Mozilla's Prism to bring Web apps to desktop
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The makers of Firefox want to break outside the browser--and challenge Adobe's AIR.
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Mozilla and eBay have launched the final version of their Firefox Companion for eBay.
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Mozilla Firefox is a safe, free, fast, simple and compatible Web browser that may be the answer to letting go of Internet Explorer once and for all.
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A growing set of developers is setting to work making Web browsing on a phone match the experience on a PC.Skyfire, a startup in Mountain View, California, joined the fray on Monday when it unveiled a free browser intended to support everything a PC browser can. That includes Flash video, Quicktime, Javascript, AJAX, and more, though not everything may be there right now, according to Nitin Bhandari, Skyfire&#39;s CEO. The browser is now in a private beta test for U.S. users only. The software was demonstrated at the Demo conference in Palm Desert, California.Apple&#39;s iPhone changed the mobile browsing world last year when it drew a huge following with its Safari browser. Unlike most browsers for phones, it lets users view a full, standard Web page all at once and zoom in to make up for the small size of the screen, though it doesn&#39;t support Flash video and some other standard Web features.Meanwhile, more opportunities have opened up for third parties to get any sort of application onto a consumer&#39;s mobile phone. Parts of&#160;Google&#39;s Android development environment&#160;are already available to developers, and Apple is preparing a software development kit for the iPhone. Both Verizon and Sprint Nextel, two of the biggest U.S. operators, have outlined plans to allow any device and any application on mobile networks.&quot;The iPhone has pretty much settled the debate. People want a rich, full Web experience,&quot; Skyfire&#39;s Bhandari said. &quot;There&#39;s a lot of consciousness that that&#39;s the bottom now, and everything now has to be there or above it.&quot;Since the phone&#39;s June debut, Mozilla has started developing a mobile version of Firefox, which looks somewhat like mobile Safari in screenshots on Mozilla&#39;s wiki. However, Mozilla has been vague about when that software will come out. Norwegian browser vendor Opera has its own mobile browser, Opera Mini.Skyfire&#39;s product will be set apart from Opera Mini and others by supporting the full browsing experience, Bhandari said. It does so by relieving the phone from some of the heavy lifting of presenting a Web page. In fact, a server transcodes every page into an efficient protocol that Skyfire has developed over the past 18 months, he said. The additional exchange of packets between phone and server to make that possible isn&#39;t a problem, because the server can carry out tasks much faster than a phone, according to Bhandari.&quot;The delay added by the server is actually such a small percentage of the time we&#39;re actually saving ... that it&#39;s actually a huge benefit in the end-user experience,&quot; Bhandari said. Skyfire operates the servers in its own datacenter.Skyfire can deliver full versions of popular Web sites, such as YouTube and ESPN, as demonstrated in a YouTube video. The zooming function, the critical tool for viewing full-size Web pages on a small screen, is different from the iPhone&#39;s &quot;pinch&quot; and &quot;unpinch&quot; gestures. A gray box appears over part of the Web page, and users can size that box to cover the area of the page they want to see full-screen, then tap on it to zoom in, Bhandari said. The browser also features a search bar and a tab with featured links in categories including news, sports and video.The browser is available only for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 today, but a version for Symbian, as well as an international beta test, are coming later, Bhandari said. Skyfire might also develop versions for Android and for the iPhone once Apple&#39;s SDK becomes available, he said. It is talking with handset makers and mobile operators about having the browser built into phones, but also sees search and advertising as possible revenue sources.In addition to invited testers, a limited number of public users will be allowed to participate in the beta. They can sign up at Skyfire&#39;s Web site.
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Once ethereal, Microsoft's plans to try to replicate its desktop position on the Web are starting to become clearer.
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For those that weren't able to make it to Adobe's webcast for combining Flex and PHP for web developers, the host Mike Potter has posted the slides for your review.   The session is targeted at PHP developers starting out with Flex.  I'll show examples of how to connect to a PHP datasource using three different methods - REST web service, JSON and AMFPHP.  I'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages to using each of them, and then show you how to extend your in browser application to the desktop using Adobe AIR.   You can find the slides here [pdf]. Also, if you want the full experience of the webcast and not just the slides, you can also sign up for the other session on July 17th.
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Mike Potter has posted about an event happening this Thursday (June 28th) - a webcast to help developers learn more about integrating Flex and PHP.   Are you interested in building rich Internet applications with PHP as the backend data service? Join me this Thursday as I present at an Adobe online e-seminar. The session is scheduled for July 28th, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time.   You'll need to register for the event to attend and you'll get info on "why rich internet applications" and some examples of companies using it in their web-based applications.
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Mozilla appears to have another winner on its hands. Its free Thunderbird e-mail client reads e-mail from Web and POP accounts, accesses RSS feeds, and offers significant flexibility.
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The latest release of Mozilla's lightweight browser for the Mac hints at a major upgrade around the corner. In Monkey Bites.
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Not content with eating into Microsoft&#39;s share of the browser market with Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation has released an open-source email client to rival Outlook.
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This week you'll learn about solid software design practices, many of them borrowed from working with Windows applications. The result is the development of a Web based drawing package. By Guyon Roche. 0802
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Mozilla&#39;s new Firefox Web browser can make believers even out of loyal Internet Explorer proponents. By Scot Finnie, Desktop Pipeline.
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Adobe's AIR allows applications to bridge the Web and desktop.
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Widgets, or small Web applications that supply useful information direct to the desktop, could soon be appearing on your cell phone screen.Japan&#39;s Access, the company behind the NetFront browser that is used in hundreds of phones on sale worldwide, has developed a widget system for the latest version of the browser and will demonstrate it next week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.Much like those on Apple&#39;s Mac OSX or Windows Vista, the NetFront widgets can do things like provide updated weather information, news headlines, favorites from YouTube, local maps, and photo feeds from Web sites.The intention is that users will be able to download widgets for sites like Google Maps, YouTube, and Wikipedia so those sites become services available directly from the desktop. In the case of some sites, say an auction site where prices change all the time, the widget will be able to provide constantly updated information to the desktop so the user doesn&#39;t have to go through a browser to the Web site.The widgets can be kept minimized at the bottom of the screen or placed on the desktop, where they appear as small boxes showing just a few highlights of the information they contain. Click on the boxes and they expand to full screen and their entire contents can be accessed.In a demonstration the minimized weather widget showed a symbol for the sun -- the current weather conditions at the time. When placed on the desktop it added the current conditions, &quot;clear,&quot; and the temperature and when fully expanded a three-day forecast was provided.The news widget displayed just five headlines on the desktop but expanded to show more news and the full text of each story while the video widget on the desktop had a screenshot from a single video and expanded to show details of the video and related content.In addition to linking up with data stored on the network the widgets framework also supports communication with parts of the phone hardware, like the camera, GPS chip or e-mail client.Access has developed the widget framework for NetFront 3.5, the latest version of its browser. The software isn&#39;t in any products available to consumers but is on its way. Access said it has already released NetFront 3.5 to partners and products are coming. It has also had interest on the widgets from partners but wouldn&#39;t identify them.On Monday Access will begin offering a preview of NetFront 3.5 intended for software developers. The software runs on Windows Mobile.The NetFront browser has been fitted in 1,349 different products to date including cell phones, televisions, set-top boxes, and PDAs. On Thursday Access said more than 544 million copies of the browser have been installed on such products.
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Scott Mattocks, like so many others, has just reciently recieved notification that he's been accepted as a speaker for the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo this fall. He talks more about his speech in his latest post.   My session, "Consusming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2&#8243; will be a look at how to turn a web services API into a desktop application. I only have fifty minutes so it won't be very heavy on implementation details. Instead it will look more at representing different data structures, collecting different types of data and how creating a desktop application can make life easier for the company and the end user.   Scott joins other speakers for this great event, including speakers like Ilia Alshanetsky, Wez Furlong, and Zeev Suraski. Be sure to check back on the Zend site soon to see when Scott and others' talks will be held.
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Mozilla takes a third shot at patching bugs in the way the Firefox can be used to launch programs from Web links.
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Macromedia has launched Flex Builder, a development tool for its Flex application-development platform. The new tool will help speed creation of rich Internet applications, including visual data