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SitePoint Blogs

News, opinion, and fresh thinking for web developers and designers. The official podcast of sitepoint.com.

Can Closed Work for Apple This Time?Yesterday

A recent poll in The Register asked who is more closed, Microsoft or Apple? A whopping 55% of respondents thought that dubious honor belongs to Apple (21% said Microsoft, and 24% said they were both equals in the matter).

Even though Apple’s current operating system is built on top of an open source UNIX base, and even though their web browser is built on the open source WebKit rendering engine, Apple has notoriously always been close. The most popular reason people perceived Apple as more closed than Microsoft in the Register’s poll was the end-to-end proprietary nature of their product line.

“Whether it’s OS X being wedded to the Mac, the iPod being dependent on the iTunes service, or iPhone software distribution being controlled via the Apple Store, there is a strong perception that openness is not always the biggest priority for Apple,” explains Dale Vile.

It is certainly true that Apple likes to retain complete control over their products. By only allowing OS X to run on hardware they create, for example, Apple not only controls the pricing of their products but they also limit the possibility of hardware incompatibility issues that degrade user experience. And if there’s one driving force behind all Apple produ

Amazon Adds New Service: Public Data SetsYesterday

Amazon announced the released of a new web service today that aims to facilitate easier access to open, public data sets. Public Data Sets on Amazon’s Web Services will attempt to make a wide range of public data available for free use by anyone. Users can interact with data sets via an Amazon EC2 machine image and only pay for their compute time — they won’t have to worry about storing, downloading, or cleaning the actual data.

According to Amazon business development manager Deepak Singh, the new program “significantly lowers the barrier for researchers and data analysts to access and use some of the most commonly used data sets in their communities.”

Previously, utilizing the type of large data sets that Amazon plans to host for research purposes was a tedious, multi-step affair. Researchers needed to locate the data, download it, and then often times convert, clean, or customize it into a usable format for their needs. Sometimes just downloading the data is a huge barrier for researchers. One of the data sets on Amazon, for example, is a MySQL database from life sciences project Ensembl that maintains an “automated annotation on a number of eukaryotic genomes.” Their data set w

Opera 10 Alpha ArrivesYesterday

According to Net Applications just about 0.71% of the net population uses the Opera browser. But according to Google Analytics, about three times that number of SitePoint users use Opera (clearly a more enlightened bunch than the general web populace). Today Opera announced the release of version 10.0 Alpha 1 for Mac, Windows, and UNIX, just about a month after the release of their last stable version, 9.62.

The new release includes an updated version of their core Presto rendering engine. Presto 2.2 gets improved CSS performance, and scores 100/100 on the Acid3 web standards test. The new Presto engine also ships with an improved regular expression engine, which Opera says will speed up the browser experience overall.

Opera 10 also has some catch-up improvements that other browsers have had for awhile, including inline spell checking (like Firefox), the ability to auto-update without user notification (a la Google Chrome), and improvements to Opera Mail that lets users send rich text emails, and allows them remove emails from a POP server after a specified number of days.

Opera 10 Alpha

If You’re in Melbourne, Come See Us For Xmas Goodies!Yesterday

Attention all Melburnians, Victorians, and super keen interstate Australians: the SitePoint direct-from-the-office Christmas book sale is about to commence!

For a limited time, you’ll be able to amble in to our very cool office at the Paris end of Collingwood and snap up a bargain or two that’ll help bring some Christmas cheer to all the financial doom-and-gloom of late.

For three days we’re discounting all our office stock by a massive 35-70%. And as a bonus, if you buy three or more books, we’ll throw in a FREE SitePoint or 99designs t-shirt!

The sale starts on Wednesday, December 10 and finishes Friday, December 12, running from 3pm – 7pm each day. Our office is at Level 3, 48 Cambridge Street, Collingwood.

With the exchange rate dropping, you’d be nuts not to take advantage of your geographical good fortune this Christmas!

Note that all sales are cash only, and stocks are limited … don’t miss out!

The Lowdown on Services and ProductsDecember 3

The following is republished from The SitePoint Tribune #424.

Should you offer services or products?

The old phrase, The grass is always greener … is often heard when discussing the merits of services versus web-based products. Listed below are some of the advantages and disadvantages of both models. Which ones apply to you?

Products — Advantages

• gives you unlimited income potential, because time constraints are minimal (unlike selling services)
• enables lower prices for the consumer, as costs can be amortized over more customers
• allows you to concentrate on building one main project, rather than several small ones
• presents a choice of different revenue models, which are simpler to modify over time
• affords a better opportunity for residual income, in continual license fees
• provides an easier option to sell as an ongoing concern than a small web service does.

Products — Disadvantages

• requires more upfront investment in time and possibly money, especially the marketing aspect
• presents the possibility of competitors creating similar products and competing directly with you.
• necessitates market research to avoid ending up with little or no customer base.
• runs the risk of fielding more support queries than anticipated
• may