There was a bunch of news items that I thought were kind of interesting, but didn’t warrant a separate post for each, so I’ll just do a group post.
- Google Dumps Gears – Google is halting development of Google Gears in favor of HTML5. This is a good thing. The problem with Gears was that it was a separate install and most users wouldn’t do that. Thus preventing widespread adoption. HTML5 will be baked into (newer) browsers.
- Google Analytics Goes Async – While I don’t personally use Google Analytics, a lot of sites do. Up til now, the javascript that gets embedded for uploading statistics to Google was blocking. Ever been to a website that seems really slow to load only to look in the status bar and see ‘Connecting to google.com’ (or whatever it is)? That’s the blocking javascript preventing the page from loading. It’s now set up to be asynchronous so there is no more blocking. Yay.
- Mozilla Sunbird / Lighting Approaching Version 1 Release – I use the Lightning plugin for my Thunderbird and probably couldn’t live without it. I will say pre-1.0 versions, at varying times, have sometimes not played well with 3.0 Beta versions of Thunderbird. I suppose that’s the price you pay for being on the cutting edge of software. I deal.
- Google Releases Public DNS Service – Jeez, a lot of Google News, eh? I hadn’t even realized it. Anyways. Google released a public DNS service. From what I’ve read, this is nicer than OpenDNS because it doesn’t have ads or redirects like OpenDNS does. I don’t use either, so I wouldn’t actually know firsthand. Google’s reasoning for releasing this is pretty obvious, by having more people using their faster DNS servers, it speeds up the user experience for users – particularly for Google users – and somehow that translates into more money for them.
- New Java 7 Features – This is a little bit older, but I had it bookmarked. I haven’t written much Java lately, but I’m slowly but surely getting around to writing more. Language support for collections seems quite useful, reminds me of some of the Javascript work I’ve done lately. I don’t particularly like the syntax for Automatic Resource Management in try/catch, but I like the idea at least. Strings in switch statements is way overdue, but at least they have it now.
That’s all I have for now kids!
