New Technology Reviews!.: developers

Google TV 2.0 to run Honeycomb, Android Market apps

Google TV 2.0 to run Honeycomb, Android Market apps

Google has announced a software update for its UK-bound Google TV service, which incorporates the Android Market and Honeycomb OS for the...

10 Essential First Steps When Starting A WordPress Blog

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<img alt="how to start your own blog" class="aligncenter" data-mce-src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/54ed8ba65eatured.jpg.jpg" src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/54ed8ba65eatured.jpg.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" />Having created quite a few blogs, I’d like to think that I have a good system down for those essential first steps, and I hope it can be of use to you too. By following these you’ll get a good head start in the world of blogging and hopefully an influx of traffic to give you the motivation to carry on. If you’ve already started, think of this as a checklist as I’m sure there’s a few you haven’t done yet.<br />
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1. Good Quality Content Is Always The Best Tactic</h2>
I can’t tell you how sick I am of hearing people announce their blog when it has less than 5 posts on it and/or consists of nothing more than YouTube videos and re-posted pictures with a one-sentence commentary. If that’s all you have to say, get a Twitter account or use Tumblr.<br />
Make sure you have, <em>at the very least</em>, <strong>10 quality posts</strong>, but aim for around 30 ideally. By “<em>quality</em>“, I mean 400 words or more of your own original content. Never copy content from elsewhere, like these mountains of autoblogs do with our MakeUseOf content…<br />
<img alt="how to start your own blog" data-mce-src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ced5871aaflogged.png.png" height="460" src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ced5871aaflogged.png.png" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px;" width="500" /><br />
Keep your articles focused, grammatically correct and spell checked. If you speak like a <em>valley-girl</em> or have a tendency to write in <em>txtspk</em>, do your best to hide it and take remedial English classes – no one wants to read that, even your best friends.<br />
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2. Get A Domain</h2>
Spend a whole $10 on a unique, short as you can, relevant domain name – even if you’re hosting your blog on a free WordPress.com or Blogger account. Get this right from the beginning and you will save yourself a world of hurt later.<br />
Don’t be tempted to make up a “cool” domain unless you have a rock-solid web service and a VC investment to the tune of a million dollars to market it; and absolutely don’t get a free domain like <em>.cc</em><br />
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3. Establish A Good Permalink Structure</h2>
Don’t promote your blog if your URLs still look like <em>mydomain.com/blog?id=1324</em>. Take a minute to go the permalink options in your WordPress settings. Something like <em>mydomain.com/my-article</em> is great.<br />
You might also want to consider installing an SEO slugs type plugin, which reduces the length of your permalink URLs by removing common words such as <strong>a, the, or</strong>. Shorter URLs are better.<br />
<img alt="start a blog" data-mce-src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/c0d7e7767aalinks.png.png" height="231" src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/c0d7e7767aalinks.png.png" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px;" width="580" /><br />
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4. Change The Tagline</h2>
It’s just embarrassing to find a blog that still has “<em>Just another WordPress blog</em>” in the title or on the theme. You can change it from <em>Settings -> General</em> to something more relevant to your site. Apart from the fact that many themes feature the tagline prominently in the header, it’s also often used in the meta-titles of your homepage and therefore shown to everyone who finds your site through Google.<br />
<img alt="start a blog" data-mce-src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/c422416685nother.png.png" height="211" src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/c422416685nother.png.png" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px;" width="580" /><br />
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5. Set Up Google Analytics</h2>
Google Analytics is a free traffic report for your website. But what’s the point of installing Analytics if you don’t actually have any traffic yet?<br />
Well firstly, motivation. If you have accurate feedback that shows a clear, progressive growth in traffic then you are far less likely to give up. Don’t wait until you <em>think</em> you have some traffic – get real feedback, right now.<br />
<img alt="start a blog" data-mce-src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/f8ff9d5c40lytics.png.png" height="374" src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/f8ff9d5c40lytics.png.png" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px;" width="486" /><br />
The second reason – to find out exactly what’s popular on your blog; exactly which keywords bring in the most traffic; and make adjustments based on this. Try not to get too caught up in the numbers game yet, but if you find people are coming to your page for a particular topic and leaving quickly, perhaps try to write another post on that topic that’s more in-depth or targeted more specifically.<br />
My favourite plugin in this area is Analyticator, as it connects to your Analytics account and lets you choose the profile from a drop down list, avoiding the need to copy and paste any fiddly codes. If you have no idea how to read all your Analytics data yet, just start collecting it anyway and I’ll go over the major features in a later article.<br />
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6. Google Sitemaps Plugin</h2>
This isn’t essential, but as far I’m concerned any helping hand you can give Google to index your blog is a good thing. Get a sitemap generator such as this, set it up correctly to automatically generate whenever you post something, and you’re halfway sorted.<br />
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7. Webmaster Tools</h2>
This is a useful, free set of tools from Google. It has a number of functions, one of which involves submitting sitemaps to be indexed. It also keeps a track of 404 errors, and alerts you to malware security issues and even if WordPress updates are available. You could get by without it, but it’s a nice tool to have under your belt.<br />
<img alt="start a wordpress blog" data-mce-src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/7857408ccdtools.png.png" height="259" src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/7857408ccdtools.png.png" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px;" width="580" /><br />
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8. SEO Friendly Images</h2>
The power of image search should absolutely not be underestimated. Put simply, this plugin will add ALT and TITLE tags to your images. You can do this using the WordPress image uploader, but I don’t know many people who actually bother to do that – so this plugin does it automatically. By adding these to your image tags, you may find a huge influx of traffic from Google Image search.<br />
<img alt="how to start your own blog" data-mce-src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/62003af077plugin.png.png" height="435" src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/62003af077plugin.png.png" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px;" width="446" /><br />
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9. Join A Forum</h2>
Find a forum related to your particular topic and establish a presence there. Introduce yourself, make some good quality comments or advice on other threads, help some people out. After that, change your signature to include a link to your website, and repeat. This should give you a small trickle of visitors.<br />
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10. Social Networks</h2>
Be sure to announce your articles on your own social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and StumbleUpon – but don’t fall into the trap of promoting absolutely everything you write. Pick one or two of your best posts to promote, and you’ll be far more likely to get a good response and not piss people off in the process.<br />
Done all that? Awesome, you should start seeing results soon. Got any other essential first steps orWordPress plugins you always install? Let us know in the comments!<br />
<small>Image credit: Shutterstock</small><br />
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10 Essential First Steps When Starting A WordPress Blog

Having created quite a few blogs, I’d like to think that I have a good system down for those essential first steps, and I hope it can be o...

How To Control WordPress Versions Using Subversion [Linux]

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<img alt="subversion version control" class="aligncenter" data-mce-src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/df56e397b000x300.png.png" src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/df56e397b000x300.png.png" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" />Most of you probably already know that WordPress powers a large amount of websites that we look at every day. With the large userbase and support, you can do a lot of cool things with it. While WordPress even offers one-click upgrades to the latest WP versions, some people simply can’t use it because their server doesn’t support it, they don’t have any FTP accounts (maybe you uploaded files using SSH?), or whatever else the reason may be. If this is the case, you’ve more than likely had to update your site by manually copying over the new files. However, there’s really no need to do that anymore, as you can set up your WordPress site in a way where updating is much more simple.<br />
I will be explaining how to create a brand new WordPress blog on your Linux server using Subversion (SVN) as well as how to convert a “traditional” installation to an SVN-type installation, as most people who will want to do this probably already have a blog going. This is possible because Automattic (the creators of WordPress) operate a SVN repository that allows this functionality. Without this repository, none of this would work.<br />
Before you start, you’ll probably need to install the Subversion version control software onto your server. For Ubuntu and Debian servers, use<br />
<code>sudo apt-get install subversion</code><br />
while Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS users should use<br />
<code>sudo yum install subversion</code><br />
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Creating A New Blog</h2>
In order to create a new SVN-controlled WordPress instance, log into your server using a program such as PuTTY, using :<code></code><br />
<code>cd /path/to/a/folder</code><br />
so you can use<br />
<code>mkdir blog</code><br />
to create a new folder named blog in your current location. Then use<br />
<code>cd blog</code><br />
to go into the new folder, and run<br />
<code>svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.2.1 .</code><br />
<img alt="subversion version control" data-mce-src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/a6dc98b83aeckout.jpg.jpg" height="385" src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/a6dc98b83aeckout.jpg.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px;" width="580" /><br />
to download and install WordPress into the current folder. If there is a newer version, replace 3.2.1 with the latest version. Also, don’t forget to include that lonesome period (.) at the end of the command as that is needed for the command to run correctly. Wait for the process to complete, then you can go ahead and enter in the correct URL to begin the installation script.<br />
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Converting From “Traditional” To SVN</h2>
Converting your blog to be controlled by SVN will require a few new steps. Essentially, this will create a new blog that is SVN-controlled, and move all your content and settings over to that new blog. This isn’t as invasive as it sounds, and shouldn’t mess up anything that you currently have on your blog.<br />
To get started, use “cd” to go to where your blog folder is located (don’t actually go into the blog folder). Here we are going to assume that your old blog is in a folder named “<em>blog</em>” and your temporary new blog is going to be in a folder named “<em>blog-new</em>“. Go ahead and run<br />
<code>svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.2.1 blog-new</code><br />
which will create the new “<em>blog-new</em>” folder and download the necessary files into it. Please make sure that you download the <em>same</em> version as the one you are currently using. So if you’re not running the latest version, don’t choose the latest version in this process.<br />
Next we’re going to go into the old blog folder by running<br />
<code>cd ../blog</code><br />
and then copy the main config file as well as the htaccess file by running<br />
<code>cp -p wp-config.php .htaccess ../blog-new</code><br />
so that these important files are in the new blog folder.<br />
Now we’re going to copy over the actual content of your blog to the new folder, including plugins, themes, and whatnot. To do this, run<br />
<code>cp -rpfu wp-content/* ../blog-new/wp-content</code><br />
and let that take a couple seconds or more, depending on how large your blog is. WordPress-provided plugins shouldn’t be affected, but you can double-check to make sure everything is running smoothly by running<br />
<code>svn status ../blog-new/wp-content</code>.<br />
Any files that were modified will have an “M” next to them and need to be reverted by using<br />
<code>svn revert ../blog-new/wp-content/some/file</code>.<br />
Any custom files or directories can also be copied by running<br />
<code>cp -rp images wp-digest ../blog-new</code><br />
You can check that everything is copied over correctly and good to go by running<br />
<code>diff -rq blog/ blog-new/ | grep -v svn</code><br />
<img alt="subversion version control" data-mce-src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2b26ed17c3diff1.jpg.jpg" height="163" src="http://www.new-technology-news.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2b26ed17c3diff1.jpg.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px;" width="580" /><br />
(This is an example after I intentionally removed some files)<br />
We’re almost done! We’re now going to move out to the big folder containing the two blog folders by running<br />
<code>cd ..</code><br />
and then renaming them to make the final switch-a-roo by running<br />
<code>mv blog blog-old; mv blog-new blog</code>.<br />
Congrats! Your SVN-controlled blog should now be up and running! If not, you may have forgotten to copy something from the old blog (now located in the renamed folder “blog-old”). You can now go ahead and update to the latest version if needed.<br />
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Updating Your Blog</h2>
To update your SVN-controlled WordPress blog, you’ll need to go into the directory of your blog using the “cd” command and then run :<br />
<code>svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.2.1/ .</code><br />
which will switch your blog to the newest version. Remember to replace 3.2.1 with the latest version available.<br />
<h2 style="font-size: 1.5em;">
Conclusion</h2>
For those that support it, Subversion version control is a great version tracking tool that is highly effective, relatively easy to use, and very fast. It’s a great thing that WordPress can be controlled via SVN, increasing the flexibility of the already-flexible WordPress platform. No wonder it’s one of the most used frameworks for sites today.<br />
What do you think about WordPress and SVN working together? Have you even known that this was possible? Let us know in the comments!<br />
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How To Control WordPress Versions Using Subversion [Linux]

Most of you probably already know that WordPress powers a large amount of websites that we look at every day. With the large userbase and ...

iOS 5 deprecates UDID as identifier for developers, but it's not the end of the world

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<div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 12px; font: normal normal normal 13px/19px Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; max-width: 640px; padding-bottom: 0.6em; padding-left: 0.6em; padding-right: 0.6em; padding-top: 0.6em;">
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<img alt="" class="aligncenter" height="259" mce_src="http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/7821/screenshot20110606at141.jpg" src="http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/7821/screenshot20110606at141.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 0px; clear: both; color: #444444; display: block; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; height: 259px; line-height: 1.5; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 8px; max-width: 640px; width: 247px;" width="247" />Reading the headlines today, you'll see the usual exaggeration of half-understood factoids bubble out from today's iOS 5 beta 6 release. Thank goodness for that NDA, huh?</div>
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As reported by our sister site TechCrunch, Apple is deprecating the use of UDIDs as unique identifiers for developers, thereby severing one of the most common ties between physical devices and the apps that need to know which specific iOS gadget they're on. It's the end of the world as we know it! Well, no, actually. Let's get to the real story here, brought to you by feedback from some iOS developers with real-world knowledge of what the implications of this change will be.</div>
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First off, let's clear up what it means for Apple to 'deprecate' this identifier. A deprecated function or software component is <span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">not</span>yanked out immediately; it's simply been flagged by the developer of the platform (or app, command line tool, what have you) as something that <span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">will be going away in the future, eventually</span>. While the feature remains in place for the sake of backwards compatibility, deprecation is a clear sign to all the programmers in town that they will have to move away from using this feature in the long run.</div>
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To the average person, this deprecation of developer access to UDIDs means little more than one step towards better privacy. UDIDs are far from the only way a developer could ensure "your" iPhone is, in fact, your iPhone. Using the identifier has always been a relatively easy way for developers to do this, however, and so many used it, some abused it, and the average user was never the wiser.</div>
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From the beginning, Apple has always uniquely identified its devices via UDIDs or other means, and the iPhone is no exception. There is a class called "UIDdevice" which describes the things on the iPhone, i.e., the features unique to that device. Until today, developers could have access to a users' UDIDs, and they've used them as identifiers for a lot of gaming, user info persistence and subscription systems (including some of our favorite apps). The downside of UDIDs in the past is because they're related to devices and not accounts, sometimes it's hard to have the device identifiers talk to each other. Some developers have grabbed or scraped these without user permission for marketing and other less than reputable purposes -- hence the privacy concern behind broadcasting UDIDs to third-party developers.</div>
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The utility of developers having access to the UDID is far lower than the potential for abusing it. The UIdevice class does things like telling you the battery state, system name, OS version, phone model, and so forth -- it identifies the device and the features on it. It's been helpful in terms of letting developers determine which devices run certain features better -- knowing the difference in performance between an iPhone 3G and an iPhone 4 is certainly important, especially to game developers -- but other than that, there's not much utility there.</div>
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So why isn't losing access to the UDID a big deal, at all? Any developer can always roll their own unique identifier. Apple provides a way to randomly generate one, so you never really <span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">had</span>to use the UDID. People have been using UDIDs for various reasons -- not all of them good -- and there's not a lot of positives to UDID use other than ad-hoc app distribution (i.e., for beta testing).</div>
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Apple's deprecation of UDID access is something that's been expected for some time. MacStories' take on it aligns with our own; privacy concerns over UDID sharing have been in the news for a long time, so it's not a shocker that Apple's now contemplating denying third-party access to them. From a user's perspective, this is a Good Thing. From a <span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">scrupulous</span> developer's position, this may complicate your life for a while, but that's all. <span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">Unscrupulous</span>developers who've been abusing UDIDs for marketing or other purposes are the ones that will get hit hardest by this change, but as far as I'm concerned, they can wither up and die with no tears shed.</div>
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Some have speculated that iCloud account information might be substituted for UDIDs, but developers don't really have access to user account information from iCloud -- and they <span class="Apple-style-span" mce_name="em" mce_style="font-style: italic;" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.5;">shouldn't</span>. That would be an even bigger security hole than UDIDs.</div>
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Apple seems to be taking a "none of your business" approach to user IDs where developers are concerned. We speculate that's the motivation behind removing the UDID API. Meanwhile, try not to buy into widespread reports of dogs and cats living together/mass hysteria, because it's just not that big of a deal in the long run.</div>
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iOS 5 deprecates UDID as identifier for developers, but it's not the end of the world

Reading the headlines today, you'll see the usual exaggeration of half-understood factoids bubble out from today's iOS 5 beta 6 ...

Motorola Photon 4G Bootloader Unlock Available Now

Motorola Photon 4G Bootloader Unlock Available Now

Over the weekend some crafty developers unlocked the Motorola Photon 4G’s bootloader. The pudding, as the developers of the method like ...

Daily iPhone App: A Game With Balls

Daily iPhone App: A Game With Balls

This game's title isn't just cheeky -- it's pretty literal. A Game With Balls definitely has lots of balls in it -- you pl...

Motorola Atrix will be Graced with CyanogenMod Soon, Pre-Beta Ready for the Brave

Motorola Atrix will be Graced with CyanogenMod Soon, Pre-Beta Ready for the Brave

Owners of the Motorola Atrix have been waiting for months now to get a port of CyanogenMod running on their fancy little Tegra 2′s, and ...

The Top 8 Web Development Highlights of 2010

<div style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-486697" height="225" src="http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/8524/developernews9111829.jpg" title="developer-news" width="225" /></div>This year brought quite a few headlines of note to the developer world. While we each have our favorites, from new releases of classic tools to astounding announcements from tech companies, here in no particular order are a few stories that stood out to us this year.<br />
In the comments, we’d love to know what stories stood out most to you this year, partly to indulge our sense of gratuitous end-of-year nostalgia and partly to help us hone our coverage for 2011, when we hope to bring you more fascinating web dev news than ever before.<br />
What were your favorite dev-related headlines of 2010?<br />
<hr /><h2>1. The Release of Rails 3.0</h2><hr />Early in February, the Ruby on Rails core team took the wraps off <a href="http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2010/2/5/rails-3-0-beta-release" target="_blank">Rails 3.0</a>, a long-awaited release of the popular Ruby framework.<br />
Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson wrote on the Rails blog, “We’ve had more than 250 people help with the release and we’ve been through almost 4,000 commits since 2.3 to get here. Yet still the new version feels lighter, more agile, and easier to understand.<br />
“It’s a great day to be a Rails developer.”<br />
<hr /><h2>2. Salesforce’s Acquisition of Heroku</h2><hr />Earlier this month, Salesforce bought Heroku for a staggering $212 million, giving another token of legitimacy to the growing Ruby community as well as to cloud-based programming tools.<br />
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at the time, “The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time… Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position Salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers.”<br />
<hr /><h2>3. Facebook’s Release of HipHop for PHP</h2><hr />In February, Facebook rolled out <a href="http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/358" target="_blank">HipHop</a>, an internal open-source project intended to speed up PHP for large-scale applications.<br />
HipHop isn’t quite a compiler. “Rather,” wrote Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao, “it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it.”<br />
The project was the culmination of two years of work by a small team of engineers; in the end, it got a thumbs-up from PHP creator <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rasmus-lerdorf-php-hiphop-facebook.php" target="_blank">Rasmus Lerdorf</a>, who said, “”I think it is a cool project and it will certainly be a good option for some sites.”<br />
<hr /><h2>4. The Rise of Node.js</h2><hr /><a href="http://nodejs.org/" target="_blank">Node.js</a> has been around for a couple years, but 2010 was the year awareness and use of the JavaScript framework really blew up.<br />
Commits have <a href="https://github.com/ry/node/graphs/impact" target="_blank">grown</a>, as has the number of committers. Traffic to the project website has steadily climbed through the year, and downloads for Node.js from GitHub have predictably grown, as well.<br />
As the organizers of the annual Node Knockout wrote, “It’s at the bleeding edge of a technology stack that allows developers to blur the lines between software, the web and the new like never before.”<br />
<hr /><h2>5. Microsoft’s Release of Visual Studio 2010</h2><hr />The latest version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio, a big release by any standards, launched this year to impressive reviews from all corners of the web. <i><a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/infoworld-review-visual-studio-2010-delivers-182" target="_blank">InfoWorld</a></i> said the release “marks a major advance in functionality and ease,” and <i><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/25/visual_studio_2010_rc_review/page2.html" target="_blank">The Register</a></i> wrote, “It is hard not to be impressed by Microsoft’s tool suite.”<br />
The IDE was overhauled, completely rewritten from the ground up. Support for Silverlight was added, and Microsoft also took this opportunity to release F#, a new programming language developed by Microsoft Research.<br />
<hr /><h2>6. Facebook’s Release of the Open Graph API</h2><hr />Facebook and social app developers have long wrestled with Facebook integration for third parties. In the spring at its f8 developer conference, Facebook rolled out a brand new model for tapping into the social web, and it did so to unprecedented fanfare.<br />
Dubbed the Open Graph, Facebook’s changes brought instant gratification and familiarity for Facebook users as they surfed the web — and they brought a fast and easy way for devs to integrate with the social network, as easy as a single line of HTML in many cases.<br />
<hr /><h2>7. The Android/Java/Oracle Saga</h2><hr />What a year it’s been for Java! Not only is the language a key part in the programming stack of the fastest-growing mobile OS out there; it’s also the star of a big, potentially spendy lawsuit between two of the giants of the tech industry.<br />
Sun, which developed the language in-house back in the dark ages, was acquired by Oracle. That deal became official in January, and Oracle wasted no time in getting litigious with Google over that company’s use of Java in the Android platform and the Dalvik virtual machine that stands in for the JVM on mobile OSes.<br />
The lawsuit began in August with Oracle claiming that Google “knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property.”<br />
Google quickly countered that it was shocked — shocked! — that Oracle would make such claims over an open-source technology. It followed with the assertions that Oracle’s patents are unenforceable and that if there had been “any use in the Android platform of any protected elements” of Java, Google itself “is not liable” due to the face that such violations would have been committed by third parties and without Google’s knowledge.<br />
We’ll continue to keep an eye on the lawsuit and on Java’s role in the Android platform throughout 2011.<br />
<hr /><h2>8. Apple Declares War on Flash</h2><hr />Tensions between Apple and Adobe ran high this year, beginning in January when the iPad launched without support for Flash. Then in February, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told employees why: “No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.”<br />
These were the words that launched a thousand blog posts. Throughout the spring, the two companies waged a war of words — and one sweet antitrust inquiry with the Department of Justice over Apple’s banning of Flash for iPhone app devs.<br />
Steve Jobs dropped the bomb of the year in a passive-aggressive missive on Flash in which the Apple co-founder stated that Adobe’s programming technology “no longer necessary” and waxed hypocritical about open technologies.<br />
But while he may have been passive-aggressive and hypocritical, he also may have been right. With HTML5 making a strong showing early in its lifetime, it was only a matter of time before a public figure of Jobs’s stature would make a statement or two about the death of Flash.<br />
Of course, this tension has made for a convenient cozying-up between Google and Adobe along the way.

The Top 8 Web Development Highlights of 2010

This year brought quite a few headlines of note to the developer world. While we each have our favorites, from new releases of classic tools...

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Microsoft launches HTML5 Labs for developers

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Microsoft pays WP7 developers ahead of schedule

Microsoft has announced changes to the development process for applications for its Windows Phone 7 platform. Developers that have created...