ReadWriteHack

Wappwolf and ifttt are a bit like the chocolate and peanut butter in Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Separate, they're pretty good. Together, though, is when the magic happens.

For folks new to the services, Wappwolf is an application that performs actions when you drop a file into your Dropbox. ifttt, on the other hand, can interact with websites and services and then do things like send an email or save a file in Dropbox.

Google's SPDY protocol offers several advantages over serving traffic via HTTP/HTTPS. But, if you want to use SPDY, you're going to have to take a few additional steps to set it up. The good thing is that if you happen to be using Apache on recent Debian or RPM-based systems, installing and using SPDY is a simple matter.

If you've seen one Web-based collaboration tool, you've seen 'em all, right? That was my thinking, until I started seriously looking at Trello a few weeks ago. Trello takes the drudgery out of collaboration software. It gives users a Web-based workspace that's as easy to use as a whiteboard and Post-It notes, but full-featured enough for distributed teams that need to work on complex projects.

Trello is developed by Fog Creek Software, a company best known for developer-oriented software like FogBugz, and for co-founder Joel Spolsky.

Don't know whether your visitors are going to be able to use Flash or HTML5 for video and audio playback? Don't guess, take a look at the jPlayer project. jPlayer is an HTML5 audio/video library for jQuery that supports real cross platform audio and video.

Me? I'm a fan of HTML5 solutions, not so much the Adobe Flash solutions – especially since Adobe is essentially abandoning Linux. But you can't assume that all users are using a browser that can support HTML5 playback. And you can't assume they're on a platform that has Flash support, either.

With the right data, you can get a pretty interesting picture of an area. Whether it's a state, city, or even a street, you can learn a lot from data. Do you need to pack a coat if you're visiting in March? What's the elevation, cost of living, how many people live there? But to answer what is it like? That takes a bit more doing.

This was the topic of Jesper Andersen's talk at Strata, "Building a Data Narrative: Discovering Haight Street." The idea, to "see how far we can go" in understanding San Francisco's famous Haight Street through as much data as possible.

Canonical and the Ubuntu folks have taken a lot of risks in the Unity interface that ships with Ubuntu Linux. One of the things that the company has been leading towards is the Head-Up Display (HUD), a new tool for controlling applications that moves away from the traditional menu interface that debuted decades ago with the Xerox PARC GUI.

Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth blogged about the new interface design today, with a description, screenshot and a video demonstrating the use of HUD.

Two years ago, the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security firmly decided (again) that a policy of responding to vulnerabilities in the nation's cybersecurity when they happen, is insufficient. The National Institute of Standards and Technology set about on a plan to model a 21st century perpetual vulnerability mitigation scheme - a continuous monitoring (CM) framework that attempts to model security procedures not in terms of crisis and response, but instead as a perpetual cycle of monitoring and engagement that stays basically the same whether or not there's a crisis.

In other words, if you "keep doing this all the time," then whatever happens won't destroy the network. Late last week, NIST produced its first series of drafts for how government information services could look, perhaps later this decade. It's so radically different from anything seen thus far, that NIST acknowledges that no one in the commercial sector has even come up with the language to describe it.

Sometimes, you need to see what a technology can do before you can fully appreciate it. Take, for instance, CSS 3D and Three.js. It's one thing to hear about doing 3D elements for Web sites, and another to see them integrated into a well-designed site. Take, for example, Steven Wittens' Acko.net redesign.

Visit Acko.net using a current release of Firefox, and you'll see a nice clean site with a nice header image that demonstrates two-point perspective nicely. But hit the site using a WebKit browser, and you're in for a real treat.

For some, it is a question about whether Google serves "the same Web" for the millions of users who rely on Google as their principal portal. For others, it is a matter of relevance, and whether the infusion of data gleaned from the personal interests of one's friends impedes the visibility of material those friends might never have seen. At any rate, Google's swift response this week to negative reviews of its first trials of personally-adjusted search results, including Jon Mitchell's fiery indictment, clearly demonstrate that it's at least as sensitive as its own users.

It's now extremely easy for any Google+ user to turn on and off personalized search results (called "Search + Your World") at will, with a toggle switch in the upper right corner, part of Google's rollout of changes today. Now, as a follow-up to our first tests of personalized search prior to the rollout, RWW looks into whether leaving the feature turned on necessarily improves the relevance of search results in various categories. At issue: Does Google elevate links to discussions about what you're looking for on its own services, above what you're looking for?

The change in emphasis for HTML5 away from just content and more toward functionality, coupled with a much deeper impact from Apple on the broader model of computing than even Apple's most adamant fans could have anticipated, has led to a changed scenario for the Web. By this time next year, barring any delays, the Web delivery model for the world's three most prevalent platforms - Windows, iOS, and Android - will be based on apps.

This changes the landscape for developers like Mozilla and Opera Software, whose value propositions to date have been based around building better browsers: If the user now bypasses the browser icon and goes directly to an app, how does a browser maker convince customers that there's value in swapping out the engines that run their apps - components which, like graphics cards, they probably never see or even care about?