Programming

Google today released a beta version of its Chrome browser for Android, a momentous step that marries two of Google's most important programming projects.

The new browser, unlike the stock Android browser, is available in the Android Market so that people don't have to wait for handset makers to offer it through an operating system upgrade. But its reliance on newer hardware acceleration interfaces means it only works on Ice Cream Sandwich, which despite emerging last year on Samsung's Galaxy Nexus smartphone remains a rarity in the real world.

Chrome for Android (review) includes the desktop version'… Read more

Google has released "Duclair," the new version 1.0.0 of its VP8 technology that the company says does a better job encoding video and faster job decoding it.

And it's a good thing, too, because VP8 is taking on not only the incumbent H.264, but also a sequel called High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) from the same group that's well under development.

VP8 and H.264 are codecs, technology for compressing video for more compact storage or for more efficient transmission over a network. But the two come from very different backgrounds. Google hopes … Read more

One of the pesky fragmentation issues Android programmers must worry about is different screen sizes.

With resolution changing from one phone to another, programmers have to figure out exactly how much room they can devote to icons, photos, video game backgrounds, dialog boxes. But, Google argues, paying the price upfront pays programmers back in the long run--and helps them avoid the fixed-resolution difficulties that afflicted Palm.

Indeed, even before the first Android phone hit the market, Google had set on an approach designed to accommodate not just different pixel resolutions, but also pixel densities--the number of pixels per inch. Android … Read more

I'll be honest here. I disabled Chrome's autofill ability. I hate it.

Maybe it's because I have too many e-mail addresses, or even regular addresses--I moved a lot in the last couple years. Maybe it's because my wife and I use the same computer. Maybe it's because my international life involves too many formats for phone numbers, postal codes, and codes guichet.

But filling out forms is certainly tedious, so I was delighted to hear that there's going to be a way for Web developers to straighten this out.

Specifically, Google and others are … Read more

Many Web developers have gotten the message: a faster site means people buy more, read more, interact more, and return more.

But apparently the message hasn't sunk in far enough, because the top 2,000 retail Web sites still take 10 seconds to load on average, according to a study by Strangeloop Networks released yesterday. The list of the top retail sites comes from Amazon's Alexa list of top sites.

Strangeloop is in the business of helping customers speed up their Web sites, so it has an agenda to push, but that shouldn't deter developers from taking … Read more

Like newspapers to the Web, many business software vendors are now reluctantly dragging themselves into the cloud-based enterprise. If they aren't nimble enough, a new generation of companies is ready to take their place.

While major enterprise IT vendors continue to deliver so-called features that keep users tied to their desks and legacy software, companies like Box and others have figured out that the industry is changing right before our eyes. The new enterprise takes the best aspects of consumer applications to make business-critical data available anywhere, anytime.

The majority of the fawning stories about startups that come out … Read more

Mike Shaver already announced last year he was moving to Facebook after resigning as vice president of technical strategy for Firefox.

And now we know what he'll be doing there: engineering manager for Android app development.

Given the immense membership of Facebook, there are few mobile apps in the world that are as important as Facebook's. The company announced in December that Facebook has 800 million users.

Shaver tweeted on Friday, "This week I started as the eng mgr for Facebook's Android team. Doing cool stuff -- some probably obvious, some rather not. And hiring!" … Read more

Google doesn't reject apps from the Android Market just because they're ugly.

But that doesn't mean the company doesn't care--especially now that Matias Duarte has seized the spotlight as director of Android user experience. So, absent the banhammer, Google is trying gentler persuasion to get others besides itself to care about designs that look and work well in the Ice Cream Sandwich era.

For that reason, Google has released an Android design guide for ICS, aka Android 4.0. As my colleague Kent German observes, Google's accommodating ways up to this point have led to … Read more

The dividing line between writing books and writing programs just got a big step blurrier.

That's because Amazon has now released tools for creating books using Web technologies. Those tools include Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), used to describe Web pages, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), used for formatting.

"Through the use of HTML5 and CSS3, KF8 allows publishers to create great-looking books in all categories, particularly those that require rich formatting and design, such as technical & engineering books and cookbooks," Amazon announced. Other features are well suited to graphic novels, comics, and kids' books, Amazon said. … Read more