Media Blog

Ever wish your RSS reader worked more like a Twitter client? Or even FriendFeed, where updates just appear in real-time? Well, that idea has been gaining ground for some time, and it just got a whole lot more appealing now that WordPress has announced support for RSS Cloud.

RSS Cloud takes advantage of the cloud element in the RSS 2.0 specification. Actually cloud has been there since RSS 0.92, but no one paid much attention to it until Twitter and others ushered in the idea of a real-time web. The cloud element is used to deliver push notifications to your feed reader.

That’s essentially the reverse of how RSS readers work right now. At the moment, most popular RSS readers poll sites to see when they have new content. Another, slightly better method is to wait for a ping from your blog to let the RSS reader know when new content is available. But as WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg notes in the announcement, “getting every ping in the world is a lot of work… RSS Cloud effectively allows any client to register to get pings for only the stuff they’re interested in.”

The result is that new posts from your favorite blogs arrive much faster using the RSS Cloud method. As Marshall Kirkpatrick writes over at ReadWriteWeb, the difference in wait times is like “the difference between checking your e-mail every once in awhile and using a Blackberry to get new e-mails pushed to you as soon as they arrive.”

Sounds good, no? More news, delivered faster. Well, the bad news is that there’s really only one feed reader that currently supports RSS Cloud — Dave Winer’s River2. However, with WordPress now implementing the cloud element in its feeds, some 50 million posts a week are potentially accessible to cloud-enabled feed readers, which should be more than enough to tip the balance in RSS Cloud’s favor.

Of course there are some competing specifications, like pubsubhubbub or FriendFeed’s SUP proposal, which both do something similar to enable push updates.

WordPress has already said that its working on other ways of pushing notifications to news reader, including pubsubhubbub, so while you may have to wait a while before your favorite reader enables support for RSS Cloud and others, the WordPress announcement has certainly added incentive. And, hopefully, it will give RSS readers a much needed kick in butt — let’s face it, RSS readers aren’t exactly hotbeds of innovation right now.

Indeed Dave Winer is trying to get popular Twitter clients to support RSS Cloud. If they do, they could well end up supplanting RSS readers as the way most people get their news.

We’ll just have to stop calling them Twitter clients and start calling them what they should be referred to as: news clients.

See Also:

• What’s SUP?: FriendFeed’s Modest RSS Proposal
• Revamped Delicious Turns to Twitter for Real-Time Search

Ever wish your RSS reader worked more like a Twitter client? Or even FriendFeed, where updates just appear in real-time? Well, that idea has been gaining ground for some time, and it just got a whole lot more appealing now that WordPress has announced support for RSS Cloud.

RSS Cloud takes advantage of the cloud element in the RSS 2.0 specification. Actually cloud has been there since RSS 0.92, but no one paid much attention to it until Twitter and others ushered in the idea of a real-time web. The cloud element is used to deliver push notifications to your feed reader.

That’s essentially the reverse of how RSS readers work right now. At the moment, most popular RSS readers poll sites to see when they have new content. Another, slightly better method is to wait for a ping from your blog to let the RSS reader know when new content is available. But as WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg notes in the announcement, “getting every ping in the world is a lot of work… RSS Cloud effectively allows any client to register to get pings for only the stuff they’re interested in.”

The result is that new posts from your favorite blogs arrive much faster using the RSS Cloud method. As Marshall Kirkpatrick writes over at ReadWriteWeb, the difference in wait times is like “the difference between checking your e-mail every once in awhile and using a Blackberry to get new e-mails pushed to you as soon as they arrive.”

Sounds good, no? More news, delivered faster. Well, the bad news is that there’s really only one feed reader that currently supports RSS Cloud — Dave Winer’s River2. However, with WordPress now implementing the cloud element in its feeds, some 50 million posts a week are potentially accessible to cloud-enabled feed readers, which should be more than enough to tip the balance in RSS Cloud’s favor.

Of course there are some competing specifications, like pubsubhubbub or FriendFeed’s SUP proposal, which both do something similar to enable push updates.

WordPress has already said that its working on other ways of pushing notifications to news reader, including pubsubhubbub, so while you may have to wait a while before your favorite reader enables support for RSS Cloud and others, the WordPress announcement has certainly added incentive. And, hopefully, it will give RSS readers a much needed kick in butt — let’s face it, RSS readers aren’t exactly hotbeds of innovation right now.

Indeed Dave Winer is trying to get popular Twitter clients to support RSS Cloud. If they do, they could well end up supplanting RSS readers as the way most people get their news.

We’ll just have to stop calling them Twitter clients and start calling them what they should be referred to as: news clients.

See Also:

• What’s SUP?: FriendFeed’s Modest RSS Proposal
• Revamped Delicious Turns to Twitter for Real-Time Search

Web developers looking to play with the new features in HTML5 are still struggling with incomplete and inconsistent browser support. While HTML5 is far from perfect (and complete), that doesn’t mean you can’t use it; it just means using it is a little more complicated since you need to detect the current browser’s level of support and then adjust accordingly.

Fortunately there is Modernizr, a very nice JavaScript Library that can detect which HTML5 features are available to the current user’s browser. With that information you can then create conditional JavaScript statements to offer HTML5 to those browsers that support it, but still fall back on other content for those that don’t.

We’ve covered Modernizer before, taking a look at its basic capabilities and how you can use them, but now Mark Pilgrim — of Dive Into Python fame — has released another chapter of his coming Dive into HTML5 book with a much more in depth look at how to detect HTML5 features and what to do for fallback content.

Pilgrim also covers some more complex scenarios. For instance, he shows how detecting support for the HTML5 <canvas> element is often not enough to determine compatibility since different browsers support different aspects of the full API. In one example, Pilgrim shows how to detect <canvas> support and then adds further checks for those who need the Canvas Text API.

Another pain for web developers is the mixed bag of support for the <video> element. Nearly all the latest versions of popular browsers support <video> (well, not IE8, but we’re assuming that’s no surprise), but then even those that do support <video> support different video formats. Mozilla wants .go files, Safari will be looking for .mp4 videos, and so on. Pilgrim offers up a series of checks to figure out which video to serve using Modernizr.

We know what you’re thinking: this HTML5 stuff is more trouble than it’s worth. Right now, you’re probably right. But in a year or two, HTML5 will be spoken everywhere on the web, and taking the time to figure it out and start using it now will put you well ahead of the learning curve.

Check out Pilgrim’s post, and be sure to keep an eye on Webmonkey for more HTML5 coverage.

Photo: svenwerk/Flickr

See Also:

• Code for Tomorrow’s Web Today Using Modernizr
• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• This Spec Has a Posse: ‘Superfriends’ Suggest Changes for HTML5
• HTML5 Drag-and-Drop API Is no Panacea for Developers

Web developers looking to play with the new features in HTML5 are still struggling with incomplete and inconsistent browser support. While HTML5 is far from perfect (and complete), that doesn’t mean you can’t use it; it just means using it is a little more complicated since you need to detect the current browser’s level of support and then adjust accordingly.

Fortunately there is Modernizr, a very nice JavaScript Library that can detect which HTML5 features are available to the current user’s browser. With that information you can then create conditional JavaScript statements to offer HTML5 to those browsers that support it, but still fall back on other content for those that don’t.

We’ve covered Modernizer before, taking a look at its basic capabilities and how you can use them, but now Mark Pilgrim — of Dive Into Python fame — has released another chapter of his coming Dive into HTML5 book with a much more in depth look at how to detect HTML5 features and what to do for fallback content.

Pilgrim also covers some more complex scenarios. For instance, he shows how detecting support for the HTML5 <canvas> element is often not enough to determine compatibility since different browsers support different aspects of the full API. In one example, Pilgrim shows how to detect <canvas> support and then adds further checks for those who need the Canvas Text API.

Another pain for web developers is the mixed bag of support for the <video> element. Nearly all the latest versions of popular browsers support <video> (well, not IE8, but we’re assuming that’s no surprise), but then even those that do support <video> support different video formats. Mozilla wants .go files, Safari will be looking for .mp4 videos, and so on. Pilgrim offers up a series of checks to figure out which video to serve using Modernizr.

We know what you’re thinking: this HTML5 stuff is more trouble than it’s worth. Right now, you’re probably right. But in a year or two, HTML5 will be spoken everywhere on the web, and taking the time to figure it out and start using it now will put you well ahead of the learning curve.

Check out Pilgrim’s post, and be sure to keep an eye on Webmonkey for more HTML5 coverage.

Photo: svenwerk/Flickr

See Also:

• Code for Tomorrow’s Web Today Using Modernizr
• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• This Spec Has a Posse: ‘Superfriends’ Suggest Changes for HTML5
• HTML5 Drag-and-Drop API Is no Panacea for Developers

Web developers upgrading to Apple’s new Snow Leopard operating system will see something a little different in their monitors — Apple has switched the default color settings in OS X 10.6 to gamma 2.2.

The net result for web designers is that colors will appear somewhat darker than in previous version of OS X.

Many Mac toting web designers have long changed the old Apple default of gamma 1.8 to gamma 2.2, as PCs have long been set to gamma 2.2. And thus, the majority of your audience would see colors in gamma 2.2.

However, if you’ve never used gamma 2.2, beware that colors do look significantly darker.

As for why Apple used 1.8 for the last 25 years, Adobe’s Principal Product Manager for Photoshop, John Nack has the skinny on his blog.

A long story made short: gamma 1.8 is much closer to the colors you’d get from a typical print press, making colors on a Mac match what your final printed product would look like.

Apple’s switch to gamma 2.2 reflects, at least in part, the shift away from print to web and video output. It also means that the default colors on Mac and PC monitors is now nearly identical.

If for some reason you’d prefer to keep the old 1.8 gamma look on your Mac, head to system preferences and click “displays.” Then just create a new color profile and set the gamma to gamma 1.8.

See Also:

• Gadget Lab: Apple OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
• CocoaKuler: Badass Color Picker For Your Mac
• Create Color Schemes From Flickr Images With Adobe Kuler

Web developers upgrading to Apple’s new Snow Leopard operating system will see something a little different in their monitors — Apple has switched the default color settings in OS X 10.6 to gamma 2.2.

The net result for web designers is that colors will appear somewhat darker than in previous version of OS X.

Many Mac toting web designers have long changed the old Apple default of gamma 1.8 to gamma 2.2, as PCs have long been set to gamma 2.2. And thus, the majority of your audience would see colors in gamma 2.2.

However, if you’ve never used gamma 2.2, beware that colors do look significantly darker.

As for why Apple used 1.8 for the last 25 years, Adobe’s Principal Product Manager for Photoshop, John Nack has the skinny on his blog.

A long story made short: gamma 1.8 is much closer to the colors you’d get from a typical print press, making colors on a Mac match what your final printed product would look like.

Apple’s switch to gamma 2.2 reflects, at least in part, the shift away from print to web and video output. It also means that the default colors on Mac and PC monitors is now nearly identical.

If for some reason you’d prefer to keep the old 1.8 gamma look on your Mac, head to system preferences and click “displays.” Then just create a new color profile and set the gamma to gamma 1.8.

See Also:

• Gadget Lab: Apple OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
• CocoaKuler: Badass Color Picker For Your Mac
• Create Color Schemes From Flickr Images With Adobe Kuler