This is our place to give you updated hosting, development and web designer news, happenings on the website, and frivolous information about the internet.
The Nerds' gang: Brian Franklin - Gamer and master model (so he thinks) David Walsh - Editor with a penchant for hosting (and likes using big words) Preeti Pradhan- Blogger, writer, and social media chick (the brains behind it all)
Exciting news for users of the online video community Vimeo who recently added HTML5 support to it’s video embeds. This means content can be viewed on devices like the iPad and iPhone.
The main Vimeo website is HTML5 but it’s embed codes have been Flash only, a frustration for content creators who want to be visible on as many devices as possible.
Vimeo’s main competition YouTube has offered iPhone and iPad support for its embedded content for quite some time, and recently rolled out an HTML5-friendly experimental new embed code for desktop browsers and mobile devices.
In addition to gaining HTML5 embed support; Vimeo will also be available to Roku customers. The most popular Vimeo HD content, chosen by Vimeo staff, will be viewable in the channel. Vimeo users can also link their accounts to view their own videos and their personalized inbox selections.
Vimeo’s commitment to non-commercial content has made it a favorite service for users and content creators alike and these additional services are sure to keep them popular.
This week saw Google debut yet another Gmail feature, this time adding a voice calling service. Google Voice will be free for at least the end of year within the U.S. and Canada and calls to other countries will be billed at very low rates starting at $0.02 per minute.
Google tweeted that they reached 1 million calls within the first 24 hours of making the service available, a number they seem to be proud of. Time will tell if customers continue to use the service or if they find other web-based phone services such as Skype more appealing.
To increase exposure of the new feature Google has placed big red phone booths into airports and on college campuses across the U.S. The booths are equipped with Google Voice technology and give users a chance to try the service.
To explain how the service works, Google put together this fun video.
For more information you can visit the Google blog.
We have yet another winner in our ongoing Facebook competitions! Congratulations to Peter Monk for the photo caption “What the Empire was after all along…” Make sure to join us on Facebook, participate in the competitions and win cash money!
Hewlett-Packard has trumped rival Dell’s bid for data storage company 3PAR, despite firing its chief executive Mark Hurd a fortnight ago amid sexual harassment allegations.
HP, which is being led by chief financial officer turned interim chief executive Cathie Lesjak, said its bid is “substantially superior” to its rival, and said it is ready to seal a deal once 3PAR’s board ends its takeover agreement with Dell.
The data storage company is so attractive to both computer manufacturers as it will allow the victor to expand their ‘cloud computing’ offerings, which involves providing remote storage in a virtual ‘cloud.’
Shane Robison, HP’s Executive VP and Chief Strategy and Technology Officer said in a letter that the new offer forces 3PAR’s board of directors to reconsider its previous merger agreement with Dell.
This week Twitter announced it’s own “tweet button”. What does that mean to all of us? It means a standardized button for re-tweeting content you want to share. Similar to the Facebook “Recommend” button they allow you to send links with one-click to your friends and followers.
Currently the common button is from TweetMeme, a third party website which helps publishers. Twitter acknowledged the company on their blog, saying “We’re pleased to be working closely with the good folks at TweetMeme and, from here on out, they will be pointing to the Twitter Tweet Button.”
It appears that TweetMeme is not completely out of the game, their blog had this statement, “We will be assisting Twitter with the technical challenges involved with the button and secondly we will be working even more closely in the future on delivering real-time curation of the Twitter Firehose. This will manifest itself in the launch of a number of new products and the first of these is being unveiled today.”
Twitter has pointed out that the main reason to use this type of button on your website is to allow me to share and to drive traffic back to your site. They also promise more accurate statistics as the data would go through their own servers instead of a third party.
This years tablet boom has started to revolutionize the way we read digital content with devices such as the iPad making digital magazines popular. Adobe announced this week that it is working on new creative software for publishers of such content.
After the success of WIRED Magazine’s digital edition using InDesign CS5 with “additional publishing technologies” Adobe pushed to get the software a mainstream release. To make it easy for publishers the software is a supplement to InDesign CS5 so that no extra training is required for designers.
The new software will become part of the Creative Suite collection and will be downloadable from Adobe Labs later this summer. The goal of this software is to simplify the process of creating tablet magazine layouts and incorporate more mobile hardware-specific needs including pinch/swipe gestural navigation for panning and zooming as well as 360-degree image rotation.
Other features include the ability to export in the new .issue format, a compressed file format that contains vertical and horizontal magazine layouts, metadata, code to enable interactivity, and associated assets (images, video, etc.).
Adobe is expected to continue their software developments with tools for magazine workflow including adding advanced interactivity and bundling content.
Mozilla has announced Firefox’s Tab Candy, a new tab management feature for Firefox that organizes tabs into groups to help you keep your tabs grouped by task. The feature might be a little advanced for some users but for others it is a much needed addition.
The video below is by Mozilla’s interface designer Aza Raskin which gives a quick overview. The idea can be compared to the new app folders in iOS 4, or a better version of OS X’s Exposé, except it’s for your browser tabs. You can drag and drop to re-arrange all your tabs into groups, create new groups by simply dragging a web page outside an existing group and dragging another item on top of it, and name all your groups based on what task they’re related to.
Tab Candy isn’t currently available as an extension, but Mozilla is offering an alpha download of Firefox that includes Tab Candy by default (all platforms). It’s worth a look to see what the future brings. Firefox 4 Beta 2 is scheduled for release July 29th.
Haven’t heard of FlipBoard yet? Well, if you own an iPad this could be the most addictive new app around. It’s a free app with one basic function: to turn your Facebook and Twitter networks into social “magazines”. This means your friend’s favorite links, photos and videos fill its pages. The attractive layout makes each link posted into a “page”, stripping the original webpage of content and reformatting it into a magazine format. (Wired.com asked the question today if this process is legal.)
It’s the slick look of this app that has made FlipBoard so popular and currently overloaded. The first 24 hours of availability brought some users back to iTunes to complain about slowness, failure to load some pages correctly and crashing. Many users trying to use the app received this message: “Flipboard is currently over capacity. Please try adding your Twitter account later.”
Despite these issues FlipBoard still accomplishes what Mike McCue, FlipBoard’s CEO, set out to do “…make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.” And overall most users agree. Those users that could fill in their account info before overload were pleased with the feed of information and the sleek look.
What makes FlipBoard so great? Let’s start with the company itself that has investors such as Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Dustin Moskovitz and Ashton Kutcher (you might have heard of him). On the back-end expect the semantic data-analysis technology from the startup Ellerdale to soon be integrated into the app. This means the ability to better determine the relevance of the information and updates from your various social networking connections.
