ReadWriteWeb

Steven Wittens got sick of staring at terminal screens from the 80s, and decided to do something about it. He built TermKit, a graphic replacement for terminal, using WebKit. But Wittens isn't trying to build a GUI. TermKit is still a command line system. Instead, Wittens is trying to retain the power of the command line with modern displays.

Wittens acknowledges that the traditional UNIX-like command line has stood the test of time, he writes that many areas of computing have come a long way. "We've gotten a lot better at displaying information. We've also learned a lot of lessons through the web about data interchange, network transparency, API design, and more. We know better how small tweaks in an implementation can make a world of difference in usability."

In a blog post Pavel Feldman explains how to use WebKit Web Inspector outside of the target browser. WebKit Inspector can communicate with WebKit-based browsers through the Remote Debugging Protocol, providing a debugging environment very similar to the one found locally.

Some reasons to use Web Inspector this way include debugging mode applications and IDE integration. However, from what I can tell, Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android don't yet support the Remote Debugging Protocol.

Node.js contributor Tim Caswell pushed an initial release of WebApp Topcube, a framework for building desktop GUI apps with Node.js, to GitHub. The stated goal is to "Give node developers a way to have a desktop GUI to their node servers using HTML5 + CSS3 as the GUI platform."

It's still very early in the project's life - Caswell notes that he's not even sure he will continue developing it. WebApp is currently built on WebKitGTK+.

PhantomJS gives you command-line access to the features of WebKit. According to its website: "Literally it acts like any other WebKit-based web browser, except that nothing gets displayed to the screen (thus, the term headless)." It has native support for DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, SVG, and JavaScript.

You can use to test JavaScript, render Web pages as PDFs or perform more complex Web-based actions such as finding recent tweets by a particular Twitter user.

There has been a lot of talk about the perceived conflicts between Adobe Flash and HTML5 lately, but during it's annual developer conference MAX today, Adobe announced a new product for building interactive HTML5 content and highlighted some of the advantages of developing in HTML5. Adobe Edge, as the new tool is called, will allow developers to easily create interactive HTML5 experiences. Adobe also announced a new open JavaScript framework for animations that it will contribute back to the jQuery project, as well as a new collaboration with Google that will bring better layout and typographical fidelity to WebKit-based browsers.

While everybody was talking about the iPhone OS 4 event yesterday, Apple also quietly announced WebKit2, a major contribution to the open source WebKit project that forms the basis of Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers. One of the reasons that Google Chrome doesn't crash very often is that Google uses a split process model. Every tab in Chrome runs in a different process and a crashing plugin or bug only takes down this tab and not the whole browser. While Google had to develop this code from the ground up for Chrome, Apple is now making this technology a core part of the WebKit2 framework.

Apple has always had a tendency to hype up its statements about the speed of its devices by using just the right benchmarks and just the right products to compare them to. When it comes to the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 3.0 update, however, it looks like Apple might actually have understated some of the speed gains it advertised. Medialets, a mobile advertising and analytics company, ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark on the iPhone 3G with the old and new OS versions, as well as on the 3GS. In Medialets' tests, the speed of the iPhone 3G with the 3.0 almost tripled, and the new iPhone 3GS is another 3 times faster in completing the SunSpider benchmark than the 3G with the 3.0 release.

After only 100 days and fifteen updates, Google has taken the "beta" label off Chrome, its WebKit based browser. Given that the company has a penchant for keeping products like Gmail or Google Docs in perpetual beta, it comes as a bit of a surprise that Google already considers Chrome to be a 1.0 product.

Since the first beta release, Google has focused on fixing stability issues (especially with regards to playing Flash video), sped up the already fast V8 JavaScript engine, and added a better bookmark manager and privacy controls.