a new way of figuring out exactly how one of the three building blocks of life forms and functions.

    University of Central Florida Engineering Assistant Professor Shaojie Zhang used a complex computer program to analyze RNA motifs – the subunits that make up RNA (ribonucleic acid).

    RNA is one of three building blocks of life along with DNA and proteins. Knowing how all three building blocks work together and how they go awry will go a long way to understanding what causes diseases and how to treat them.

    While much has been discovered about DNA thanks to the Human Genome Project, not a lot is known about RNA, which like DNA helps encode genes. Some viruses also use RNA as their prime genetic source to replicate. And various types of RNA are involved in everything from protein synthesis, controlling gene expression and communicating cell signals from one part of the body to another.

    The units that make up RNA fold like a long accordion and vary in structure. Many have been identified in the past, but finding a quick automatic way to determine patterns in the varying types of units has been elusive until now.

    “We have discovered many new RNA structural motifs using our new computational method,” Zhang said. “This breakthrough can largely increase our current knowledge of RNA structural motifs. And newly discovered motifs may also help us develop possible treatment of certain diseases.”

  • Apple Cuts iAd Pricing, Boosts Developers’ Cut

    It looks like Apple is taking some steps to revitalize their iAd mobile advertising platform. The company has lowered the starting price of an iAd advertising campaign to $100,000 – a mere 10% of the original price. They have also thrown a bone to app developers, increasing their take by 10% also. Now, developers get 70% of iAd-generated revenue, and Apple’s cut drops to 30%. This brings iAd into line with Apple’s other revenue sharing plans – Apple currently gets 30% of the cost of apps and in-app purchases, as well as 30% of the cost of books in the iBookstore.

    In June of 2010 Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4 and iOS 4. At the same event, he also introduced Apple’s new iAd mobile advertising platform. At the time, the minimum cost for an iAd campaign was $1 million. Revenue generated by the platform was split, with Apple getting 40% and the app developers getting 40%.

    In the year and a half since, Apple has seen the initial rush of advertisers and developers dwindle considerably. They reduced the starting price for an ad campaign by 60% last year, dropping it to $400,000, but that has not been enough to put a dent in Google’s AdMob service. Unfortunately for Apple, iAd has a much narrower audience than AdMob, since it is only available on Apple’s devices. Google can put their ads virtually anywhere. It remains to be seen whether the current price drop will help Apple finally mount a challenge against its rival.