Rapid Web News

I previously posted on how Nokia open-sourced the Symbian mobile operating system and the advantages this will bring to mobile web developers. Nokia has now released their first mobile device based on the open-source version of Symbian, the Nokia N8 phone.

It is the first version of the software since the Symbian foundation announced that it had made its code open source in February.

The Foundation – which includes Nokia, Motorola and Samsung amongst others – gave away the code to developers for free in the hope that it would help speed up the pace of improvements. Any organisation or individual can now use and modify it.

The software in the N8 allows the phone to have multi-touch and multi-tasking, meaning more than one application can be open at any one time.

The device will be Nokia’s flagship smartphone. It can be plugged into home theatres and supports surround sound as well as high-quality video.

Social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, can be displayed on the home screen in a single application.

Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, said he was “stoked” that Nokia had chosen to use the operating system on its phone.

BBC News article

The Nokia N8 will ship in the third quarter of this year, 2010. Hopefully the improved software will bring advantages both for its end-users, and the software ‘app’ and web application developers.

WordPress, the super popular open-source content management and blogging software has recently gone into beta. Version 3 of WordPress looks to bring many new features to the system including a revamped administration system and the ability to deploy a network of WordPress powered blogs simultaneously on the same domain in either seperate directories or subdomains.

WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 also comes with a new default blog them called Twenty Ten which comes with custom background and header options built-in.

The official WordPress development blog gives the following information about what to expect in WordPress 3.0.

You Should Know:

• The custom menus system (Appearance > Menus) is not quite finished. In Beta 2, the layout will be different and a bunch of the functionality will be improved, but we didn’t want to hold things up for this one screen. You can play with making custom menus, and report bugs if you find them, but this is not how the final screen will look/work, so don’t get attached to it.
• The merge! Yes, WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.
• We’re still fiddling with a few small things in the UI, as we were focused on getting the more function-oriented code finished first. For example, we’re getting a new icon for the Super Admin section.

Things to test:

• Play with the new default theme, Twenty Ten, including the custom background and header options.
• Custom Post Type functionality has been beefed up. It’s really easy to add new types, so do that and see how it looks!
• WordPress MU users should test the multiple sites functionality to make sure nothing broke during the merge.

WordPress, possibly the most popular blogging software out there, is set to heavily open source the design of its user interface this year.

WordPress is an open source blogging solution written in PHP and powered by a MySQL database backend. Code wise, it is entirely open source and licensed in entirety under the GNU General Public License (version 2), and as of typing this, it is used by over 200 million websites worldwide.

Design in WordPress has previously relied on contest to refresh the system’s administration section header, colour schemes and icon sets. This year however, the WordPress community are looking to heavily drive the concept of open source design, with a focus on many more design contests, a dedicated WordPress user interface design blog and significantly in the way of general communication about the direction the user interface is to take. To this end, there will be the new UI design blog, a newly created WordPress UI IRC channel (#wordpress-ui on Freenode) and a more noticeable mention of WordPress design on the official WordPress mailing lists.

If you’re interested in helping to design the new user interface for WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms out there, see the original open-source design article on the official WordPress blog.

If you want more information on how you can use WordPress for your own website, or would like to see how we can integrate a WordPress powered blog into your existing website, feel free to contact us right now!

In a move that should help with mobile web design and development for Nokia’s mobile devices, the Symbian operating system which powers these devices has been made open source.

Nokia is releasing their Symbian operating system, which includes the Symbian web browser, under an open source license. Symbian is the most popular smartphone operating system, and its total code base is valued at “billions of dollars”. The open sourcing of Symbian hopes to allow for a greater adoption of the operating system and a method by which to increase the evolution and innovations of the various features of Symbian OS, the Symbian web browser and all its integrated components.

From a web developer’s point of view, the open sourcing of mobile web browsers is fantastic. Open sourcing the mobile web browser in Nokia phones will enable it to be made to comply more accurately with web standards and can allow for increased performance and functionality, which may not be possible or financial viable in a closed-sourced proprietary licensing model.

More information regarding the Nokia OS moving to an open source software model can be found on the BBC website.

If you are interested in web design and development for mobile devices, feel free to browse our web design section or get it touch.

Version 1.4 is the latest inception of the highly popular lightweight cross browser JavaScript framework. The new version features many new additions and speed improvements over 1.3.

jQuery was developed in 2006 by John Resig and since launch has been adopted by many large companies such as Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Digg and many more. The mantra behind jQuery is “write less, do more” With a wide range of easy DOM manipulation calls and user interface effects jQuery is an attractive option for developers looking to make applications more intuitive, user friendly and feature rich.

So whats new in 1.4?

Aside from all the new additions and improvements one of my favourite new functions is .delay(). Delay provides us with the functionality to delay execution of subsequent items in the queue.

For example we can fade out and fade in an element with a second delay.

jQuery not only allows us to delay on effects we can also apply delays to custom queues.

One of many new updates is the addition to pass event data to the function .live(). This gives developers much more flexibility to capture events. From form submission, focus changes, clicks and custom events.

The example below shows how to smooth scroll on all anchor tag elements using live to capture the click event data.

According to BuiltWith.com’s statistics jQuery is running on one in five websites on the internet. Not surprising considering the adaptability of the framework.

14 days of jQuery is still running and you can find more information via the below links.

http://jquery.com/
http://jquery14.com/