Developer tools

Adobe updates Edge tool for easier Web coding

Adobe Systems has released its first update to Edge, a tool designed to help the company capitalize on the growing array of Web standards useful for bringing publishing and applications to the Web.

Adobe released a preview version of Edge in July and promised frequent updates on the way to a full-fledged 2012 product release. "This update has been focused on fit and finish--bug fixes and many enhancements to existing features that we think will make the product feel much easier to use," Adobe said in a forum post.

The tool has the potential to bring some of … Read more

Adobe Muse: Creating sites out of thin AIR

Adobe bills its newest Web design software, codenamed Muse, as coding-free site creation for InDesign and Illustrator users. And as far as the interface goes, the development team did a good job mimicking what it could from those applications using the lighter weight, far less mature AIR programming platform. But as I see it, in a market glutted with site creation tools for all levels of sophistication and budget, Muse looks like Adobe's first real chance to wrest designers away from using tools like Photoshop for designing and prototyping sites. However you plan to use Muse, it needs a … Read more

NuCaptcha takes on Google's ReCaptcha

Modern captchas are effective at keeping bots and algorithms from accessing Web sites made for humans. They also generate collateral damage and keep up to 25 percent of humans out, too, according to Ron Moravek, COO of NuCaptcha. He says he has a better, more flexible technology for filtering humans from bots.

NuCaptcha is a replacement technology for the free, Google-owned ReCaptcha service. There are two major differences between NuCaptcha and ReCaptcha. First, NuCaptcha displays moving text against a moving image. While this makes it harder for computers to discern text from background, it makes it much easier for humans. … Read more

Adobe dives into HTML with new Edge software

Adobe Systems has dipped its toes in the HTML5 pool, but starting today it's taking the plunge with the public preview release of software called Edge.

For years, the company's answer to doing fancy things on the Web was Flash Player, a browser plug-in installed nearly universally on computers for its ability to play animated games, stream video, and level the differences among browsers.

But allies including Opera, Mozilla, Apple, Google, and eventually even Microsoft began to advance what could be done with Web standards. The three big ones here are HTML (Hypertext Markup Language for describing Web … Read more

Google brings in-app payments to any Web app

Google has rolled out its in-app payment service for any Web developer.

The service was first announced in May at Google's I/O Conference. The feature allows developers to offer single-click payments from their applications. At launch, Google touted the platform's simple integration into a respective Web app, saying that it only required the addition of a single line of code.

When Google first announced in-app payments, the company said it would be made available only to Chrome Web Store developers. However, Google said yesterday that its in-app payment system is now "available for all Web application … Read more

Firefox world loses Web dev guru to Chrome

For years, an extension called Firebug has been a powerful tool that kept Web programmers loyal to Firefox.

But now, as browser makers add their own tools geared to attract those who build Web sites and applications, the lead Firebug programmer has taken a job with Chrome, CNET has learned.

"Monday, I start work on next-gen Web dev tools at Google on the Chrome browser team. Consequently I will no longer be contributing routinely to the development and maintenance of Firebug for Firefox," John J. Barton told members of a Firebug mailing list yesterday.

The change reflects the … Read more

Google App Engine suffers availability problems

Nice financial results notwithstanding, Google had some trouble late today with its App Engine service for online applications.

Overall availability of the cloud-computing foundation, which can run online applications written in Python or Java, dropped at least as low as 88.1 percent, according to the Google App Engine status dashboard.

The dashboard showed problems serving Java programs--more than half of attempts to request an app's Web page resources produced errors at one point. There also were delays in using a programming interface to manage tasks.

In Google's postmortem analysis, the company determined that there was an overall … Read more

Evernote raises $50M to help become your 'second brain'

The popular note-taking service Evernote today announced it has raised $50 million in a new round of funding by Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures to develop a growth and acquisition strategy.

"Even though we've built a profitable and successful business in the past three years, we still have a long way to go to achieve our goal of becoming everyone's second brain," Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote said in a statement.

Ken Gullicksen, vice president of corporate development of Evernote, will head the development and acquisition strategy.

Since the software company's inception, Evernote has grown … Read more

WebCL: New hardware power for Web apps?

Web applications such as image editors and advanced games could get a new performance boost from a graphics chip's processing power through a technology called WebCL.

Hardware acceleration is all the rage right now among browser makers: it can speed up everything from animating graphics to laying out all the elements of a Web page. Tapping directly into the hardware at a low level not only speeds things up, it saves precious battery power, too.

Now several companies are hard at work on a new interface called WebCL through the auspices of the Khronos Group standards body. WebCL is … Read more

Developer API for Google+: It's coming

Google's new social network, Google+, has only been public for two days, and developers are already interested in access to the service so they can roll out add-ons and improvements.

Fortunately for them, and ultimately for Google+ users, developer access is coming. It's simply a matter of time. As Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of social for Google, told me at a Web 2.0 Summit cocktail party tonight, "I'm a developer guy at the core. It is inconceivable I would build something without a platform."

Gundotra worked for 15 years at Microsoft before leaving for Google. His last job there was as general manager of platform evangelism. It's fair to say he's got the background for building systems that developers can build upon.

But it's not surprising that Google+ launched without developer access. The service is far from fully baked.

"We're just getting started!" Gundotra gushed to me when we talked.

The features and functions of Google+ will likely change substantially in short order. More functions will be definitely be added to the service, as well as increased integration with other Google apps. Giving developers access now might be premature, as some might build products that end up duplicating features that Google itself is just about to layer into the publicly available service.

But opening up Google+ to developers eventually could enable all manner of add-ons and improvements, from third-party access apps, like Tweetdeck was for Twitter (before Twitter acquired it); to Zynga-like games that access the Google social graph; to other utilities and add-ons. Personally, I'd like to see a utility that makes faster work of managing and sorting contacts into circles.

Google is collecting names from developers who want to know when the company launches developer tools. There's an e-mail and Google Group sign-up online now.