ACCELERATED CSS TRANSFORMS
Recently the WebKit team added support for CSS transformations with 3D GPU acceleration. This means that soon we can built web applications that mimic desktop applications in graphical responsiveness. Charles Ying wrote a simple image gallery application that demos this new functionality. This is definitely not yet ready for end users but it demonstrates the power of the web platform and where it is heading. With the native video tag, local and session storage, plus much faster JavaScript engines, browsers are changing from simply presenting information to being a fully interactive platform. It’s no surprise that Google is developing a web-browser operating system, called Chrome OS.
SYMFONY CRUD GENERATOR
The symfony CRUD generator is a very useful tool for speeding up your web development. When you need a list of items that you can list and edit, you are most likely building a standard CRUD (create-read-update-delete) interface. This is common functionality that is found in most applications. Since this is such a common task, it makes perfect sense that the symfony web framework has a tool to build it for you.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE HTML VIDEO TAG
Since Firefox, Safari, and recently Chrome hit the browser scene, the web has been growing and improving at a much faster pace. The next evolution of the web comes in the form of HTML 5, the latest HTML standard that brings native video playback, offline storage, 2D drawing via the canvas tag among others features. Of those, the video tag is the most important and critical to the continued success of the open web.
LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS ARE A CLOSED SOFTWARE ENVIRONMENT
Closed? How can that be? The whole premise of most Linux Distributions is to be a free and open environment for users and developers. What I mean is that software packages available on the web or on distributable media often don’t work on Linux. Valid examples are software from game publishers and bleeding edge software. For example, people who use the Fedora distribution (could be SUSE, Ubuntu…) install new software packages via its package manager called yum. All packages in the repository (there are thousands) have been compiled specifically for each version of Fedora Core.
THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY
What is the future of technology and our digital toys? The future is big screens. Digital screens, like LCDs that are a thin as paper and a large as you wall. Heck, they’re probably even on your wall. Ubiquitous advertisements. Why? They appear in games, they appear in product placements on all the new movies. Google is funded by advertisements on free web applications; their whole business strategy is to move more services onto the web so more people are available to watch and click on advertisements. Mobile. Remember when Microsoft was pushing so big hard to attract more developers to its platform? The mobile future is an even larger wave that isn’t even being pushed very hard by Microsoft. Having instant access to your email, documents, entertainment, and web browsing will be possible through smart phones, Palm Pre anyone, or iPhone? A few more years, notebook computers will be relics, too heavy and clunky when everything you could possibly need is on your mobile phone. The funny thing is, most of this is available now.