Developer tools

OSLO, Norway--Opera Software is a browser company, but its chief technology officer believes the modern Web still could learn a thing or two from publishing technology that's hundreds of years old.

At the company's Up North Web press event here, CTO Haakon Wium Lie showed off a new standard he proposed that could give Web pages more of the feel of printed pages. A document too big for a single screen, instead of getting a scroll bar, would be split across several pages, and people can navigate among them with gestures--swiping left and right to go forward and … Read more

Google today launched an "early preview" of Dart, a programming language the company hopes will help Web application programmers overcome shortcomings of JavaScript that Google itself feels acutely.

Programmer and project leader Lars Bak detailed the project in a talk today at the Goto conference in Denmark and in a blog post. Dart is geared for everything from small, unstructured projects to large, complicated efforts--Gmail and Google Docs, for example.

"If we want to focus on making the Web better over time, we have to innovate," including with new programming languages, Bak said in an interview … Read more

Using a tried and true method to make up for lost time, Adobe is acquiring two companies, Nitobi and TypeKit, to give it more strength in a fast-moving area where it's playing catch-up.

For years Adobe advocated its Flash Player technology for advanced Web design, but now it's wholeheartedly on board with the biggest alternative, Web standards including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Today, in conjunction with its Adobe Max developer and designer conference populated with the very people wrestling with that transition, the company announced the two acquisitions.

Overall, both acquisitions make sense strategically. Each gives Adobe a solid new starting point for aspects of new-age technology. Terms weren't disclosed, though, so it's not clear whether Adobe had to pay a premium for the companies. The TypeKit acquisition is complete, but the Nitobi buy is subject to closing conditions that should be met this month, Adobe said.

Nitobi makes PhoneGap, an open-source programming tool for creating Web apps that run on a variety of mobile phones. That aligns well with the cross-platform approach Adobe has favored with Flash: give programmers the ability to create what they want, and let the tools worry about the differences from one system to another. … Read more

Link-shortening service Bit.ly was down for a period of time last night, but the service appears to be working just fine now.

Last night, CNET editors found first that Bit.ly links were not working and then that all of Bit.ly seemed to be down. A quick search on Twitter reveals that some others had also been affected by the outage.

"Is Bit.ly down for anyone else or just me?" one Twitter user asked late last night. Another user quickly followed that up, saying "For the first time I can remember, Bit.ly is … Read more

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 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

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 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 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