HTML5 Rumblings
Some people have been dogging the iPhone and Mobile Safari as “the new IE6”. The sentiment being that we’re going back to the “Best Viewed in XXX Browser” era. I am unabashedly in favor of this particular icing on the internet cake mostly because we are still living with IE6. :^)
What I mean to say is that having a locked down platform that is guaranteed to support all of HTML5’s new features means that web developers can innovate using the shiny new tools in the toolbox and hopefully those uses will make their way back into web development at large.
In addition, if you give an executive the choice between supporting IE6 and doing up a good iPhone / mobile implementation I think we’re at the tipping point where decision-makers are leaning away from IE6 and towards these newer technologies.
Like icing, however, too much of it can ruin a good cake. I don’t really want iPhone-only sites, but instead good small-screen experiences driving improvements which in turn drive faster and ~nicer~ desktop experiences.
My six month prediction sees an increase in “IE6 is officially not supported” messaging with IE6 phased out for the internet at large within a year or so (ie: one of the major JS frameworks drops IE6 support, makes it optional, or drops active testing against it).
A neat trick you can start playing with now is the following mojo to trigger different mobile Safari keyboards on web pages (nice!) which all devolve into <input type=”text”>:
Browser Support
What’s most interesting is that we’re starting to see some of these features
get implemented into browsers.
- <input type=”number”> - iPhone keypad loads with numerics
- <input type=”url”> - iPhone keypad loads with “.com” button
- <input type=”email”> - iPhone keypad loads with “@” sign
Mobile Safari (on the iPhone) was quick out of the gate by adding support for
number, email and url. No validation is performed but special keyboards for
each input type are presented to aid in entering a value.
Most recently, Chrome 5 beta has support for the placeholder attribute.
(source)
And if you want to see state of the art on iPhone web experiences, check out the following:
- NextStop.com - uses geolocation, local caching / storage, in-page ajax
- m.expatliving.sg - uses page transitions, inline flick-scroll, and good URL-hiding
- Joe Hewitt’s iUI - an older, general purpose library that managed to fool me into thining I had Belle & Sebastian on my iPhone when I accidentally left it up on the artist page.
- Edit: *jQTouch - just ran into this one, looks like the jQuery toolkit for apps, lots of neat animations although in some ways it doesn’t feel as native
The future present certainly looks bright.
11:26 CST | category / entries / links
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Convince me one way or the other…
I’m seriously looking into hosting for my pet project, and Dreamhost might not cut it. Looking at my probable future requirements:
- I want to be able to install my own packages (Dreamhost doesn’t make this ~easy~)
- Run ~heavy~ processing jobs like image resizing, pdf generation
- Queue-based work division (ie: SQS or beanstalkd)
- Experiment with non-mysql data stores (ie: HBase, Cassandra)
- Ratings calculations over larger data sets (ie: Cascading / MapReduce / Hadoop)
The pricing for EC2 has always turned me off as it’s a tad high to just blow for no good reason. Looking at their recent rates, they have a new pricing option called “reserved” which reduces the daily price but for a higher upfront cost.
AWS EC2 - Small Instance:
- ~1.0ghz Xeon / Opteron
- 1.7gb RAM
- 160gb Disk
AWS EC2 - OnDemand Small Instance:
- $0.085 / hr
- = $2.04 / day
- = $744.60 / year
AWS EC2 - Reserved Small Instance 1 year:
- $0.03 / hr + $227.50
- = $0.72 / day
- = $262.80 / year
AWS EC2 - Reserved Small Instance 3 years:
- $0.03 / hr + $350.00
- = $0.72 / day
- = $262.80 / year
With Dreamhost, I’m on the ~$190.80 every two years plan, paid up through 2011, which you can’t really beat with a stick. The only thing I’m currently using it for is a basic text-based blog and a few other PHP things but it is convenient and familiar for the basics. With that I’ve currently got ~500gb disk and ~11tb bandwidth, excess disk and bandwidth are not included in the above EC2 price comparisons.
So, currently Dreamhost is almost a rounding error compared to committing to Amazon and I’m not currently at the point where I have any traffic worth committing to the cost or overhead of working with EC2. The difficult part is that the development models vary significantly depending on whether I get to play with the cool toys and install my own packages on an EC2 instance or whether I’m stuck with what I can beat out of Dreamhost shared hosting.
I’d be all over an Amazon “90% idle” instance with ~1gb ram and 500mhz processor that was less expensive or didn’t have hard performance guarantees, but I’m guessing it’ll be a while before they go after that market.
22:21 CST | category / entries
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For My Canadian Frisbee Friends…
Water Consumption in Canada During 2010 Olympic Gold Medal Hockey Game.
10:59 CST | category / entries / links
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Complexities of Airline Pricing
If the airline charges $1 per ticket of course the plane will fill, but
the total revenue of $150 barely pays for an hour of a pilot’s salary. If
they charge $1000 a ticket then if they could fill the plane they’d make a
fortune, but only a small number of people are willing to fly at that price,
so again they can’t equal the fixed costs of flying a plane. But if the
airline can make those who are willing to pay it pay $1000, and others pay
$800, and others $500, maybe down to $100 or so, then the sum total over all
passengers is sufficient to pay for the fixed costs. In fact, some estimates
put the incremental cost of flying a single passenger as low as $30 (for the
meal and baggage and ticket handling), so that once the airline has committed
to flying the plane it is in their interest to sell a ticket for $30 rather
than let a seat go empty. But they must keep those who can pay more from
buying their ticket at low prices, a tough balancing act.
[source…]
The whole paper is worth reading if you’re that kind of dork. I knew things were complicated but I didn’t realize just how complicated.
11:09 CST | category / entries / links
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