Stories by Peter Wayner

HTML5 in the browser: Canvas, video, audio, and graphics

The five characters HTML5 are now an established buzzword, found everywhere on the Web and often given top billing in slides, feature lists, and other places where terms du jour congregate. Nonprogrammers who must either manage or work with programme...

12 programming mistakes to avoid

A car magazine once declared that a car has "character" if it takes 15 minutes to explain its idiosyncrasies before it can be loaned to a friend. By that standard, every piece of software has character -- all too often, right of the box.

7 programming languages on the rise

In the world of enterprise programming, the mainstream is broad and deep. Code is written predominantly in one of a few major languages. For some shops, this means Java; for others, it's C# or PHP. Sometimes, enterprise coders will dabble in C++ or a...

First look: Internet Explorer 9 beta makes waves

One of the best ways to see what's changed with the ninth and newest version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer is to tune into beautyoftheweb.com and watch the words, images, and DIVs bounce around, luring the world into pretty images and information...

First look: Firefox 4 Beta 1 shines on HTML5

While it's impossible to sum up the thousands of enhancements and bug fixes both big and small, the Firefox 4 beta version brings the browser that much closer to taking over everything on the desktop. There are fewer reasons for anyone to interact wi...

Where Android beats the iPhone

Can Google Android phones compete with the Apple iPhone? A few weeks ago, Google loaned me a Nexus One smartphone for experimentation, and I've spent the time since downloading applications and writing my own code. The good news is that the platform ...

Android apps for business users, at a glance

Even though the market for Android apps is still emerging, there are a number of good programs for business users.

Android apps for developers and IT pros, at a glance

These eight apps allow you to open a shell, run a shell script, tap the Linux command line, or otherwise put your Android-based smartphone to productive use. Most are available in free editions, and none will set you back more than a few dollars.

The best free open source software for Mac OS X

Most Mac lovers love the Mac for the carefully wrought user interfaces and the crisp design, and never pay attention to the open source at the heart of the operating system. But underneath this beautiful facade is a heart built upon the rich - if oft...

Palm Mojo SDK 1.1

When the Palm Pre appeared two months ago, the world took one look at the graceful curves and immediately decided there was finally a contender that might stand a chance of attracting some of the crowds clustered around the iPhone.

Sun Cloud looks beyond Java

Sun Microystems, which announced Sun Cloud in March, is taking a different tack than the Java clouds from Google, Aptana, and Stax because it wants to be more than just a Java provider. The new cloud will create new clusters of machines from any disk...

Open source and SaaS offerings rethink the DB

The world of low-rent key-value storage silos is exploding. Here's a list of some of the more prominent new projects:

Why developers prefer Macs

When Terry Weaver wants to create .Net applications, he fires up Visual Studio and types away like any other .Net programmer. The setup gets a bit weird when he wants to test how the .Net application might appear to a Mac user visiting the Web site. ...

Caspio Bridge 6.0

Caspio Bridge, like a Microsoft Access on the Web, allows nonprogrammers to easily create online databases and the Web forms to fill them

A Web-based app builder with a Microsoft twist

Now that the desktop revolution is largely over, most of the excitement lies in the counter-desktop revolution that is bringing all the flair developed by the desktop programmers back to the safe world of the server. Caspio is one of the most promine...