Firefox 3.5 the much awaited release to counter IE 8 was released today. Fasten your seatbelt: Firefox 3.5 includes the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which gives the browser dramatically better performance than ever before. Firefox has always been fast, but this is the fastest Firefox ever (more than twice as fast as Firefox 3, and ten times as fast as Firefox 2), meaning Web applications like email, photo sites, online word processors and more will feel snappier and more responsive.

Performance

Firefox 3.5 is the fastest Firefox ever – check out this video of Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner running through the new features. Please note, you can view the video without plug-ins using Firefox 3.5 and get a first-hand look at native audio/video support in the browser. You can download the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate here.

In other Mozilla video news, later today we’ll be releasing the latest in our series of Fastest Firefox videos. Check out the already-posted World’s Fastest clapper and World’s Fastest sport stacker videos.
 Video
Firefox 3.5  download

Read more on Mozilla.com

Smartphone maker HTC is on a roll with the Android operating system. The company introduced its third Android-based device, called the HTC Hero, on Wednesday. It’s a touchscreen phone that will come with a newly designed user interface.

The phone has a 3.2-inch display, GPS, digital compass, a 5-megapixel auto focus camera and expandable MicroSD memory. The HTC Hero also features an anti-fingerprint coating on the screen for smudge resistance and a Teflon coating on the exterior.

HTC’s latest release adds momentum to Google’s Android operating system, which was introduced last year. The first Android phone to hit the market was the HTC-produced T-Mobile G1 phone in North America in October. Since then, HTC has also launched Magic, a touchscreen phone that eliminates the physical keyboard of the G1.

[Read more on wired]

Starting today, there is a simpler way to use the Java^TM language to develop and deploy world-scalable web applications. We are very happy to announce today:

• Google Web Toolkit 1.6,
• An early look at Google App Engine for Java, and the brand-new
• Google Plugin for Eclipse that supports a productive integration of the two.

What does this mean for you? It is easier than ever to create sophisticated web applications entirely in the Java language with Google Web Toolkit while working productively in Eclipse. And the moment you’re finished, with only a few button clicks you can upload and publish your application to the world on App Engine.

In GWT 1.6, we’ve tried to make common tasks simpler while making it possible to do even more advanced things. If you’re brand new to GWT, some of this is going to sound like gibberish, so you’ll also want to take a look at the Product Overview as a gentler introduction.

Direct support for war output and related tools

• GWT 1.6 changes the conventions for project organization to center on the standard Java web archive deployment structure. This new war support makes it easier to introduce GWT modules into existing web applications. It also makes GWT development more flexible by allowing hosted mode to work easily with any standard servlet container. 
• In conjunction, there is a new webAppCreator tool which replaces the older projectCreator and applicationCreator tools. It is a unified, war-aware tool that can quickly create a working GWT module, configuration files, source files, and an ant build file that you can use as a starting point for your own code.
• And, of course, it’s pretty easy to create a war directory layout that you can upload to App Engine.

Hosted mode and compiler enhancements

• Hosted mode has been enhanced to take advantage of the new war-centric project structure to provide additional conveniences. For example, the new “Restart Server” button reloads server-side code without you having to restart your debugger, which can save you time when you’re developing RPC services. Also, for you GWT experts out there using hosted mode with your own custom servers — if you know what “-noserver” is, I’m talking to you — you’ll be glad to know that hosted mode integration “just works” now; generated resources such as bundled image files are automatically recreated when you refresh the hosted browser. This, too, can help speed up your development cycle.
• Hosted mode has also been modified to work smoothly with EMMA’s on-the-fly instrumentation, so that you can easily generate code coverage reports. If you’re an Eclipse user, in addition to using the new Google Plugin for Eclipse, you should also look at EclEmma, which makes it easy to enable code coverage for any launch configuration. 
• Finally, the GWT compiler has gone parallel. It can compile multiple output permutations in parallel using the new -localWorkers flag, which can speed up web mode compiles noticeably on multi-core machines. In more elaborate build systems, it is also possible now to do parallel distributed compiles using the new compiler lifecycle classes Precompile, CompilePerms, and Link.

New widgets and a shiny new approach to event handling

• A big change that you will surely notice is GWT’s overhauled event handling. The new Handler pattern for managing widget events is easier to understand and more succinct than in previous releases. Widget writers can also easily create their own custom events.
• The customizable and internationalized DatePicker is now a standard widget, and the new LazyPanel helps you speed up your code by delaying the creation of widgets until they’re actually needed.
• There’s also a new API for triggering browser native events programmatically, which is a real boon for unit testing. 

As usual, there are many more improvements than we can list above. The issue tracker has the full list of changes. We hope that these new features in GWT 1.6 will seem like only the beginning, though, as you start to using GWT alongside the new Google Plugin for Eclipse and deploying your code on App Engine. There’s lots more to come on how these technologies work together to help you do cool new stuff faster.

Last but not least, the GWT team will be at Google I/O on May 27-28, giving in-depth sessions on GWT and eager to hear your feedback on these new features. We hope you’ll join us.

Download Google Web Toolkit 1.6

Sourced via Google

Flash is an excellent technology for dealing with data visualization. It being client-side, it can reduce the amount of work your server has to perform in order to generate graphs and charts. Because of its robust ability in dealing with sleek and fluid animation and complex user interactivity, Flash is an excellent web and (and even desktop) application technology for dealing with graphing data.

In this article, you will find ten excellent Flash components that will help you in building stunningly attractive, complex, and interactive data visuals. These components will help you create an assortment of graphs and charts to aid in presenting otherwise boring and stale numerical data.

Open Flash Chart is an open source Flash-based graphing and charting solution developed using ActionScript 3 and compiled using Flex. Open Flash Chart’s features include interactivity of your charts with tooltips, the ability to resize your charts client-side, and being able to save your graphs as images.

Its native data format is JSON, which makes it a breeze to work with for developers who know C-style language like Perl, Python, PHP, and of course, JavaScript. There’s some great Open Flash Chart tutorials to get you started right away.

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Windows only: Free application Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren’t cool enough, it’s portable, so you can carry it on your thumb drive.

Built from the same guts as the andLinux system that lets you seamlessly run Linux apps on your Windows desktop, Portable Ubuntu is a stand-alone package that runs a fairly standard (i.e. orange-colored, GNOME-based) version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. It just doesn’t bother creating its own desktop, and puts all its windows inside your Windows, er, windows.

The coolest parts about Portable Ubuntu are:

• It actually works (in most cases, on most systems).
• It fits on a (larger) thumb drive and can run entirely from it.
• It can work on, and save to, your Windows folders and files.
• It’s persistent, so changes you make and apps you install are carried around with you.
• It’s easily manageable from Windows, and works great on dual monitors.

[Read More]