As we reported last week , Firefox’s latest version of 3.6, release candidate 1, has been released to the general public . This time around, however, Mozilla has issued a more general release, as the new version will not only be available for download but also part of an automatic update for those already running Firefox. The release is one more sign that we’re getting closer by the day to a full-on sparkly new version of Firefox. For those of you worried about updating, Mozilla has assured us that “over 75% of the thousands of Firefox Add-ons have now been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6,” so go ahead and take that leap. But what will you find on the other side? Sponsor Firefox 3.6 RC1 Features In addition with offering this release as an automatic update, Mozilla has offered a synopsis of what it sees as the most important new features to be found in what the company hopes to be a near final version. Users can change the browser’s appearance with a single click using Personas . Firefox 3.6 alerts users about out of date plugins to keep them safe. Changes to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability. Improved automatic form fill provides better options from your form history. Open, native video can now be displayed full screen , and supports poster frames . Support for the WOFF font format. Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time. The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times. Support for the HTML5 File API Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies. While wallpapering Firefox with the latest blockbuster movie may be an attractive addition, we are looking forward to a faster and more stable Firefox. Loading scripts asynchronously should speed up some page load-times dramatically by letting faster scripts run while slower ones continue to do their work in the background – something our computers have been doing for a long time now. And the changes to third-party software integration should offer a huge boost to the browser’s stability by keeping the core components of the browser safe from being modified. For the web developers out there, increased support for CSS, DOM and HTML5 is always a welcome addition, and the addition of the WOFF font format may further help page load-times and give web designers a greater range of choice. Discuss

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New Firefox Release…One Last Time?

Our startup-minded readers may remember Mike Trotzke, our good friend who, with a little help from his good friends Marc Guyer and Brad Wisler, founded a startup incubator called SproutBox earlier this year. One of the latest sprouts to emerge from the box is Squad , Trotzke’s gift to developers everywhere – and we mean everywhere! This web-based environment allows distributed teams to collaborate in real time, opening, editing and sharing code from anywhere with an Internet connection. Sponsor It’s also beautifully portable – meaning you can work on projects from any location, whether it’s your home computer, your laptop, your mom’s vaccum tube-era model – any device with a browser can be your portal. And because it’s collaborative, it’s great for conducting code reviews or paired programming. And it’s a perfect platform for noobs and the poor suckers who have to train them. It’s even got a built in chat module so you can discuss changes as they’re made. Parts of this app dimly reminded us of Lowdown , a plain-text collaboration tool for developers to communicate to designers and managers, and even more so of How’s My Code , a resource for distributed teams to conduct code reviews and keep all the coders for a project on the same page. But those apps were relatively lightweight contraptions slapped together for the Rails Rumble a couple months ago. Trotzke offers a product of a different caliber altogether. He wrote to us, “It has a unique approach to realtime interaction that even non-developer types would find interest in. “Users follow each others actions (tab switching, scrolling, etc.) and then see each character they type. You kind of need to try it out to get the feel, but it’s pretty sexy for instructional or code review use cases.” Sounds sexy indeed! Like a developers-only, less crowded, actually useful version of Google Wave. Check out the screenshots: Pricing is competitive and ranges from free to $40 per month for teams of up to 5 users, with additional user support available for $7 per user per month. And the first month is free for everyone on a trial basis. Squad supports a variety of languages, including HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Python, SPARQL, Lua and XML. Squad works great as an HTML editor, a PHP editor or a plain text editor. The startup also plans to add a Ruby syntax mode, enhanced search and replace functions, an offline sharing mode, a show/hide feature on the collaboration panel and project handling functions. It looks like a great, exciting product, and we look forward to reading users’ reviews and seeing what else Trotzke and the Squad team come up with. Discuss

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Like Google Wave for Developers: Real-Time, Collaborative Code Editing

Facebook has just added a new photo uploader tool to their Prototypes directory, the “labs” section of the social network where new programs are released for testing prior to their public rollout. The uploader dramatically improves one what was previously one of the worst experiences on Facebook: adding photos. Despite the fact that Facebook hosts over 80 billion photos and adds around 2 billion more each month, the process of adding new photos to your profile was cumbersome, slow, and buggy. Even Facebook itself admitted there were problems saying that most users found the tool “functional, but only just.” They also discovered that a significant percentage of users couldn’t even upload photos due to technical issues. Because of these complaints, the company finally decided it was time to revamp their uploader for good. Sponsor Believe it or not, the Facebook photo uploader hasn’t changed since its introduction in 2005. As it did then, the current tool still relies on a third-party ActiveX control and Java Applet. For users, this meant a photo-uploading experience that felt just as old as it was. When thinking as to how the new uploader should function, Facebook had a few goals, most of them technical in nature. They wanted the new tool to no longer depend on Java, be compatible with future versions of Facebook’s chrome, be easy to update, and more. However, to the end user, the best part about the new uploader is that it allows you to start a photo upload and then leave the page to browse around elsewhere on Facebook (or even the web!) while the upload is underway. To meet their goals, Facebook went with a browser plug-in that uses JavaScript APIs and a front-end created with HTML and CSS. The end result is a much improved experience. But like the Facebook blog post says, “while it looks like magic, it’s really just a bunch of cool hacks.” Hacks or not, regular Facebook users will greatly appreciate the upgrade. Install the New Photo Uploader Tool To install the new uploader, you must first visit the Prototypes page for the tool and activate it for your profile. Then, the next time you go to create a new album, you’ll be prompted to install the Facebook plug-in. Once complete, you’ll be presented with the new user interface which lets you browse through your computer’s photo library and select the images you want to upload. This new interface is much easier to navigate – and more attractive, too – than the old Facebook uploader from days past. Facebook says the new tool has several additional security mechanisms built in as well, one of the more interesting being a “kill switch” that can remotely deactivate the tool in the event that a security hole is discovered. While confident that the new uploader is already securely designed and architected from the start, the company has released it as a prototype first so people can report any security issues they may find. Less technically-minded folks can simply activate the tool and use it, reporting any problems they find as well as far as user experience issues, crashes, or other bugs. Depending on the results of the tests, Facebook will be able to correct any problems prior to rolling it out to all users. If you want to give the new uploader a shot yourself, you can do so by visiting its page here . Discuss

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At Last! Facebook Improves Photo Uploading Experience

Today Adobe released new beta versions of the company’s Flash Player and AIR . The Flash Player 10.1 technology now includes HTTP streaming and hardware decoding of H.264 video. The company plans to bring the updated Flash Player to mobile devices too, starting with the Palm Pre and then completing versions for other major smartphones by the first half of 2010 (with the notable exception of the iPhone, of course). However, out of the two updates, it’s Adobe AIR 2 that received the biggest overhaul. The new runtime allows developers to create entirely new types of applications that simply weren’t possible using AIR 1. What sort of apps are those? Adobe’s gallery of sample apps should give you some ideas of what’s to come. Sponsor 1. Mass Storage Detection In Adobe AIR 2, apps can now detect when a mass storage device has been inserted into the computer. That means the app can “see” your USB flash drives, external drives, and even some digital cameras. For example, developers could build an app that recognizes when your Flip camera is plugged in and lets you automatically upload videos to YouTube. To demo this capability, Adobe has released FileTile, a sample app that does just this (minus the video uploading). FileTile recognizes external devices and lets you see the files and open them with their default application. Download Installer | Source 2. Native Process API The native process API allows developers to better integrate their AIR apps with existing code libraries or extend their apps using native code. With the new native process API, this can now be done without compromising the cross-platform capabilities of AIR which allows it to run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Developers using this new functionality can now deploy their apps with operating-specific installers like .exe, .dmg, .rpm, and .deb instead of an .air installer file. To demonstrate the native process API, Adobe released SearchCentral, an application that taps into Mac OS X’s Spotlight feature for desktop searches. It also lets you do web searches on Google and Wikipedia. Installer | Source | How to Here’s a video explaining in more detail how the native API works: 3. Microphone Data Access Like it sounds, the microphone data access feature lets you acquire the sound data from a computer’s microphone without the need of a server. For example, a developer could build a note-taking application that lets users record audio clips even when they’re offline. To get started, a simple app called Microphone is now available which does recording and playback with variable playback speeds supported. Download Installer | Source | How to 4. Drag-and-Drop Support for Remote Files The new “file promises” feature of AIR 2 lets you drag remote files out of an AIR application. A file promise, as described by Adobe’s Christian Cantrell , is “what you put on the clipboard when you want the user to be able to drag and drop files that do not yet exist, or that exist elsewhere (not locally on your machine).” It’s a promise to deliver a file at some point, but not an actual file. For example, an app could generate a CSV file but only when a user tries to drag and drop the file. It could also refer to files on a remote server, like an FTP server. When a user grabs that remote file and pulls it into the AIR app, the app could then download the data. It even supports files accessible via a URL like those hosted on Google Sites. Unfortunately, this feature is Windows and Mac only. A sample app called S3E provides a graphical front-end to your Amazon S3 account to demonstrate this feature. Download Installer | Source | How to 5. Peer-to-Peer Networking Capabilities Adobe AIR 2 also adds support for new networking capabilities including UDP, secure sockets and peer-to-peer. To demonstrate the possibilities, Adobe released KeePIPE, a javascript app that lets users on the same network share files using peer-to-peer technology. It also lets VMWare users transfer files between a virtual machine and a host computer. Download Installer | Source | Read me 6. Multi-Touch Perhaps the most exciting enhancement in AIR 2 and in Flash Player 10.1 are the new multi-touch APIs. In Windows 7, AIR apps can respond to multi-touch and in both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard, they can respond to gestures. In this video (below), Adobe’s Kevin Lynch demos a multi-touch app on an HP TouchSmart computer: Obviously, Adobe is excited about this new feature, too, because they’ve released not one but four sample applications that demonstrate multi-touch in action: GeoTest : Lets you move images around the screen using a built-in physics engine. Download Installer | Source PhotoPhysics : A multi-touch app with a built-in physics engine. Download Installer | Source SpriteFract : A multi-touch app with a built-in physics engine that demonstrates a mouse-compatible, direct-manipulation interface. It also uses PixelBender to asynchronously process a large amount of geometry data. Download Installer | Source TouchTest : Lets you drag, scale, and rotate images on the screen. Download Installer | Source Other Features Other features in Adobe AIR 2 include the following (courtesy of Rob Christensen ): A new API lets you open documents with its default application Global error handling Enhanced printing support, including vector printing support on Mac and new APIs to query the local machine for a list of printers or print without a dialog box. WebKit in AIR 2 is now based on the version shipped with Safari 4.0.3 which includes support for JavaScript profiling, SquirrelFish Extreme JavaScript engine performs 50% faster using SunSpider tests, CSS3 Module support (2D transformations, transitions, animations, gradients, zoom and WebKit CSS selectors), styling scrollbars via CSS and Canvas enhancements. IPv6 format addresses can now be used with all APIs that accept an IP string as input. Increased maximum size of NativeWindow: AIR 2 apps can have a window size of 4095 x 4095 where before the maximum was 2880 x 2880. DNS lookup Network interface enumeration Database transaction savepoints Screen reader support in Windows IME API and IME text input enhancement Smaller runtime installer sizes More efficient CPU usage and reduced memory size Adobe AIR 2 is available for download here on Adobe Labs . You can send Adobe feedback here or participate on the user-to-user forums here . Discuss

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See Adobe AIR 2′s Best New Features Demoed in 9 Sample Apps