iWeb Communities: Blog

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 20th, here are the highlights:

• Chrome Experiments is a collection of new and advanced javascript effects. It’s only works though for for Safari 4 and Google Chrome. The website shows us what could be done in the future for website animations and website graphics
• GMail introduces unsend, a feature which allows a user to cancel an email sent. 
• An exhaustive review of LoadImpact.com, a service which allows a webmaster to test the performance and responsiveness of a website under load
• Time introduces Mine, an experimenal magazine which is essentially a customized, printed RSS feed. 

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 19th, here are the highlights:

• Apple has announced the version 3.0 for the iPhone OS. It brings background notifications, cut & paste, in-app micro-purchases, MMS, system-wide search (spotlight), landscape viewing, all in all, 100 new features. The OS will be free for current iPhone users, and will cost $9.99 for iPod Touch owners
• Microsoft introduces Internet Explorer 8.0, a sign on how the browser competition heats up. In the past few months, Safari 4, and Google Chrome for Mac, as well as new browsers based on WebKit were announced, as well as new tools like Ubiquity from Mozilla.org
• Safari on Macbook was cracked in seconds at the Pwn2Own 2009 Hacker competition, getting advantage of an unknown security vulnerability, and landing the $10.000 top prize
• 6 months later, the Intel SSDs are still massively better

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 17th, here are the highlights:

• A performancy study of Nginx vs Apache. Nginx can get up to 10.000 req/s and has sustainable RAM consumption
• Ruby On Rails version 2.3 is out, it now has Rack, Metal, Templates, Engines and more
• Twitter OAuth is now available to all third-party app developers for Twitter.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 16th, here are the highlights:

• A blog post on how microblogging services like yammer, present.ly, identi.ca (or even Twitter) would marginalize email
• 15 tools to know the popularity of a website
• For programmers, Zed Shaw has an (updated) article on FreeHackers Union, a movement that would gather programmers, hardware hackers and artists.
• If you use Firefox or Thunderbird, and like what Mozilla is doing, here’s an interesting crowd-sourced initiative to redesign Mozilla.org’s homepage

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 13th, here are the highlights

• Cybercrime is now so common that attackers are now offering their services, with support and maintenance services, added to the initial attacks. It’s now an industry, with investors, service providers, media etc. 
• Early screenshots of XUbuntu 8.1 + Xfce 4.6
• A very interesting series of Screenshots of Operating Systems, between 1981 and 2009
• Jaiku is now JaikuEngine, available on Google App Engine. The service bought by Google is being open sourced and being turned into a micro-blogging federated platform
• Sourceforge now supports Git, Mercurial and Bazar as version source control systems. It also now offers Trac, Mantis and phpBB to software developers hosting their projects on the website, making Sourceforge a project management/collaboration service, much alike Assembla.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 12th, here are the highlights:

• Google has announced the beta release of Google Voice, which allows anyone to control how they get contacted, managing SMS and voicemails, have a web interface to manage these. It’s an innovative service, built upon the technology developed by GrandCentral, acquired by Google in 2007
• Fusion-IO claims to have the fastest solid-state drive, with throughputs of 20GB per second. The price is prohibitive though, with $30 per GB, which means a SSD by Fusio-IO will sell at around $5000
• The results of an interesting survey of developers using the Ruby On Rails framework, about their development practices and web hosting needs

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 11th, here are the highlights:

• Ars Technica documents the state of in-flight Internet, now available on many domestic flights in the US and in a few international flights.
• Facebook admitted that they’ve lost 10 to 15% of their users’ photographs over the weekend, due to a hard drive failure. If you are hosting important data, do take into account backups and recovery plans!
• Google announced they will be offering behavioral-based ads, with a system similar to the harshly criticized Facebook Beacon.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 10th, here are the highlights:

• An interesting video where 24 Solid State Drives (SSD) were setup in a RAID, achieving 2GBs rates of transfer and hyper-fast access times. Another article on Ars shows how SSDs will help the new SATA3 to reach its full speed potential.
• Color Scheme Designer has a new version, the third since its launch. It’s a handy tool for graphic designers when choosing a good color palette
• Cebit, an electronics conference, sees a big drop in visitor numbers.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 9th, here are the highlights:

• Da Button Factory is a new useful website for website designers to create easily photoshop-style buttons, with drop shadows, gradients, and rounded corners. See also examples
• An exhaustive report of DrupalCon2009, the Drupal conference held last week
• A mathematician and software engineer named Stephen Wolfram is building a new semantic and computational search engine, which “could be as important as Google”

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 6th, here are the highlights:

• Barack Obama Names Vivek Kundra Chief Information Officer. The CIO position is new in the White House, and shows how important technology is for the new US president. Vivek Kundra says he wants a web2.0 government, adopt consumer technology, cloud computing, etc.
• Zimbra has 40 million paid users. It’s more than GMail or any other email service, although they can’t be really compared since the Zimbra service is white-labelled by very large partners such as ISPs, large entreprises, and brands
• For those of you who publish on the Internet, or if you have a website and consider subscriptions, here’s an interesting article which analyzes the Wall Street Journal’s business models. The WSJ is one of the very rare newspaper which charge for access to its content.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 5th, here are the highlights:

• A detailed article on how netlog (a social networking european website) does sharding with MySQL. Netlog has 50 millions unique visitors per month, and up to 3000 database queries per second
• AT&T is planning to sell subsidized netbooks, with 2 year contract, with a $60/month unmetered plan, with prices for the netbook below $100
• Nokia has announced they will be developing and launching LTE devices for 2010. LTE is a 4th Generation network, competing with Wimax to deliver broadband Internet to mobile devices
• Facebook has announced a new redesign for its homepages, profile and pages, with a focus on streams, and taking inspiration from Twitter’s success

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 4th, here are the highlights:

• Apple has released yesterday new versions of its desktop computers and accessories. The iMac, the mac mini, and the mac pro have had updated specifications, small design changes, while Airport Extreme and the Time Capsule brings new wireless features (dual-band networks, temporary guest networks, control a mac via the Internet)
• If you are publishing a website and want to focus on advertisements for monetization, here are a few tips on how to raise the rates and bring in cash
• Amazon is releasing an iPhone application for books
• An interesting article on how Android will make Linux mainstream, thanks to the Dalvik virtual machine

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For March 2nd, here are the highlights:

• Psion countersues Intel, asks for $1.2 billion and punitive damages. Psion states they hold the “netbook” trademark, with its netBook Pro product, and Intel sued Psion last week Psion for fraud
• Safari has now a 10% browser market share, the first time ever for Apple. This is mainly due to the beta release of Safari 4
• Zuora brings subscription billings to Facebook apps, an opportunity for creators for this platform.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 27th, here are the highlights:

• Google has launched the Apps Status Dashboard, which is a visual representation of the Google Apps availability history. This follows the outage Tuesday morning
• Nokia is considering entering the laptop industry
• A series of iPhone-related news: NYT asks why iPhone/iPod touch users are willing to pay for content. AirPhones is a new app which allows you to stream music wirelessly from iTunes to an iPhone, which sounds like a software version of Apple’s Airport Express. Wired tells how the iPhone is not successful in Japan: consumers can now get it for free there.
• For database admins and web developers, a blog post on how FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data. 

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 26th, here are the highlights:

• An interview of id Software’s John Carmack, who talks about the new in-browser game Quake 3. John Carmack discusses the future of PC games, how in-browser games development differ from regular titles, and business models,
• Marvell plans $100 pluggable computers, called wall-warts. It has Linux, a 1.2Ghz cpu, 512Mb of RAM and a USB port, etc. and could be used a home server, a light office server, a media server (music streaming)
• Microsoft sues TomTom, the in-car navigation maker company, over IP claims, with three involving the Linux kernel.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 25th, here are the highlights:

• Safari 4 has been released in public beta yesterday. It has a new javascript Engine called Nitro, it’s the fastest browser on the market (3.5 times faster than Firefox 3), and has new graphic UIs, with CoverFlows for the Web. The browser will show you graphically your most visited websites in 3D, as well as history and bookmarks
• The team at 280North has announced a new product, Atlas, aimed at web developers, javascripts programmers, and front-end UI engineers. It has a code editor, but more importantly, a sophisticated user interface editor for next-generation web apps
• Usability Analysis of Apple’s website: Why is it so good
• After the guide published by Gizmodo on how to put Mac OS X on the Dell Mini 9, LaptopMag reveals that 1/3 of those netbooks are sold with Linux, making it the most hacker-friendly netbook ever. Another articles states how netbooks will kill Microsoft

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 24th, here are the highlights:

• If you are contemplating opening getting revenues from blogs, here’s a new list of the 25 most valuable blogs. Gakwer Media tops the list, with an estimated value of $170 million. 
• GMail was down for several hours Tuesday morning
• A blog post arguing how instant deployment matters. With new rapid development frameworks, better practices, agile development and new technologies, development time has reduced, but deployment hasn’t reduced in the same rate
• It’s the End of Second Life
• the New Zealand disconnection plan has been delayed after outcry from consumers and citizens, both in New Zealand and on an international level

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 23rd, here are the highlights:

• In Europe, media company GoAdv acquires shopping portal LeGuide for 50 million euros
• For ruby developers, how to build and scale a rails startup
• Why Entreprise applications suck?
• The Future of NetFlix is streaming

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 20th, here are the highlights:

• An interesting case study for web entrepreneurs who are selling products on the web: the video game Steam sees sales jumping 3000%, after price drop. 
• The White House has chosen Drupal as its Content Management System for Recovery.gov: why it matters
• For software and web developers doing agile development, classes of Intermittent test: how to handle intermittent tests in test-driven development

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 19th, here are the highlights:

• Intel sues NVIDIA over chipset licensing agreement. Intel believes NVIDIA does not have the right to bundle the future Intel processors (core i7, on the Nehalem platform) in its products. NVIDIA states that the suit is an attempt to slow down adoption of GPU platforms “to protect a decaying CPU business”
• Yahoo! introduces ads with images and videos, called Rich Ads in Search. Previously, Yahoo! ads were just text and links
• Most handsets manufacturers and mobile carriers have agreed on an universal mobile phone charger at MWC09
• First Details of the Palm Pre Os, called webOS 

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 18th, here are the highlights:

• Ars Technica asks if Internet traffic decreases, why the ISPs are throttling the Internet? This is related to the CRTC hearings and the net neutrality debate in Canada.
• At the SMX conference, Vint Cert, the creator of the Internet, listed several problems for the Internet, amongst them the problem of security for cloud computing, lack of formats, protocols and standards, and the impossibility to communicate between different clouds.
• Facebook and myspace have the best uptime, while Twitter and LinkedIn trail, in a pingdom study. If you are interested in the infrastructure of social networks, Wordpress has a post (and a video) about their new data center.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 17th, here are the highlights:

• DataCenter Knowledge comes back to yesterday’s incident: the problem came from a Czech ISP which broadcasted bogus commands. The problem is similar to the Pakistani ISP which took YouTube down in Feb 2008.
• For UI designers, John Gruber (Daring FireBall) writes that a User Interface’s complexity can be measured in the number of actions (keystrokes, mouse clicks) needed to complete an action.
• Mobile World Congress (MWC09) has opened yesterday in Barcelona, Spain. Lots of new handsets, with a wave of touchscreen smartphones; no Android phones though, and analysts are asking questions.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 16th, here are the highlights:

• Debian 5.0 has been released, after 22 months of “constant development”
• An audio interview of Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress, on how to go from 1 to 100k users for your product. He tells about his 12 rules, including the “importance of obsessing about details, doing your own support, blogging every step of the way, and being a painkiller, not a vitamin”.
• The Nokia store, a platform for Nokia to distribute their mobile applications, has opened publicly. 70% of future revenues are given back to Symbian OS developers.

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 13th, here are the highlights:

• For front-end developers and web designers, here’s a resource listing browser features and incompatibilities, such as PNG support, CSS3, HTML5, DOM etc.
• YouTube launches several download options for video viewers, such as free downloads, with Creative Commons licenses, and also paid downloads, through Google Checkout.
• News in micro-blogging: US Congress is adopting Twitter, first social virus in Twitter, Yammer is planning a hosted version of their software for companies. 

The iWeb Tech News Highlights covers web hosting, web development, web design and general technology news and is published at 8.00am EST. For Feb. 12th, here are the highlights:

• Skype is now 5 years old. It launched version 4 of the software to celebrate the event. Stats show the service gets 380.000 new users every day, and has now gone past the 15 million concurrent users mark.
• “Social Media” types are all excited by Twestival, an event due today, which is said to help raise awareness for water issues. For those wondering how to do web marketing and how to create a viral, grassroots campaign, Twestival is a textbook case.
• Apple is rumoured to launch iTunes replay, a video streaming service, with users having their media library on Apple’s servers instead of their hard drive.
• Om Malik writes that Facebook’s future is mobile