Can Apple Save the Publishing Industry?

I’ve read the Economist religiously for over 15 years. For many of those years I bought a copy every week at the newsstand, and I’ve subscribed for the past couple of years. A few weeks ago, I let my subscription lapse. The reason is a web service-cum-iPhone application called Instapaper. Dragging their bookmarklet into your [...]

Apple Ramps Up Its iPhone RIA Platform

While industry observers focus on AIR and Silverlight, efforts by Adobe and Microsoft respectively to implement their vision of a more compelling web experience, Apple is slowly slipping in through the backdoor. The other day I hypothesized that Apple’s aggressive tactics for pushing Safari on Windows users were all about plans to turn WebKit into [...]

Apple Edges Towards RIA Viability

MacRumors is reporting that Apple has shipped a new Safari beta to developers with a number of HTML5 features: audio/video tags, SQL storage, downloadable fonts, CSS transforms/animations and a new DOM function (getElementsByClassName). This puts Apple in pole position among browser vendors with respect to HTML5 support, although Mozilla is hot on its heels with [...]

Ten iPhone Browser Improvements Steve Jobs Could Have Announced… But Didn't

Since I’m now a total iPhone fan boy, I’m officially allowed to say that I was a little disappointed by the 1.1.3 firmware update announced on Tuesday at Macworld. I’m actually still running the 1.1.1 firmware, since I couldn’t find a freely available hack to unlock 1.1.2 for use here in the Czech Republic. In [...]

Browser Trends: Offline Storage

I’ll start my exploration of the future of web browser technology by discussing some key trends that will come to the fore in 2008. The first is the addition of local storage capabilities to web browsers. This is an area that kicked into high gear last year with Mozilla’s work on offline apps, Google Gears [...]