I’m not sure when this was implemented, and I don’t know what else was implemented at the same time, but I noticed the other day that Chrome now supports the standard border-radius CSS3 property, rather than requiring the -webkit- prefix.

If you’re using Chrome (or the new IE9 platform preview), this text should be inside of a box with a black, rounded border.

Has this also been implemented in the new versions of Safari? Any ideas what other CSS3 properties might have been added with the latest updates to Chrome?

Today at the MIX10 Conference, Microsoft previewed Internet Explorer 9 to an apparently very receptive crowd. I watched along on Twitter as Molly Holzschlag live-tweeted from Dean Hachamovitch’s speech (the link only shows a small portion of the tweets she posted from his speech – this is also a really impressive tidbit from Molly). She seemed impressed by the demo of Internet Explorer 9, and, I have to admit, I was extremely impressed by the information she shared.

At the end of the speech, it was announced that Internet Explorer 9 is already available for download. It’s obviously far from final, but it’s really cool to see that Microsoft is moving so quickly toward releasing new browsers and embracing the standards of the Web. Microsoft is referring to the available version as a “platform preview,” which is a creative way of referring to an alpha or beta release, I think.

If you want to try Internet Explorer 9, you can download the “platform preview” from Microsoft’s Web site.

During the SXSW conference in Austin this week, Google held an all day hackathon event. The idea behind the hackathon is to allow developers to create applications in one day and also get help from Google employees on applications they are developing.

I recorded the session that discussed Google App Engine and the video is below. You can also download all of the “code labs” which are simple tutorials on how to use a variety of Google APIs and services including Google App Engine.
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It’s been a while since I’ve used the Google Docs interface to create a Web form; but I needed to create some quick, simple forms today. When I logged in and started creating the form, I didn’t really notice anything different.

However, as I worked more on the form, I noticed a nice update I hadn’t seen before. When creating forms within Google Docs, you can easily add section headers (along with additional text under the header) and even paginate your forms. (more…)

The dates for this year’s edUi Conference have been officially announced. The conference will be held on Nov. 8 and 9, 2010 at the Omni Hotel and Conference Center in Charlottesville, VA. I attended and enjoyed the first edUi Conference last year and decided to get involved this year. (more…)

A few weeks ago, FiXT Music, the record label founded by Klayton of Celldweller, announced a new concept for the music released on the label. Much of the music released was now considered “Podsafe,” meaning that purchasing the music from the Fixt Store grants you a license to use the music in non-commercial audio and video podcasts and other online materials. Following is the announcement they sent out. (more…)

The other day, a client of mine received an e-mail message from GoDaddy informing them that the cost of .com and .net domain names would be increasing on July 1, 2010. Following is the text of the e-mail message: (more…)

Amazon Web Services has announced the launch of versioning support for their S3 cloud storage product. By using the versioning function, it will help make sure you (or your users) never accidentally remove or update an object. The S3 versioning will allow you to rollback to a safe version if needed. You can also use the versioning option for storage and archiving as you can now just keep writing to the same file name and each new write will create a version.

Amazon notes, “Once you enable Versioning for a bucket, Amazon S3 preserves existing objects anytime you perform a PUT, POST, COPY, or DELETE operation on them. By default, GET requests will retrieve the most recently written version. Older versions of an overwritten or deleted object can be retrieved by specifying a version in the request.”

The AWS S3 versioning is available for the standard data storage rates. So if you store 2 versions of an image, you will be charged for the storage of both objects. To use versioning, you MUST set the bucket to use it – otherwise it will be the same bucket as you’ve had previously.

One of my favorite services for developers and entrepreneurs is Pingdom. They offer a tool which notifies you if your website is down or non-responsive. I also like Pingdom because their staff is very responsive. The company is based in Sweden.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on testing and optimizing the speed of my websites. Google has stated that the faster a website is, that there might be a chance for better rankings. Better speed also makes for a better experience and more importantly for a smaller load in weight and time.

Pingdom has a speed testing tool which I’ve been using and it’s really sweet. It’s free to use and you can test to your heart’s delight. By using the Pingdom speed test tool, I found that my style sheet was pulling in old images. By removing those images, I increased the speed by nearly 50% overall.

The tool tracks: total loading time, total objects, external domains, html, xhtml, css, images, scripts and plugins. The graph loads in real-time so you can watch how a browser loads your objects one by one. There are tools including Yahoo’s YSlow and Google Chrome offers some of this functionality but the Pingdom tool just seems easier to use and you can save the tests as well.

Leave a comment if you know of other good, reliable speed testing tools.

The Zune team has announced that this evening, beginning at 10 p.m. PST, the Zune network will be unavailable for a period of up to 24 hours so they can implement some major backend updates and changes to the service. Apparently the changes are being made to help improve the performance of the network and to make it possible to implement some planned feature additions in the future. Very few of the changes made this evening will be immediately visible to the end user, but it sounds like they’re preparing for some good updates further on down the road.

One thing Zune users will notice after the service resumes, though, will be an update for the Zune software. Again, there are not supposed to be any major feature additions with this release, but the release is apparently necessary to keep the Zune software working properly with the updated network.

If you are a Zune software user, especially if you are a Zune pass user, the Zune team is warning customers to make sure that all pending transactions are completed before 10 p.m. PST this evening. If you are planning to download or rent a movie, make sure that download is finished before they shut off the service.

Update: As of 8:40 p.m. on Tuesday, the service still does not appear to be fully operational. However, a new version of the Zune software (Zune 4.2) is now available, and apparently allows users to view AVI videos natively within the software.