Google Launch SSL Encrypted Searches
Secure searches for Google.com users are now available at https://www.google.com helping us all make private searches even if we are connecting via an unsecured network (even the Google maps sniffer car can’t snoop on that – see my previous post). With the use of an SSL Google are effectively creating an encrypted tunnel between your browser and their servers, meaning that your searches cannot be sniffed out by people wanting to gather data on you.
Using technology commonly found on ecommerce sites, Google have improved security across the web for the user, not to mention making browsing in China an all together safer experience.
HTML5 Client Side storage. In every browser. Right now.
Somewhere along the road to cloud based storage accessed through web applications a weary programmer sighed and pointed out that you would not have access to your data if you have no internet connection. The response was to add local client side storage as part of the HTML5 spec. Hence-forth you could keep a copy of all your data on your local machine for your web apps to access. Possibly the same programmer pointed out that while this was indeed a solution wouldn’t it require everyone to have fully HTML5 compliant browsers ? I imagine there was a lot of frowning from various people at this point. Never fear though because more clever programming chaps have come up with ways to have client side storage on all browsers. Yes, even those produced by Microsoft, which incidentally have had this ability since IE5.5.
Store.js – http://github.com/marcuswestin/store.js
Lawnchair – http://brianleroux.github.com/lawnchair/
PersistJS – http://pablotron.org/?cid=1557
MilkCrate – http://github.com/garrow/milkcratejs
Google's Sniffing Around
Google’s all seeing eye just keeps on getting worse! As if the whole streetcar invasion wasn’t enough bad press they just had to go one step further…
Taking unauthorised pictures of people and property left a bad taste in the public’s mouth, but Google’s most recent scandal takes the biscuit! Incase you hadn’t heard, Google’s latest potential law suit involves the monitoring of data sent over unsecured Wi-Fi networks in 30 countries.
Only after the German authorities requested to view Google’s logs did Google admit to having gathered `pay load` data as well as SSID’s and MAC addresses by sniffing packets on open networks and loging what was been sent and received. Google amassed a total of 600Gb of data via their already controversial street view cars.
Just another story indicating the importance of encrypting your Wi-Fi network.
CSS Media Queries
Nary a month on from the UK launch of the iPad it’s iPhone 4 day. Beyond the sight of people getting giddy over expensive consumer electronics the proliferation of mobile devices with all sorts of different resolutions and orientations raises the question of how best to serve web content that can be viewed as nature intended on all these devices. We’re not even past clients asking for pages that “fit on one screen” to which we invariably point to articles such as this – http://www.cxpartners.co.uk/thoughts/the_myth_of_the_page_fold_evidence_from_user_testing.htm – so how do we build for everyone ?
One answer are CSS media queries. Simply put these allow you to supply different CSS depending upon queries about the devices resolution and orientation. For more information see http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/04/using-css-media-queries-ipad.html and http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/
Microsoft move into top gear with IE9 Beta
Microsoft have announced that the third platform preview of IE9 is available to download and it’s a doozy. On top of their previously announced support for the Video tag we’re now getting a full Canvas implementation. Not only that but it’s fully hardware accelerated too meaning that rendering speeds for complex animations are now faster than competitors browsers. The icing on the cake ? That’ll be the support for ECMAScript 5.
Web Development…
Web design isn’t just about the look of a site it’s about the feel and the functionality too.
This is where experience and expertise is needed to make your site navigate well, look good and perform fail safe operations.