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Posts Tagged ‘Web Development’

Google Gives $5M Worth of Java GUI Tools to Eclipse

19 Dec


Google has donated two open-source Java tools to the Eclipse Foundation to join the popular IDE suite in 2011.

The tech giant’s WindowBuilder and CodePro AnalytiX were part of Google’s acquisition of Instantiations in August this year. By September, Google had relaunched some of Instantiations’ tools as open-source software.

One of those tools was WindowBuilder, a WYSIWYG code generator. This drag-and-drop, bidirectional GUI designer for Java played nicely with a variety of frameworks, including Swing, XML Windowing Toolkit (XWT), the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) and more. With support for Windows, Linux and Mac, the Eclipse extension was intended to make Java app creation a lot simpler and faster.

And CodePro is another interesting Eclipse plugin for “comprehensive automated software code quality and security analysis.” The toolkit included features from EclipsePro Audit and EclipsePro Test and generally attempted to improve code quality, maintenance and readability.

Instatiations’ execs estimate the software, which is slated to roll out with the rest of the Eclipse June 2011 release train, is worth around $5 million.

Google’s emphasis on Java tools is hardly surprising; the blockbuster success of the Android platform (and sometimes harsh criticism of the Android Market of apps) has practically mandated a focus on Java, which is a big part of the Android stack. Giving devs better Java tools free of charge is an investment in the future of Google’s own platforms.

That’s not to say either of these Eclipse extensions is, in itself, going to be directly used for Android applications; we’re not sure either tool is intended for mobile development. But better tools make better Java devs, who in turn are better equipped to make more and better Android apps.

We would, however, love to see more drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG-plus-code Android app tools — something along the lines of a less-dumbed-down App Inventor. If you know of any such tools, definitely let us know about them in the comments.


Reviews: Android, Android Market, Eclipse, Google, Linux, Windows

More About: codepro, developers, eclipse, foss, Google, java, open source, windowbuilder

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Google Explores the Human Body With HTML5

16 Dec


Google has just soft-launched its latest browser experiment, the Google Body Browser, which is basically Google Earth for the human body.

Think of it as a three-dimensional, multi-layered browser version of those Visible Man/Woman model kits. Or a virtualized version of Slim Goodbody, if you will.

Google showed off the app at the WebGL Camp. WebGL is a cross-platform low-level 3D graphics API that is designed to bring plugin-free 3D to the web. It uses the HTML5 Canvas element and does not require Flash, Java or other graphical plugins to run.

If you visit bodybrowser.googlelabs.com in a supported web browser, you’ll get a three-dimensional layered model of the human anatomy that you can zoom in on, rotate and search.

WebGL support hasn’t hit mainstream browsers, but the beta versions of Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox all support it.

Once you’ve got a compatible browser, visiting the Body Browser home page shows off the human body. You can adjust the various layers of skin, muscles, tissues and the skeletal system.

What’s really cool is that if you type in an organ or bone or ventricle system, you are taken directly to that area in the anatomy, zoomed in. You can turn labels on or off and the app supports multitouch so users of trackpads (Magic or otherwise) or multi-touch mice can zoom in with ease.

This is a pretty cool display of new web technologies. Presumably the use case is for the healthcare industry, but educators and students can benefit from this kind of demonstration too.

[via PeriVisioN]


Reviews: Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Safari

More About: google body browser, HTML5, webgl

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What Does Web Design Say About Your Small Business?

13 Dec


This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

If you’ve ever been horrified by the design of a small or local business website, you’re not alone. There are so many aesthetic travesties out there, and worse, many small businesses still don’t even have a website. One recent study concluded that a paltry 54% of small businesses maintain a home on the web.

Your business doesn’t need an elaborate multimedia site, but you do need an eye-pleasing and informative destination. After all, you wouldn’t (purposefully) hang an ugly sign on your storefront or office. Why would you present an ugly website to your prospects?

With this in mind, we spoke to some professional web designers about their favorite small business websites. They explained why these sites make sense for each company and why the design is an asset to their business.


Make Business Personal at First Click


Go Realty Website

Jacob Gube, a web developer and the founder/chief editor of Six Revisions, looks at North Carolina real estate firm Go Realty’s website as a way to personalize a sometimes impersonal industry.

“They put a great deal of emphasis towards humanizing the process of buying a home,” said Gube. “To most real estate companies, you’re customer record ID #67343, budget range $200,000 to $225,200, but to Go Realty, you’re the Johnsons with a baby girl named Amy. They convey this personality through their site design.”

Gube notes Go Realty’s very welcoming website that puts people first and properties second.

“The home page has a beautiful image slider that flips through photos of the people they’ve dealt with, with short descriptions of their stories. They have a Fan Mail section that flips through messages from happy clients,” said Gube. “When you see all that, as a prospective home buyer and client, you’d think, ‘Wow, these guys will take care of me.’ ”

When it comes to something as personal as purchasing a home, this is a smart design choice. While it may be the inclination of many companies to put products front and center, a page of property listings can be less inviting than a satisfied customer.

“I think for a real estate company, they have a truly unique angle and they have a web design that manages to convey their core message,” Gube noted.


Accentuate Your Products With Complementary Design


Hardgraft Image

Shopping carts and product galleries have become staples of the e-commerce landscape, but that doesn’t mean they have to look stale. If you sell attractive products, make sure they live on an attractive website.

Tim Van Damme, a freelance web developer based in Belgium who knows a thing or two about web aesthetics, cites online retailer Hardgraft as a case study in minimalism and product display.

“Their website is beautifully designed, featuring just a couple of products with large, beautiful photographs. They’re clearly targeting the more fashion-aware web nerds this way,” said Van Damme.

The site sells cases and sleeves for electronics, as well as handbags and wallets. The sleek modern products sit nicely on a clean, modern website. The presentation is complementary, and there’s nothing to distract the eye from the merchandise. A site like this expresses organization and straightforwardness — qualities your customers are always after.

“Their products are pretty expensive, yet every conference I go to I see multiple of them in the audience,” Van Damme noted.


Sell to the Right Consumers, Visually


If you’re targeting a certain customer demographic, good web design can help.

Kelli Shaver, a web app developer who specializes in user interfaces and experiences, points to Gazel, Inc., purveyors of unique, organic bath towels and robes. Its website evokes a sense of luxury that befits the customers who can afford these products.

“Clearly the site is targeting environmentally conscious consumers with expendable incomes and sophisticated tastes,” said Shaver, noting Gazel is not your typical e-commerce website. “The focus seems more on educating customers about the products than simply selling those products. The combined effect of the colors, typography, textures, and photography just feels expensive and high-quality.”

In essence, the site “feels” like the products it’s selling, and that goes a long way toward user experience, according to Shaver.

“Nearly everything about the site is inviting. Rich, warm colors and earth tones give the visitor a feeling of calm,” she said. “The slide show on the landing page, in addition to showcasing some of the company’s product, also brings in a lot of texture.”

The takeaway here should be that if your customers feel at home on your website, they’re more likely to browse and buy. That may seem obvious, but think about who your customers really are as you develop your web presence. Your web designer won’t know this, so be sure to communicate it effectively. The branding payoff can be big.


Informational Sites Don’t Have to Be Boring


SWFWMD Image

If you thought some small business websites were rough, visit a government agency online sometime. They can be notorious for bad design, poor navigation, and a general disinterest in Web 2.0 functionality.

Not so with the Southwest Florida Water Management District, says Chris Coyier, a web designer and blogger at CSS-Tricks.

“The home page is OK, but the site actually gets better and more interesting the deeper you go,” said Coyier, noting the exceptional layout of the recreation page, and the pages for individual locations administered by the department.

“The most important part they got right was thinking about what the mindset of an actual user of the site is like — in this case, me,” said Coyier. “It’s easy to browse by featured locations, type of activity, and specific regions, all of which were of interest to me, so it was fun to click around.”

This site could so easily have gone with black and white bullet lists, but instead went the extra mile to draw the user in with design.

“The aesthetics are totally appropriate for an outdoors kind of site — tans and greens and browns with flourishes of plant life,” said Coyier. “The location-specific pages are amazing. Everything I would want to see: photos, maps, specifics on what you can do, rules, etc. The visuals are great, but the information architecture is the best feature.”


More Business Resources from Mashable:


- 5 Design Trends That Small Businesses Can Use in 2011
- 10 Free WordPress Themes for Small Businesses
- 5 Beautiful Tumblr Themes for Small Businesses
- 10 Free Drupal Themes for Small Business
- 5 Big Social Media Questions from Small Business Owners

Image courtesy of Flickr, Mike Rohde.


Reviews: Flickr

More About: business, design, small business, web design, Web Development

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Create Automated Website Tests with Ease

12 Oct


This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Fake

Quick Pitch: Fake is a new browser for Mac OS X that makes web automation and testing simple.

Genius Idea: Inspired by Apple’s Automator, Fake is a tool that lets web designers and developers create graphical workflows that can be run again and again, without human interaction. These workflows can be saved, shared and edited at ease.

Fake is the creation of Todd Ditchendorf’s Celestial Teapot Software. Ditchendorf is the guy responsible for Fluid, one of our favorite single-site browsers.

Whereas Fluid is a great tool that can appeal to a wide array of users, Fake’s target audience consists of developers, web designers or people that have to perform the same automated tasks repeatedly. That is to say, if you aren’t doing a lot of website testing, unit tests or debugging, Fake might not be for you.

However, if you are a web designer or developer, Fake is just awesome. I’ve been using this app for the last month or so and I have to say, the ability to create workflows to perform rudimentary tasks like capturing a screenshot or filling out a form or clicking on a link is just really remarkable.

A common workflow I utilize is taking screenshots. Oftentimes when I’m writing a post, I’ll need a screenshot from lots of different sources. Rather than taking each screenshot individually, I can just enter in each URL into Fake and have it repeat the “capture screenshot” action for each site. That way, while I’m writing in the background, my screenshots are being captured and saved to a folder of my choice.

For testing purposes especially, the fact that Fake has assertions, assertion failure handlers and error handlers makes it really powerful. It’s often hard to get a real sense of how a site or web app is going to perform under certain conditions. User testing is great, but it can be expensive and time consuming, especially if you need to test various alternating aspects of a site.

The great thing about saving workflows is that you can modify or rerun the workflow against other content. So for people doing A/B testing, you can set up the same set of “fake” interactions for each version and compare results.

Fake is $29.95, but you can download a free trial to see how you like the app. The trial doesn’t let you save workflows and limits you to eight actions at a time, but it’s a great way to determine whether you need this kind of app.

Check out this video to see Fake in action:

Designers and developers — what types of tools do you use for unit or automated testing? Let us know.


Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark


BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.


Reviews: fluid

More About: automator, fake, fluid, mac apps, single-site browser, software, unit testing

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Google Just Lost a Potential Ally in its Legal Tussle with Oracle

12 Oct


The battle between Oracle and Google over Android’s use of Java just got a lot more interesting. That’s because IBM has announced that it will be collaborating with Oracle to work on the OpenJDK project.

This means that IBM will no longer be part of the Apache Software Foundation’s Project Harmony, the project that provides Android with the components it needs to run Java code. With IBM leaving the project, Harmony is basically dead in the water.

Although Android wasn’t mentioned in the announcement, this is all interrelated to the Oracle lawsuit. Google responded to the lawsuit last week, claiming that Oracle, which got Java out of its purchase of Sun Microsystems, was acting in bad faith.

For the non-Java savvy out there, here’s an abbreviated rundown of how and why all of this stuff matters:

Apache Harmony is an open source implementation of Java. The goal in creating the project was to unite all of the various free software Java implementations together under one banner.

The project had a lot of early support, the only problem was that Sun (and then Oracle) never offered the project with a Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK). The TCK is needed to prove that Harmony is compatible with the Java specification and can be seen as a certified Java independent version of Java. When Sun first open sourced aspects of Java in 2007, it said it would provide the Apache Foundation with the necessary TCK for certification.

Sun never made good on those assurances and when Oracle took over Sun, the new company wasn’t interested in sharing the TCKs, instead wanting to focus all of its efforts on the officially sanctioned open source Java implementation, OpenJDK.

IBM’s Bob Sutor discussed the decision on his blog, writing:

“We think this is the pragmatic choice. It became clear to us that first Sun and then Oracle were never planning to make the important test and certification tests for Java, the Java SE TCK, available to Apache. We disagreed with this choice, but it was not ours to make. So rather than continue to drive Harmony as an unofficial and uncertified Java effort, we decided to shift direction and put our efforts into OpenJDK. Our involvement will not be casual as we plan to hold leadership positions and, with the other members of the community, fully expect to have a strong say in how the project is managed and in which technical direction it goes.”

This is a big blow to the Harmony project and by extension, to the libraries and classes that Android implements from Harmony in Android. Without big backing like IBM behind the project, it’s not likely to survive.

For now, the Harmony implementation of Java is fine. The problem will be when future versions of Java are released and Harmony can’t keep up in terms of features.

In Java, staying compatible is key. Interestingly, InfoWorld notes that Google has more developers working on OpenJDK than Oracle. So why choose Harmony for Android?

We think it’s because Google wanted to do an end-run around Sun’s licensing requirements. In essence, getting to take advantage of Java SE on mobile devices (something that Sun explicitly forbade without a license), but not having to pay for it.

Long before Sun’s sale to Oracle, others pointed out the potential licensing and IP quagmire that Google was entering with Android. The reality was, Sun didn’t have the power, the funds or the industry clout to really do anything about it.

Oracle does. In fact, Oracle’s clout and power is underscored by IBM’s decision to join up. IBM may be making its decisions for pragmatic reasons, but in the decision shows that IBM is not willing to side with Google in this elongated fight.

At this point, Google’s only real recourse is to sensibly settle and pay Oracle, or countersue and drag the fight out even longer. By fighting back, Google risks alienating its Java-base of developers.

While we question how important having a strong base of Java developers really is to Android’s success in the long term, it doesn’t mean it’s worth risking the future developments of the platform on a legal gamble.

Oracle is out for blood and IBM just provided the syringe.


Reviews: Android, Google

More About: android, apache foundation, Google, harmony, IBM, java, lawsuits, legal, oracle

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lostworldsfairs.com/moon/

12 Oct


This is the “Moon” website or page from the Lost World’s Fairs website project designed by Jason Santa Maria.

I love this design for “Moon”, the visual depth is really nice. I also love the movement as you scale your browser window down and then back up. The little illustrations are sweet too. It’s really hard to believe this is done with web fonts.

 
 

Top 5 Web Font Design Trends to Follow

21 Sep
This series is brought to you by the Intel AppUpâ„  Developer Program, which provides developers with everything they need to create and then sell their applications to millions of Intel Atomâ„¢ processor-based devices. Learn more here.


The world of web fonts and web typography is exploding. After years of struggle, we’re finally at a point where using real fonts on the web is a viable option.

For web designers, this is huge news because it means a greater degree of control over how content is displayed. For end users, it means a richer web experience.

Thanks to web services like Typekit, Fonts.com Web Fonts, Webtype and others, the opportunities to integrate real fonts on the web is getting better all the time.

Let’s look at five of the biggest trends taking place with web font and web typography design.


1. WOFF as a Standard


The Web Open Font Format, or WOFF, is edging ever closer to becoming the de facto standardized format for using fonts on the web.

Backed by Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft, WOFF allows TrueType, OpenType or Open Font Format fonts to be embedded into web pages.

Right now, WOFF support is built into Firefox 3.6 and above, Google Chrome version 5 and above, Internet Explorer 9, and will be supported in upcoming versions of Safari.

Jason Santa Maria and his Friends of Mighty built Lost World’s Fairs as a way to showcase IE 9 and its support of WOFF. This fantastic piece of typographic web art really shows just how great type can be made to look on the web.


2. Big Foundries Jump on Board


When Adobe announced that they were partnering with Typekit back in August, it was a big move. Historically, the biggest font foundries have led the resistance against getting fonts on the web.

Adobe’s decision was followed recently by the new company, Webtype, a partnership of Ascender, Roger Black and Font Bureau. Similar to Typekit, Webtype offers a way for designers or end users to get high quality fonts for use in their own designs.

Last week, Monotype Imaging formally launched Fonts.com Web Fonts and brought many of the most famous Monotype, Linotype and ITC font families to the web.

At this stage, nearly every major foundry is either offering fonts with web usage licenses or is considering making their fonts usable on the web. Eighteen months ago, that wouldn’t have been a reality. Today it is.


3. Better Letter Control with Lettering.js


When creating the Lost World’s Fairs project, Friends of Mighty realized they would need to have a way to better control individual letters and words to offer proper spacing and better kerning.

Thus, Lettering.js was born. Lettering.js is a JavaScript plugin that allows developers and designers to better control individual letters without having tons of messy markup.

As Dan Rubin recently remarked on Twitter, Lettering.js may just end up having a bigger impact on typography on the web than anyone is expecting.


4. Mobile Support


Fonts.com Web Fonts service and Typekit both offer support for multiple mobile browsers. This continues to increase as more and more mobile browser makers support various aspects of @font-face and draft specifications like WOFF.

It’s not just enough for fonts to look good on the desktop, as more and more web usage shifts to the smartphone, having readable, legible and properly spaced typography on mobile devices will be a bigger and bigger area of interest.

Already companies like Monotype and Typekit are working to make sure that fonts look their best on a number of different screen types and sizes.


5. Font Support in Web Apps


One of the most interesting recent advancements in the web font world has been the ability to choose web fonts when customizing an aspect of a web app. Thanks to Typekit and Google’s Web Font Directory, it’s easy for developers to build these tools into their product.

Already many Tumblr themes are coming with Typekit support and new web services like About.me give users the option to customize their typefaces for various aspects of their profile.

This is a great use of typography on the web because it gives end-users direct interaction with fonts and lets them see directly how different fonts look together and at different sizes.

Web typography is on a tear and we’re at the beginning of a new era of a more beautiful, more legible and more customizable web.


Series supported by Intel AppUpâ„  Developer Program

This series is brought to you by the Intel AppUpâ„  Developer Program, which provides developers with everything they need to create and then sell their applications to millions of Intel Atomâ„¢ processor-based devices. Learn more here.


More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:


- HOW TO: Be a Hybrid Designer/Developer
- 6 New Mac Apps for Designers and Developers
- Flash vs. HTML5: Adobe Weighs In
- 10 Free Web UI Kits and Resources for Designers
- Top 10 Accessories for Typography Nuts [PICS]

Image courtesy of playgrounder.com


Reviews: Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, Tumblr, Twitter

More About: fonts, fonts on the web, monotype, typekit, typography, Web Design Trends Series, web fonts, webtype

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