I believed in Opera for iPhone. Really, I did.

I’ve always pictured the folks at Opera like a bunch of guys who were striving to create a good, alternative yet standard compliant browser that could show people around the world that developing an alternative browser was possible, and that developing a good alternative browser was possible too. This is not an attack to the Mac or Windows versions of Opera: those are good browsers, even though they have their problems. Especially Opera for Mac, whose interface has been designed by Jon Hicks, has finally started to feel native and snappy on Apple computers. But what happened yesterday - and what’s been happening for the past 2 months actually - is very sad. So sad that looking back, it’s ridiculous.

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“Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourself. You made a business decision in 1996 to screw Apple when it needed you most to gain credibility for its fledgling OS with the creative crowd. Somehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time.”

You always get what you paid for, you know.

TUAW has published an interesting interview with OpenFeint’s founder Jason Citron here, where he talks about the future  of the platform and the Game Center announcement.

From the post:

“So why now? “Apple stumbled onto this,” he told us. “They were trying to make cool phones, an iPod and a phone coming together. They opened up the SDK, and all of a sudden there were all these games out there, and now it’s disrupting the handheld gaming industry.” We’ve seen a few hints, mostly in commercials and rumors, that Apple has been looking at the iPhone and specifically at the iPod touch as a gaming platform, but Citron believes the wind has changed for good. “I don’t think they’re thinking of it as an accidental opportunity any more. I think they’re diving in headfirst.”

And considering all the mentions regarding the iPhone (and thus the App Store) being more successful than Nintendo’s DS and Sony’s PSP as a gaming device, I definitely agree that Apple is seeing this a huge opportunity.

In the past months we’ve seen many tech demos trying to experiment the concept of desktop-class applications running inside a browser, as a webapp. Safari 4 running inside Safari is a perfect example for this.

Today’s experiment is another webapp that tries to replicate the functions of a Mac desktop app, this time using UKI, a simple JavaScript UI toolkit for desktop-like webapps. The app is the popular Mail.app, and the web version is absolutely stunning: it looks the same, works the same and acts the same. You can drag messages around, expand and collapse folders, navigate with your arrow keys. Clearly it’s just an experiment that shows what’s actually possible with modern technologies, but the result is impressive nevertheless.

Check out the screenshots after the break, and the try the app here.

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The iPad has been out for 5 days now, mine is on its way to Italy too, everyone seems to be happy and satisfied. It’s a great device, no doubt about it. But I can hear the far away voice of those people who haven’t purchased an iPad yet and decided to stick with their iPhones. Waiting for better times (camera, 3G, other random excuses) to come. I can hear this voice, I can hear these people complaining because they fear developers have forgotten about them.

Developers, this one is for you. They are right.

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We’ve seen many Webkit / CSS experiments, but this one, seriously, it’s an outstanding achievement. We’re talking about a kinetic type videos, one of those you usually see realized with Flash and advanced After Effects techniques. This time, we have a kinetic type video made entirely with Webkit, CSS and javascript. The experiment is called “The Man from Hollywood” and it’s available here.

From the website:

“It’s a Kinetic Type experiment that makes use of Advanced CSS selectors and Webkit CSS properties. The idea is based off of kinetic type videos that are usually created using After Effects, Flash, or other animation tools. Javascript is used, but minimally, really just to turn class names on and off. All of the animations are accomplished using CSS.”

Be sure to check out the screenshots after the break, and see the video in action here.

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I remember when I was a kid I asked my parents to buy me a computer. I didn’t ask for a Mac or a Pc, I just wanted “a computer”. Maybe I should have been more specific in my request, because my parents did buy me a computer, but one of those fake ones kids use to play around with english words and learn basic word processing. Just like this one. Thing is, I wanted a computer, but I had to get along with that. Assuming that we’re calling my first computer an actual computer, I reckon that thing had some sort of desktop with icons to switch back and forth between “programs” and choose which would have been the next step. Should I open the word processor or the dictionary? That’s what was bothering me back then. But even though that was nothing more than a toy, that computer initiated me to the concepts of desktops and apps, the basics or modern computing life.

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