WebKit HTML5 wrapper for Google Gears
Thu, Oct 25, 07
In What’s in Leopard for Designers (2): WebKit & Safari I wrote about WebKit recently incorporating client-side data storage through HTML5 into SQLite. Several people inquired about differences and compatibility with Google Gears which essentially does the same thing as a plug-in and uses the same database SQLite.
It took Developer Dimitri Glazkov a day or so to come up with a wrapper to show WebKit’s Stickies demo-app running in Firefox with Gears, using a 4.3Kb bridge script:
Briefly noted Curiosities: 25 Oct 07
Thu, Oct 25, 07
Say you want to do outdoor advertising touting the 12X optical zoom capability of Leica cameras. You could do a lot worse than these very clever boards:
» Via 2WENTY 4HOUR.
Panasonic follows suit, or is it the other way around?
» Via The Online Photographer.
Just how brilliant is that!
» Via tantramar.
Weather.com Formatted for Windows Mobile vs. iPhone
Are we still arguing the iPhone won’t have much impact on mobile content design?
» Via o’reillynet.
Briefly noted Curiosities: 23 Oct 07
Tue, Oct 23, 07
What if your significant other were blind and wanted to ‘see’ your tattoo?
Klara Jirkova, a student at the University of Arts Berlin, thinks implantable beads placed just under the skin could form readable braille characters, as expressed in Tattoos for the Blind art project.
…implants creating embossed text in braille placed under skin, can be read by touch – stroke by blind people. it could be either a small slide with embossed text in braille or bead-style implants (in this case the size of the beads must be a bit bigger than the standardized size of braille text. too small beads will sink in the muscles and they will not be embossed). alternative – transdermal implants, placed partially below and partially above the skin…
» Via Technovelgy.
Lost your privacy and focus in an open-plan office? Simone Brewster has a solution, hand made and in white leather:
‘Nuff said.
» Via SensoryImpact.
Weirdsville: Pricing is Designing
Mon, Oct 22, 07
In Radiohead: Pricing is Designing I explored how crucial pricing is to a product’s success and advocated how it should come under the purview of design.
Now comes a movie Weirdsville, directed by Allan Moyle (Pump Up the Volume, New Waterford Girl) opening this Friday with a twist. Its producer Nicholas Tabarrok will refund the ticket price if a moviegoer doesn’t like the movie:
It occurred to me that this is a common thing… If you buy a product and you’re not satisfied, you get your money back… The same principle [should apply] to film
In the computer industry the ‘shareware’ model allows potential customers to sample an application for a limited time, after which the app becomes unusable. In movies, however, once you see it you have consumed 100% of its value. So ticket returns is far more problematic.
If a producer decides on a ticket refund policy before the movie is made what kind of a pressure would that place on the director? Would it be a safe bet to assume movie plots would substantially change to accommodate the likelihood of ticket refunds? Is this an homogenizing effect?
Bonus question: Does the fact that Alex Tabarrok, the economist, is the brother of Nicholas Tabarrok have anything to do with this?
(Via Playback.)
What’s in Leopard for Designers (2): WebKit & Safari
Mon, Oct 22, 07
This series exploring future design implications of Leopard technologies started with What’s in Leopard for Designers (1): Core Animation. Today, we’ll look at various strategic directions ushered in by WebKit and Safari 3.0.
When Apple announced Safari on Windows, it caught many developers and pundits unawares:
“For Windows users, the browser market is already far too crowded — who needs anything other than Internet Explorer or Firefox? Safari is one browser too many.”
For Apple, the significant bit in Safari is WebKit. Developed by Apple and based on KDE project’s layout engine KHTML and JavaScript engine KJS, WebKit is used by not only Safari in Leopard, but also pretty much by anything having to do with HTML including Dashboard, Mail and countless third-party applications.
WebKit as decoy
Traditionally, web designers and developers have targeted IE first and then Firefox, but seldom spent much additional time covering other browsers. Apple’s strategic goal is to establish WebKit as a main browsing engine alongside IE. The introduction of Safari on Windows was the first leg of that operation, iPhone is the second. In a way, Safari is Apple’s trojan horse into the developer community dressed up as an invitation to create web apps for the popular iPhone.
Taking a page out of popular Firefox plug-ins, Safari now offers an expanded WebKit Inspector, a sophisticated tool to navigate and debug web app development:
What QuickTime is to iTunes, WebKit is to Safari. Wherever OS X goes so goes WebKit: today on Macs, iPhones and iPods, perhaps tomorrow on AppleTV or other platforms yet to come. This affords Apple a strategic ability to move its technologies across platforms, if it so chooses. For example, it would not be a difficult task to take WebKit based Dashboard widgets in Leopard and move them not only to the iPhone and iPod touch but also to Windows to better compete against Vista-only Microsofts Gadgets.
Weaving an x-platform web
Having an open source rendering engine like WebKit has advantages. Apple is certainly not the only company using WebKit. Its chief rivals in phones and applications also base their browsers on WebKit. Nokia’s higher-end S60 platform is based on S60WebKit. Adobe’s new AIR platform for creating rich-media online applications that can also run offline on the desktop uses WebKit to render HTML and run JavaScript. Even popular cross-platform framework developer Trolltech has announced that they are including WebKit in their upcoming Qt 4.4.
Who’s afraid of the browser?
Unlike Microsoft (which sat on IE for half a decade with no significant updates after vanquishing Netscape) Apple is not afraid of the web browser. In fact, until the native SDK arrives next year the only legitimate app development on the iPhone is through Safari. For Web 2.0 fans this has been a great step forward to move applications from walled gardens like Active X on IE to open platforms using familiar HTML and Ajax.
By next Spring there will be downloadable native apps running on the iPhone, but there will still be an order of magnitude more Web 2.0 developers cranking out Safari-based apps that run wherever WebKit can be found: on PCs, Macs, iPhones, iPods, and other devices/apps from Apple, Nokia and Adobe. Cloud-based applications that rely on web processing and storage (like Facebook, Salesforce or Google Apps) will find a very welcoming and fully-functional home on WebKit-based browsers.
What’s so great about WebKit?
For starters, the <canvas> element. <canvas> defines a region of an HTML page between <canvas></canvas> to be scriptable and capable of dynamically rendering a gamut of bitmap drawing functions. If you played with Dashboard widgets with flips, animations, graphs, games and other 2D effects, you’ve already seen <canvas> in action. Apple introduced <canvas> for WebKit and now it’s also part of Safari, Dashboard, as well as Mozilla, Firefox, Opera and even IE via a workaround from Google.
<canvas> is part of HTML5, a web application platform from WHATWG. It is the primary agent enabling rich presentations in HTML, inching it closer to Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-ins. Hardware accelerated <canvas> regions for games or 3D can’t be that far off. Open source, multi-platform and without plug-ins!
Cookies on steroids
A knock on browser-based application design and development has always been the browser’s inability to dynamically store data. For a decade, the Netscape-introduced cookies have done the yeoman’s job keeping session state, personalization data, authentication IDs, and so on. But cookies are inherently limited, fragile and cumbersome to work with. When a browser is disconnected from network connectivity, it has no way to interact with data sources. This has critically impeded online application design and development, opening opportunities for plug-in based RIA platforms like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight.
But what if the web browser had a persistence layer, where data could be locally stored not in miniscule bites of cookies, but in a proper relational database?
Welcome to HTML5 client-side database storage! The emerging API allows the browser to store structured data using plain old SQL. Further, Apple has already integrated this into the Web Inspector, allowing the developer to see contents of a database used by the browser page, run arbitrary queries against it, and navigate it like a DOM tree:
So now, imagine if you will, the Safari browser in iPhone working without disruption with locally cacheable data even when not connected via EDGE or Wi-Fi. Or Safari in Leopard being able to do all kinds of sorting and manipulations on a data table in Google Docs even when a laptop is not connected to a network.
On Leopard, WebKit uses the already bundled SQLite database for storage. Both Google Gears and Adobe Flex also use embedded SQLite database engines for local storage of data.
Fortune cookie
What then is WebKit/Safari 3.0 foretelling us about design and development for the next 2-5 years? Once left for dead by the proponents of RIAs, the web browser is in ascendency, endowed with rich 2D effects capabilities, Ajax, embedded local data storage and capable of displaying applications across OSes and devices on an open source platform. As Moore’s law helps JavaScript and rendering catchup with native OS speeds, the browser closes the gap between web and desktop paradigms.
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What’s in Leopard for Designers (1): Core Animation
Next, we’ll take a strategic look at other Leopard technologies that will affect designers, including virtualization, Time Machine, resolution independent UIs, widgets and others. Please come back or subscribe to the RSS feed.
