Tag: announcements

LinkedIn “improved” profile

Today I got an email from LinkedIn, telling me that I am about to get an improved profile.

On December 11, 2012, you’ll be getting the new LinkedIn profile, which has a simplified design, provides deeper insights, and surfaces new ways to connect and build relationships. You’ll also be one of the first to preview a new way to showcase rich content on your profile — like presentations, videos, documents, and more.

But it’s not only the new functionality, some of the old functionality will be removed:

Now there are more ways than ever to tell your professional story on LinkedIn, and we’re excited for you to try them out. As we roll out these changes, we’ll also be streamlining our app offerings, so the following LinkedIn apps will no longer be supported on the homepage or profile as of December 11:

  • Blog Link
  • GitHub

Unfortunately, these are the only two applications that I am interested in.  As a blogger, I want to have my blog’s RSS feed broadcast to LinkedIn.  And as a developer, I can’t think of a better way than GitHub profile to showcase my work at LinkedIn.

I wonder what bits of new functionality will allow to compensate for this gaping hole…

Fedora 18 features

Fedora Engineering Steering Committee has recently had a meeting where the upcoming Fedora 18 features were decided.  Out of the whole list, I am actually really looking forward to just one – 256 color terminals:

Many terminal programs (like vim and ls for example) can take advantage of 256 color terminals, and all xterms I know of support at least 256 colors and sometimes more.
So let’s break through the artificial 8 color limit!

Also when preparing this page, while searching the net I noticed that Mac OS X Terminal’s default $TERM value is xterm-256color since Lion 10.7 That will ease some of the compatibility issues noted below.

You can see vim’s default appearance using the above expanded palette at:

http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/terminal_colours/#256

Sure, the upgraded Perl and Python, Samba4 and Active Directory integration, FedFs and even the MATE Desktop (based on Gnome 2.x) are all cool.  But I don’t use any of them on a daily basis anymore.  Most of my needs have moved beyond desktop and straight into the browser.  But the colorful terminal still plays a major role in my daily routine, so I’m glad to see there will be an enhancement.

What’s your most expected feature?

HTML5 splits into two standards

Just when web developers got a little bit of hope, Slashdot reports on the bad news.

Until now the two standards bodies working on HTML5 (WHATWG and W3C ) have cooperated. An announcement by WHATWG makes it clear that this is no longer true. WHATWG is going to work on a living standard for HTML which will continue to evolve as more technologies are added. W3C is going the traditional and much more time consuming route of creating a traditional standard which WHATWG refers to as a ‘snapshot’ of their living standard. Of course now being free of W3C’s slower methods WHATWG can accelerate the pace of introducing new technologies to HTML5. Whatever happens, the future has just become more complicated — now you have to ask yourself ‘Which HTML5?’

Even if it sounds good, it is actually really bad.  HTML5 is already complicated enough, and all major browsers support a different subset of it, and even those things which are supported do differ in the way of how.  Splitting the standard just complicated things further.  The fact that this is not exactly new, doesn’t really matter.  Saying that it won’t be harmful, is silly.  As is the whole point of a “living standard”.  Like a few people mentioned in Slashdot comments, “living standard” is an oxymoron. The whole point of standard is to provide a static point of reference.  Splitting is not a solution to the problem.  It’s quite the opposite.  Consider this xkcd comics for illustration, which is nothing but the truth.

Adobe PhoneGap 2.0 Released

Adobe PhoneGap 2.0 Released

We’re excited to announce the following major new features in PhoneGap 2.0:

  • Cordova WebView – This allows for the integration of PhoneGap, as a view fragment, into a bigger native application.
  • Command Line Tooling (CLI) (Android, iOS and BlackBerry) – CLI tooling brings a standard nomenclature to common tasks across platforms such as project creation, debugging, and emulation. Normally, these are different incantations for each platform vendor making cross platform development workflow inconsistent and jarring; we’ve fixed that.
  • Enhanced documentation – Getting-started guides, plugins, migration guides and more to help accelerate the development of mobile applications and make it even easier.
  • Web Inspector Remote (Weinre) ported to nodejs – The availability of a node module means easy installation using Node Package Manager (NPM).
  • Cordovajs (Support for unified Javascript across platforms) – We’ve seen dramatic advancements to performance, security, and API symmetry across platforms thanks to the herculean effort of unifying our JS layer.
  • Transition to Apache Cordova and nearing graduation from incubation
  • Windows Phone support
  • Improvement to iOS app creation – We’ve implemented significant changes for the iOS platform. Get a deeper dive into all the changes from Shaz, our PhoneGap iOS lead developer.

jQuery 2.0 will drop support for MSIE 6, 7, and 8

Slashdot reports:

The developers of jQuery recently announced in a blog entry that jQuery 2.0 will drop support for legacy versions of Internet Explorer. The release will come in parallel with version 1.9, however, which will include support for older versions of IE. The versions will offer full API compatibility, but 2.0 will ‘benefit from a faster implementation that doesn’t have to rely on legacy compatibility hacks.

A few comments mentioned that dropping support for MSIE 6 and 7 is fine, but MSIE 8 is still widely used by people with Windows XP.  The solution to the problem seems to be conditional tags.  Since jQuery 2.0 will have fully compatible APIs to jQuery 1.9, something along the lines of:


<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="jquery-1.9.0.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
<!--[if gte IE 9]>
<script src="jquery-2.0.0.js"></script>
<!--<![endif]-->

should solve the problem.