Google Abandoning IE6 Users in 2010
As a Google Apps admin I received the following email this past Friday, announcing that IE 6 will no longer be supported by the end of 2010. This is fantastic news, hopefully others will follow suit and convince those users hanging on to this god awful browser to move on to better things. If you are still on IE6 you should upgrade to Chrome, it's a top notch and very fast browser, you'll never look back.
Dear Google Apps admin,
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.
In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps team
Google has done it again, Presentations added to Google Docs
I'm sure the bloggers will be chattering about this one this morning, especially the Ajax-centric blogs. Hats off to Google for another well done Ajax application. Google launched their Powerpoint equivalent in their Docs suite, which is getting closer and closer to providing a viable online replacement, or at least a supplement, to Microsoft Office.
Within a few minutes I was able to create a presentation and view it full screen with no visible difference to running a Powerpoint presentation, other than the nice collaboration feature built into the sidebar. I was then able to publish the presentation to be publicly available on the web - My first Google Presentation Their application seems to have the same type of theme as the rest of their Docs Applications, you're able to upload or email in an existing Powerpoint presentation, you're able to share with other Google docs users and collaborate on the creation of the presentation, you're also able to play the presentation in a collaborative environment. The application seems to be well built and extremely performant.
In addition to the new application, there's word of additional features, the UI for google's docs applications has consistently gotten better and better. I think Google provides a good example to the world of Ajax and Web 2.0 websites, progressive enhancement is definitely the way to go, get a good working and performing application in place first and then move on to enhancing the UI later. I've been very impressed with the quality of the applications Google has developed. I can't wait till Firefox 3 and offline applications, I'd love to see these application converted over to work offline, maybe they'll do something early with Google Gears, watch out Microsoft, it won't take Google 4 years to come out with a new version.
An AJAX email contact form using DWR and Scriptaculous
Coming from the Java Server side, my JavaScript skills are pretty limited, a lot of the AJAX frameworks still require a good deal of JavaScript, or wildly complex configurations, not to mention having to take into consideration how you plan to accept and answer the asynchronous calls on the server side. I needed a framework that was easy to configure, was at home in the Servlet Container, and could expose my existing API's to be called asynchronously.
I came across http://getahead.org and their AJAX framework, DWR, and found they had exactly what I needed and at the right price again, free.
Now down to the business of the article. The purpose here is to give some sample source that I worked through in following the directions on GetAhead's website. I had some issues following their directions and figured others might too, some things didn't seem to be working in their examples.
Source for this article is available here: testDWRContactForm.war
Step 1 - Download DWR and add it to your project lib directory
- Download dwr.jar
Step 2 - Add the configuration to load DWR to your web.xml
dwr-invoker DWR Servlet org.directwebremoting.servlet.DwrServlet debug true dwr-invoker /dwr/*
Google Apps Rocks!!!
I just signed up for the standard Google Apps account, which is free, and I'm extremely impressed. Any small business stands to save tons of money if they only used it for the email service. All you need to have to sign up is your own domain name, and the ability to modify your MX records.
The standard service includes:
- Google Homepage
- Google Calendar
- Google Web Publishing
- Google Docs and Spreadsheets
- Google Talk
- Google Mail
Now all of these apps can be customized for your domain and your users, there's a Management application that allows you to set up new users and configure custom urls for all of these applications. I moved all of my email hosting over to Gmail, so now I have the greatest Ajax web application for email access to my domain email, along with the same POP client support I had with my host before. I had been using mail2web.com to access my pop account because of the non-existent web mail access at my host. Not to mention that my mail took away space from my hosting account limit.
I definitely think that Google has something here and it doesn't hurt to try it out, heck it's free, and I do love free. To get to the sign up go to http://www.google.com/a
Google Code Search – Great "Source" for Developers
I happened to be in Google Labs today poking around and noticed Google Code Search. If you're looking for a code snippet or example, this beats poking through links in the regular Google search. Just type the snippet that you're looking for and off you are with dozens of examples returned. I've already found tons of Java snippets and examples, next time I'm looking for a code example I'll definitely start here.