Bringing HTML5 to Windows Phone 8

Microsoft is promoting the new software developer kit (SDK) available for the IE10 browser as containing an emulator that allows testing of sites on the Windows Phone 8 platform. Microsoft says this functionality will help IE10 sites provide the same experience on mobile devices running Windows Phone 8 as they do on PCs and other devices.

‘Beautiful, Intuitive’ Sites for Windows Phone 8

IE10 developers will have the ability to create “beautiful” and “intuitive” site experiences for Windows Phone 8 users, according to Microsoft. The vendor says expanded CSS3 support enables features such as 3-D effects, faster animations and transitions, and aesthetic touches including CSS gradients and custom fonts. In addition, Microsoft says the IE10 SDK allows developers who lack “CSS and HTML ninja skills” to still create site features such as multiple columns, positioned floats and device adaptations.

Other features include an HTML5 application cache that makes website files available offline and indexed object storage. Microsoft cautions that IE10 for Windows Phone 8 is not quite as feature-rich as IE10 for Windows 8. Features not included in the Windows Phone 8 version include inline video, ActiveX and VBScript and drag-and-drop APIs, among others.

Microsoft Applies Responsive Design Principles to Windows Phone 8

While Microsoft’s IE10 development approach to Windows Phone 8 may not fully constitute a responsive design strategy, it does include many responsive design principles. As detailed in CMSWire's May 11 webinar, "Optimizing Mobile Customer Experience with Responsive Design," responsive design involves designing a site at different “break points,” or standard screen sizes, that allow designers to accommodate many different devices at once.

Instead of designing for a specific device, responsive design best practices dictate that you should plan to scale your digital experiences for a range of screen sizes, focusing on the smallest screen first and drawing from a single codebase. Responsive design relies on functionality of HTML5 and CSS3 to allow seamless adaptation of websites to mobile formats, and this aspect of responsive design is clearly evident in Microsoft’s IE10/Windows Phone 8 strategy.

Windows Phone 8 Leaps Ahead

While the Webmonkey developer news site does not give the new IE10/Windows Phone 8 development strategy unqualified praise, it does credit Microsoft for bringing IE 10 on mobile “leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessors and support(ing) web app essentials like the Application Cache API for creating offline apps and IndexedDB for storing data.” Although Webmonkey concludes the Windows Phone 8 release of IE10 is “very close to feature parity with the desktop/tablet release,” it does find the lack of support for the File Access API and other missing features “disappointing.”

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Google Chrome Update Boosts User Privacy with Do Not Track Feature

Users of the Google Chrome browser now have more privacy options available to them. Access to permissions settings has been eased and Chrome now offers a “do not track” feature.

Permission Denied

In an official blog posting, Google said changes to how users set permissions for web pages will make it “much easier to view and control any website’s permissions for capabilities such as geolocation, pop-ups, and camera/microphone access.”

The new permissions procedure enables Chrome users to click on a “page/lock” icon next to a site’s URL in the browser and then select from a list of settings. Different sites can be given different settings and users no longer have to go to settings pages to customize permissions. 

Follow Me Not

Google Chrome also now offers users the option of sending a “do not track” request to any site or online service to try to stop following and monitoring of user behavior after leaving the site. Google warns “effectiveness of such requests is dependent on how websites and services respond” and says it is working with “others” to create common “do not track” procedure.

Joining the Crowd - Is It Enough?

Chrome was the last major browser not to offer its own proprietary “do not track” feature and users previously had to rely on third-party extensions to maintain privacy settings. As reported by Daily Online Examiner, although users will automatically receive access to the feature, they must still manually turn it on in the advanced settings page.

The article also questions the effectiveness of “do not track” as currently offered by Google Chorme and other major browsers. “The do-not-track request doesn't prevent ad networks from collecting data about Web users or sending them ads,” states the Daily Online Examiner. “Instead, it only signals that users don't want to be ‘tracked’ — a concept that means different things to privacy advocates and ad networks.”

The article concludes by saying the FTC may support legislation to formalize “do not track” rules for online advertisers – perhaps the FTC is one of the unidentified “others” Google says it is working with (see more on Google’s interesting history with the FTC on this topic below).

Google Follows Through

Google is following through on a promise it made earlier this year to include “do not track” functionality in Chrome. What Google’s blog posting on the subject left out is that the promise came in the wake of a US$ 22.5 million settlement with the FTC for mishandling privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser.

Whatever prompted Google’s move, it brings Chrome in line with its competitors in terms of user privacy, though until “do not track” has more teeth it may not serve as a real deterrent to advertisers surreptitiously monitoring the online activities of private individuals.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Alpine Data Labs Offers Browser-based Predictive Analytics for Hadoop

Alpine Data Labs has announced Alpine 2.8, a new predictive analytics platform that work with Hadoop - straight from your browser.

If your company is typical, it’s thriving in this age of Big Data. You’ve found Predictive Analytics to be a cakewalk. Your marketing department knows exactly which promotion to push at precisely which customer at what time of day, to the second. And your inventory managers know which products to store at which warehouse so that just-in-time replenishment actually happens just in time. Everything truly is just off the truck, just out of the oven, just off the vine…and so on.

Your CEO is as pleased as Martha Stewart on Pinterest. Big Data has truly lived up to its promise of improving operations, capitalizing on new opportunities and driving new revenue.

NOT. Or not yet, anyway.

“Big Data is really, really hard,” says Steven Hillion, Chief Product Officer of Alpine Data Labs, whose mission it is to provide its customers with a reliable, cost-effective way to apply predictive analytics to Big Data.

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” he adds.

Leveraging Hadoop for Predictive Analytics

And it’s with that thought in mind that Alpine Data Labs is today introducing Alpine 2.8, the industry’s first predictive analytics platform that leverages the full power of Hadoop, enabling enterprises to finally harness the promise of Big Data. With this advance, Alpine 2.8 users will be able to perform end-to- end analytics on combined data from Hadoop and relational databases, all from the ease of their web browser.

This should spell a welcome relief to the large number of companies and other organizations who admit to be struggling with setting up big data infrastructures and/or working with samples that must be extracted from the Hadoop file system; Alpine Data Labs’ solutions are in-database.

But that’s far from the only win, companies who use Alpine 2.8 might be free of the burden of trying to hire staff with the sophisticated statistical and coding development skills Hadoop requires. “They may not have to write a single line of code,” says Arshak Navruzyan , Alpine’s Vice President of Product Management. “We make the promise of Big Data more accessible,” he adds.

And because using Alpine 2.8 is as easy as opening a browser, everyone from business analysts and data engineers can participate in predictive analytics and work together to share workflow and analyses and to discover important insights.

The promise of Big Data becomes less of a dream and more real.

Alpine 2.8 Highlights

Predictive Analytics and Data Mining on Hadoop

Provides end-to-end analytics workflows on data from Hadoop. Offers predictive modeling, data transformation and visualization of Hadoop datasets. Users can generate insights by performing statistical analyses and building scalable models on massive datasets without writing a line of code, using an intuitive interface. 

A Data Agnostic Approach to Analytics

Draw upon data from multiple sources, including HDFS and MPP databases. Explore tables and files without complex and time-consuming data movement, infer structure automatically and combine data from multiple sources. Use a single workbench and a common set of scalable operators that apply equally to Hadoop and relational data.

Expanded Web-Based Functionality

The web-based functionality greatly expands the product capabilities to offer full modeling and workflow creation capabilities with an improved look and feel. It simplifies workflow editing, provides full data browsing and visualization capabilities, and provides an accessible framework for the entire team to collaborate on advanced analytics.

Broadest Database Support

Alpine 2.8 supports databases Greenplum, Oracle 11g, Oracle Exadata, Netezza, DB2, and PostgreSQL. The Hadoop supported platforms are Apache Hadoop 0.20.2+, Greenplum GPHD 1.0+, and Cloudera CDH3.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Privacyfix Extension for Chrome, Firefox Puts Users in Control of Their Online Privacy

We have become a society intent on not letting Facebook’s privacy settings get the better of us. Thanks to a new browser extension for both Chrome and Firefox, we are a step closer to simplifying our lives.

Get in Control of Your Privacy

With the goal of putting the user in control of their own online privacy, the Privacyfix browser extension scans for privacy issues based on your Facebook and Google settings, the other sites that you visit and the companies tracking you. Privacyfix directs users to the settings they need to fix, and can warn of new privacy issues as you surf the web — so you'll know when sites like Facebook change their privacy policies or have privacy breaches.

Additionally, your information will not be compromised further by using PrivacyFix — the application has been engineered not to transmit or share any of your data, including history, cookies or privacy settings. Because all of the ratings and calculations for Privacyfix happen inside the browser, with generic formulas and data being sent from their server, the only data that a browser sends to PrivacyFix's server is standard technical data (like IP addresses), which the company says is promptly deleted.

Tracking the Outcome of Better Privacy Controls

What are the long-term implications of an extension like this? Will users be curious enough to learn about how specific sites are using their information? Upon learning that sites may be collecting more information than users thought, will they be moved to make more educated choices? If they decide not to share information, will companies update their policies?

Of course, it’s too soon to know. Additionally, it’s too soon to know if we can get the right people using these extensions. Three years ago GetSafeOnline.org found that students are more likely to put themselves at risk of online fraud than any other adult demographic in the United Kingdom. Twenty-eight percent admitted to entering personal details into a website from an unsecured computer, over double the national average of 11 percent. Almost one in five students (19 percent) regularly posted valuable personal information, such as their date of birth or home address, on social networking sites, almost double the national average of 11 percent. 

Are students likely to install these extensions on their browsers? It will be interesting to see how PrivacyFix markets themselves to this vulnerable demographic. The appeal, in the beginning, will be to those who are already proactive about protecting their privacy online — so getting this app into the hands of those who can benefit from it most will be most important.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com