David Walker | 26 February 2013
I read a LOT of tech blocks daily, infact Chrome moans that I’m about to open 20 tabs as I sit down with my coffee in the morning and figure out what is new and exciting. Over this week and for every week now on i will be letting you know what interesting, important or amusing facts I have found this week
Web Development
The biggest story in web development this week is that
Opera are giving up on their own browser engine and replacing it
with the
WebKit engine
that is used for Safari and Chrome. Opera's
figures have been in the doldrums for a while with numbers in their
core Scandinavian countries dropping and Chrome beating them into
second place. If this webkit revision reaches their mobile browser
we have a really interesting set of affairs as Opera mobile is one
of the top three mobile browsers in the world. If they can use
webkit in that space, HTML5 will then be available to the majority
of mobile browsers.
This means WebKit is now the core engine in Chrome, Safari &
Opera with only Firefox's Mozilla engine and IE's Trident engine as
competitors. I can't see any company giving up their engine yet but
tech crunch have been considering what would happen in a
web mono-culture
.
Before we get too excited about a standardized platform in web
development one of the jQuery gurus warns us WebKit still has some
serious bugs
.
So Firefox are staying with Mozilla and launched
FF19
this week
User Experience
The flavor of the week in enquiries I have been getting
has been about User Experience or UX. UX is about considering
deeply what the user needs, wants. Six Revisions have a great
blog
to get you thinking about UX.
One of the most important conversations in web development at the
moment is
Responsive design
. A responsive site adapt to the display
viewing it. It is one of the most important evolutions of UI design
in years. Smashing magazine talk about it.
Of interest to that story Google are taking
AdSense
responsive which gives you an indication of how ready
the world is for your site to go mobile.
Responsive is the most dominant solution to the multi device
problem but there are
others
that
Six Revisions talk about.
A few fun links
The mobile world is ablaze with the ideas of whether we
will get
smart watches
this year. If we did why would we want them? Well
my reason is I want to look like Dick Tracy.
I've been re reading William Gibson recently and unfortunately a
neural jack and mirror shade eyes still seem to be a while away but
if you have a spare 1500 dollars Google are opening up their
Google Glass project
.
