Web And Say All we have to say about the Web

Up until now, the Google home page was meant to be as lite as possible. It only contained one image with the Google logo, some links to other Google tools, services and legal information. But that has changed recently as a new prominent image appeared to publicize the Google Chrome web browser. And this is quite huge as the overall advertisement's size is almost the same as the biggest element on the Google's home page: Google's logo itself!

Chrome Experiments is "Not your mother's JavaScript" as it was "created to showcase cool experiments for both JavaScript and web browsers". And Dean McNamee proves it by providing Monster, "a demonstration of what can be done with browser web standards (without Flash). A square turns to a cube, a sphere, and a monster. Realtime procedural 3d in JavaScript". Not happy to prove that Javascript can be a (fresh) contestant in the 3D world, Dean also provides a simpler, yet beautiful demo named Colorscube. A must see for all Javascript graphics coders out there! Thanks to Niko of Irrlicht3d for the heads up.

Starting a blog post with a number seems to be today's obligation and after posting 75 (Really) Useful JavaScript Techniques, 80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding or 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without, the nonetheless excellent Smashing Magazine does it again by providing a list of 50 Useful JavaScript Tools. This list includes JavaScript/AJAX Authoring Tools, Documentation Tools, JavaScript Debugging Tools, JavaScript Testing and Validation Tools and Security Tools amongst other, well, useful tools.

If you were using Google this past Saturday between 6:27 a.m. and 7:25 a.m. PST, chances are that you have been warned by the search engine that your search result "may harm your computer". Trying another request couldn't help and you soon realized that the whole Internet might have harmed your computer. If that's no news for some of us, this might be a different story for Internet novices who think that Google is the Internet.

Through Ajaxian, the following 12 characters code seems to be the shortest way to detect any version of Internet Explorer, including IE 8. This is the result that came from a comment in a post from the Web Reflection blog. Very interesting!

IE='\v'=='v'

What can you do in 25 lines of ActionScript ? How about participating to the The 25-Line ActionScript Contest! January finalists include amazing entries, such as a real-time webcam video to ASCII art conversion, fire blending, 3D world exploring and Mandelbrot zooming amongst other. This really shows the power of Flash and Action Script as well as the gain of interest in the web-related demo scene. Now the question is when will we be able to see such advanced demos using only Javascript and Canvas ? My guess is pretty soon if the war for browser performance continues...

Gamasutra is running and interesting story about the biggest browser-based game sites where we can learn some pretty amazing numbers measured by ComScore such as "Total player time with browser-based online games increased 42 percent in 2008"... interesting!

Even though Microsoft promised the final version of Internet Explorer 8 for last year, it is only today that the first release candidate of Internet Explorer 8 is available for public download in 25 languages for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server customers. Changes between Beta 2 include platform completeness, reliability, performance, and compatibility improvements and security enhancements.

After shutting down six of its projects and letting go some of its employees, Google is now Turning the page on Print Ads. "In the last few months, we've been taking a long, hard look at all the things we are doing to ensure we are investing our resources in the projects that will have the biggest impact for our users and partners. While we hoped that Print Ads would create a new revenue stream for newspapers and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, the product has not created the impact that we — or our partners — wanted".

That's what I thought when I saw Anthony Calzadilla's article "Building an Animated Cartoon Robot with jQuery" article through WebAppers. Just check the demo to see how nice this is! "This project was created by layering several empty divs over each other with transparent PNGs as background images. The backgrounds were animated at different speeds using a jQuery plug-in by Alexander Farkas. This effect simulates a faux 3-D animated background dubbed the “parallax effect” originating from old-school side scrolling video games. The robot is comprised similarly to the background animation scene by layering several DIVs together to create the different robot pieces. The final step, was animating the robot with some jQuery."