iPhone web app performance

The Exceptional Performance group at Yahoo! just released a detailed performance analysis of web applications on the iPhone. Yahoo! analyzed the full capabilities of the iPhone’s Safari browser including browser cache and transfer speeds. The iPhone cache is much smaller than a desktop browser, and web developers should adjust their targets accordingly.

Sniff browser history for improved user experience

The social web has filled our websites with too much third-party clutter as we figure out the best way to integrate content with the favorite sites and preferences of our visitors. Intelligent websites should tune-in to the content preferences of their visitors, tailoring a specific experience based on each visitor’s favorite sites and services across the social web. In this post I will teach you how to mine the rich treasure trove of personalization data sitting inside your visitor’s browser history for deep personalization experiences.

Data interchange for the social web

Data portability is only useful if outside systems can comprehend the exported data. Well-described and interoperable data sets open new possibilities for context-aware social applications, importing your friends, photos, or genetic markup from an existing system into your current tool of choice. In this post I will discuss website best practices for exporting portable, descriptive data sets in the name of data portability.

Data Portability, Authentication, and Authorization

In this post I will take a deeper look at the current best practices of the social Web from the point of view of its major data hubs. We will take a detailed look at the right and wrong ways to request user data from social hubs large and small, and outline some action items for developers and business people interested in data portability and interoperability done right.

Widget Basics

The total number of widget platforms and deployment options intimidate many newcomers. Each platform offers a unique audience and features, but widget basics remain the same across Windows Vista, Nokia S60, Google, MySpace. and more. In this post I will outline the basic components of a widget including static assets, user preferences, processing remote data, and rendering your final widget.

YUI Rich Text Editor for blog comments

This blog’s comments are now enhanced with the YUI Rich Text Editor. I’m already familiar with the YUI JavaScript library, so when this new feature was included last week’s 2.3 release I decided to try out a progressive commenting enhancement. In this post I’ll walk you through how to implement YUI’s Rich Text Editor on your own blog with comment-specific features.

Widgets on your iPhone

Steve Jobs announced the iPhone development platform at last week’s Worldwide Developer Conference to sighs of disappointments. Mac developers were anxious to develop new applications for the the most anticipated consumer electronics device in years, only to be told they should code fancy websites instead. The 9-minute iPhone development demonstration during the WWDC keynote was a bit confusing for anyone new to Apple widget development. In this post I’ll break down a few Apple widget components, transport you to the iPhone development world, and explain a few restrictions and lock-downs common in the mobile phone industry. Dashboard under the…

Podcast: Taking Ajax offline

Rich Internet applications are stepping out of the web browser and onto the desktop, helped along by a new set of toolkits. Web developers are able to code against desktop resources using familiar languages and toolkits such as JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, or HTTP interactions. Offline access for web applications is about much more than planes, trains, and automobiles — it can accelerate performance and integrate with established desktop interactions as well. Offline web applications are a hot topic, but often misunderstood. In this week’s podcast I step beyond the myths of offline web applications with special guest Brad Neuberg….