So we’ve seen a couple of 2010 lists lately, but from a technical perspective, we think they were missing some important stuff. The following list is a snapshot of heated-up discussions in our company about things that could shake up the web development world in the year ahead.
Last weekend the whole staff went to rails camp germany 3 at ZweiTag/Münster. It was nice to see how many people showed up and we’ve seen many things – also many non-rails topics. We were pretty excited to introduce a very early alpha of our open source content management system VRAME to the public.
We are currently working on some interesting project where we have the chance to distribute some video footage with the new HTML5 <video> tag instead of “ye olde” flash player. Since there is a battle between the browser vendors you have to support ogg theora for Firefox and mp4 for Safari and Chrome. What was planned as an easy peasy task turned out to be hours consuming process of fiddling convert parameters together and adding mime-types to server configs. We have learned our lesson and now we share some wisdom.
Well, now, here it is. The magic of a pillowfight in slowmotion. It took a while to edit and cut the footage we took during this year’s pillowfight in nyc (probably the largest pillowfight in the world), so we’re a little late with the release. continue…
Unser HTML5 Experiment war ein voller Erfolg, wenn wir uns allerdings unsere Statistiken anschauen, dann kommen die meisten unserer Besucher aus den USA und dem Rest der Welt. Deshalb haben wir uns dazu entschlossen das Experiment noch einmal in einem deutschen Kontext zu starten. continue…
The results of the “red dot award 2009″ have arrived. 6.112 works of designers and companies from 42 countries were submitted. And we received one for szenesprachenwiki.de! continue…
Click here to launch the experiment! (beware: sophisticated browser needed)
HTML5 is getting a lot of love lately. With the arrival of FireFox 3.5, Safari 4 and the new betas of Google Chrome and Opera, browsers support some great new features including canvas and the new audio/video tags. Most interesting: modern mobile devices like the iPhone or Android-based phones also support new standards in favor of Flash. The future looks bright for HTML5.
Time for us to play with this technology. We’ve created a little experiment which loads 100 tweets related to HTML5 and displays them using a javascript-based particle engine. Each particle represents a tweet – click on one of them and it’ll appear on the screen.
The original particle engine was ported from a Flex/AS3 project that we’ve created to javascript. We’re using processing.js for particle rendering on canvas which is a very useful graphics library created by John Resig. The music will only be played if the browser supports the audio tag. To detect if the audio or canvas feature is present we use the awesome modernizr library. We could have used a fallback solution like playing the sound via Flash. But this experiment is about HTML5 – and who needs Flash anyway?
Big thanks to spokenlounge.com for supporting us and for providing the mp3 track.
If you want to dive into further ressources, then try:
- HTML5Doctor, great ressource about everything HTML5
- Official Mozilla Canvas Tutorial
- Carsonified linklist about HTML5
Why do I need CAPTCHAs?
As soon as your web project becomes bigger you will notice that bots are trying to spam your blog and to fake user inputs. When I created a blog with Django for a website with about 60.000 unique users per day I had to delete about 20 spam blog entries every single day. Pretty annoying. So I had to find a way to ensure that the response is not done by a computer. continue…
You might already know about the notoriously cheesy and badly produced microsoft songsmith ad (also check out the parody). Whatever they intended with that ad, it certainly proves that microsoft marketing totaly fails to catch up to the successful branding strategies of companies like apple or google. In contrast, some of their ads are so bad, that it already has something trashy. (But I doubt that this is the image they want). continue…
People who have worked with a small team on a project know the problems: “The late night dudes have changed the database and now the live server is unuseable for the early risers.” Few phonecalls later – Ey man next time please email around the latest sql dump if you do some changes.
Though Rails does the best to keep you on track by providing a migration mechanism at a certain point at the development you want to be able to share the contents of the development database, not only the schema.
That’s why we released a plugin – more information on the projects page.
