It’s good to be the king, but judging by the missing finger he’s had to fight for the right to sit in the sauna and been attended to by the gang.

Being a developer of several web-apps for both pc and mobile phones, I read with interest way back in March the brouhaha regarding whether Apple had intentionally hamstrung web-apps performance on the iPhone by preventing their use of its brand shiny new Nitro javascript engine.

The question that remains is whether this is an oversight on the part of Apple, or whether it is quietly intentional. With the company’s stand against Flash, an open standard of HTML5 should be its next logical thing to support. But if it doesn’t fix the problem in future versions of iOS, that leads a hefty credence to the rumor mill.

The debate primarily centred around whether with their update to Safari in iOS 4.3 Apple had purposely excluded web-apps for security reasons (JIT’s ability to mark memory pages in RAM as executable) or something more nefarious, such as perhaps feeling threatened by the rise of web-apps and a potential hit on the native app-store revenue….that debate rages on.

As I mentioned, I develop a number of websites with web-app versions customised to run on mobile phones. One of these apps is SwipeStudy (a flashcard study tool) which I submitted to the Apple web-app library, which is (or perhaps was) a very useful and thoughtful site provided by Apple for developers to showcase their (typically freeware) web-apps. However on my last update I mistakenly entered the web address without the http:// prefix (my mistake I admit) which causes the link to wander off to some internal Apple error page…doh!

I have been trying to contact apple to rectify this link, but started to suspect and now after the passing months am pretty sure that they are no longer maintaining this site. In fact the last update to was 3rd Dec 2010, over 4 months ago a year ago!

So I conclude with the question that if Apple are playing with a fair hand with respect to web-apps on iOS, why would they stop updating this site. I guess they may just be too busy dealing with their undoubted many successes, or could they see the writing on the wall with a business model based on app-store revenue when the whole app-ecosphere is converging on html5?

Later in the evening Presented SwipeStudy at Google Creative Sandbox 2011, Carriageworks Sydney.
, a great night despite the stormy weather, I was almost electrocuted on the monorail trying to get there…

But I think there’s actually a very good reason why we should, in fact, embrace the term “HTML5” as an overarching buzzword for this latest round of web standards and specifications. Our industry has proven on several occasions that we don’t get excited about new, interesting, and useful technologies and concepts until such a buzzword is in place.

“AJAX,” of course, is the canonical example of this. DOM scripting, XMLHttpRequest, and dynamic Javascript all existed long before the term “AJAX”. But it wasn’t until the clever term was coined that anyone really cared. As soon as we had a single, simple word we could all get behind, Javascript really took off. A proliferation of frameworks and libraries hit the scene, and suddenly we were all building dynamic web projects. And the term was misused. Badly. Left and right. Much of the great code being written didn’t use XML. Much of it wasn’t asynchronous. But most of it was pretty great, and it was usually called “AJAX” wether it really was or not. And pedants went crazy. They argued about the semantics of the term “AJAX” until they were blue in the face. But in the end, no one would argue that “AJAX” wasn’t a good thing for our industry. Without that term, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

And it’s not just AJAX. If you want other examples, look no further then “Web 2.0” and “Microformats.” “HTML5” is today’s “AJAX.” Just as with “AJAX,” people are misusing the term all over the web. But it wasn’t until influential people and companies (notably Apple) started misusing the term that web developers at large (myself included) starting taking this new collection of web standards, specifications, and best practices seriously, as something that might be useful before 2022.

Sometimes we just need a word to rally behind. And put in job descriptions. And claim we “support” (another word that is mostly meaningless). It’s a language thing and a human psychology thing.

So be pedantic about the semantics of “HTML5” if you want, but don’t be surprised if no one really listens. This is something most people can understand and get behind. This, on the other hand, is not.

http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2010/aug/02/term-html5/

2. (C) British Ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic Paul Brummell invited the Ambassador to participate in briefing His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, ahead of his October 28 meetings with Kyrgyz Prime Minister Igor Chudinov and other high-level officials. The Prince was in Kyrgyzstan to promote British economic interests. Originally scheduled to last an hour over brunch, the briefing ended up lasting two hours, thanks to the super-engaged Prince’s pointed questions. The Ambassador was the only participant who was not a British subject or linked to the Commonwealth. The absence of her French and German colleagues was notable; they were apparently not invited despite being fellow members of the European Union. Others included major British investors in Kyrgyzstan and the Canadian operator of the Kumtor mine.

“ALL OF THIS SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE FRANCE”
—————————————-
¶5. (C) After having half-heartedly danced around the topic for a bit, only mentioning “personal interests” in pointed fashion, the business representatives then plunged into describing what they see as the appallingly high state of corruption in the Kyrgyz economy. While claiming that all of them never participated in it and never gave out bribes, one representative of a middle-sized company stated that “It is sometimes an awful temptation.” In an astonishing display of candor in a public hotel where the brunch was taking place, all of the businessmen then chorused that nothing gets done in Kyrgyzstan if President Bakiyev’s son Maxim does not get “his cut.” Prince Andrew took up the topic with gusto, saying that he keeps hearing Maxim’s name “over and over again” whenever he discusses doing business in this country. Emboldened, one businessman said that doing business here is “like doing business in the Yukon” in the nineteenth century, i.e. only those willing to participate in local corrupt practices are able to make any money. His colleagues all heartily agreed, with one pointing out that “nothing ever changes here. Before all you heard was Akayev’s son’s name. Now it’s Bakiyev’s son’s name.” At this point the Duke of York laughed uproariously, saying that: “All of this sounds exactly like France.”

RUDE LANGUAGE A LA BRITISH
————————–
¶13. (C) The brunch had already lasted almost twice its allotted time, but the Prince looked like he was just getting started. Having exhausted the topic of Kyrgyzstan, he turned to the general issue of promoting British economic interests abroad. He railed at British anti-corruption investigators, who had had the “idiocy” of almost scuttling the Al-Yamama deal with Saudi Arabia. (NOTE: The Duke was referencing an investigation, subsequently closed, into alleged kickbacks a senior Saudi royal had received in exchange for the multi-year, lucrative BAE Systems contract to provide equipment and training to Saudi security forces. END NOTE.) His mother’s subjects seated around the table roared their approval. He then went on to “these (expletive) journalists, especially from the National Guardian, who poke their noses everywhere” and (presumably) make it harder for British businessmen to do business. The crowd practically clapped. He then capped this off with a zinger: castigating “our stupid (sic) British and American governments which plan at best for ten years whereas people in this part of the world plan for centuries.” There were calls of “hear, hear” in the private brunch hall. Unfortunately for the assembled British subjects, their cherished Prince was now late to the Prime Minister’s. He regretfully tore himself away from them and they from him. On the way out, one of them confided to the Ambassador: “What a wonderful representative for the British people! We could not be prouder of our royal family!”

¶14. (C) COMMENT: Prince Andrew reached out to the Ambassador with cordiality and respect, evidently valuing her insights. However, he reacted with almost neuralgic patriotism whenever any comparison between the United States and United Kingdom came up. For example, one British businessman noted that despite the “overwhelming might of the American economy compared to ours” the amount of American and British investment in Kyrgyzstan was similar. Snapped the Duke: “No surprise there. The Americans don’t understand geography. Never have. In the U.K., we have the best geography teachers in the world!” END COMMENT.

cablegate.wikileaks.org

Eric Schmidt, Alec Ross & Jared Cohen on 21st Century Statecraft. Google is increasingly getting involved in geo-politics.

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: Mark Zuckerberg, “A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg” …the man is a social media machine!

Please leave any comments, bugs or feedback as a comment here.

thx
David

Last week I realised the internet wants to kill me. I was trying to write a script in a small room with nothing but a laptop for company. Perfect conditions for quiet contemplation – but thanks to the accompanying net connection, I may as well have been sharing the space with a 200-piece marching band.


I’m starting to feel like an unwitting test subject in a global experiment conducted by Google, in which it attempts to discover how much raw information it can inject directly into my hippocampus before I crumple to the floor and start fitting uncontrollably.

Endurance running, unique to humans among primates and uncommon in all mammals other than dogs, horses and hyenas, apparently evolved at least two million years ago and probably let human ancestors hunt and scavenge over great distances. That was probably decisive in the pursuit of high-protein food for development of large brains.

In FireFox, you would do this:

setTimeout(myFadeIn(), 1200, "id1");
setTimeout(myFadeIn(), 2700, "id2");
setTimeout(myFadeIn(), 3500, "id3");

Except, MSIE doesn’t like this. And in fact the additional parameter is not even part of the official javascript spec.

So how can we work around this ?

Closures. In the below example I use closures to pass an anonymous function to setTimeout() that contains in its “frozen in time local scope” the id of the div to fadeIn.

// Return delayed fadeIn closure function 
function delayFadeIn(id){
    return (function(){
        $('#'+id+'_img').fadeIn(1000);
    });
} 

//Setup three delayed fadeIns by passing closures to setTimeout
function setupFadeIns(){
    setTimeout(delayFadeIn("id1"), 1200);
    setTimeout(delayFadeIn("id2"), 2700);
    setTimeout(delayFadeIn("id3"), 3500);
}

And this will work in both MSIE and FireFox