Google follows 37Signals Lead, Gives IE6 the Finger

16 Months after 37Signals made their move to curb IE6, Google announced today that it would do the same, for much the same reasons.

Here's the email I received from Google explaining the move:

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team


Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Apps product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

With Google Apps continuing to gain market share in government, corporate, and small business, this should help significantly in the efforts to rid the web of the one browser that makes web developers and designers cry.

Good riddance IE6!

Horn-tooting

On the heels of my presentation at LFNW09 on Cloud-based web development, I was asked what my qualifications were to present on the topic.

Personally, I think education is the best teacher, but sometimes you need a piece of paper to prove your skills. So, in addition to my 14 years of web development experience, two and a half years working on Ruby on Rails, and two years on BungeeConnect, I do have some certificates to back it up.

I'm a BCDN Member, having completed Bungee Labs' BungeeConnect Core Curriculum in October 2008:

I graduated Sang Shin's Ruby/JRruby/Rails Programming with Passion course in January 2009:

LFNW09 - Developing in the Clouds

I gave a talk at LFNW '09; I started with the question "can you create a web application, development to deployment, all in the browser?" I already knew the answer; yes, because of my experience with Bungee Labs' BungeeConnect project, and Heroku's HerokuGarden project.

A variety of solutions exist for creating web content in your browser, but most of them are exceptionally limited, or niche products. These include Yahoo Pipes, Google's Gadget Editor, and AppPad. Unfortunately, none of them provide an complete, robust development environment, leaving... wait for it... BungeeConnect and HerokuGarden. :-)


What the heck is BungeeConnect?

Bungee Connect, from Bungee Labs, is Object-Oriented Programming for the web. No HTML/JS/CSS required. Familiarity design patterns, on the other hand, is. But don't worry too much about it - there's a complete learning curriculum ( videos, sample code, even tests!) to get you up to speed.

The best way I know to demonstrate a programming language, though, is to dig in. So, here's 19-minute video showing the complete process of developing and deploying an app, from 0 to a published app.



Download native resolution video as OGG/Theora or AVI/h.264 (download link at the bottom).


You have what kind of garden?

In a fit of asexual reproduction, Heroku recently split their solution in two: heroku.com is now a paid service for hosting Ruby on Rails in the cloud; herokugarden.com continues to provide the service of my primary interest - web based development of live-deployed Ruby on Rails application. This is straight-up Ruby on Rails, no monkey business. You need to either know or be learning RoR, or this system will be useless to you. Thankfully, RoR has a robust community, so tools, tutorials and samples are never far away.

Again, I think its better to show than to talk, so here's the video: building an RoR app on HerokuGarden, in 12 minutes!



Download native resolution video as OGG/Theora or AVI/h.264 (download link at the bottom).



Small Note: Please don't judge my coding abilities in either environment, as a result of the samples. I do produce solid, well documented, tested code on a regular basis. Just not in the under-20-minutes category ;-)

Thanks to Brad at BungeeLabs for some visuals that help explain the BungeeConnect environment, and everyone who attended my presentation at LFNW. See you next year!

BungeeConnect Basecamp API version 0.1.4 "Green Bar" - Release Candidate

I revved the BungeeConnect Basecamp API tonight, with the following improvements:

• Time Entries have complete test coverage. Thanks to Yamato Engine Specialists for allowing testing of the API with their account.
  
• Messages and Comments now have complete test coverage (and yes, the tests pass).
  
• Todo-Items now update all recommended fields; v0.1.2 only updated the text of the todo-item.
• Milestones update successfully; Milestone due-dates were incorrectly types as DateTime - they are now properly typed as Date.
• An issue with properly identifying responsible parties for milestones, and todo-items was resolved.
  

The following issues are still outstanding:

• There is currently no support for Attachments.
  

Prerequisites (unchanged):

• A BungeeConnect account.
• A Basecamp account. To use SSL and manage Time Entries, you need at least a Plus Account.

Just as a reminder, this code is released completely free to the BungeeConnect community; feel free to use and abuse it to your hearts content.

CampHappier Project

I'm also proud to announce that this code is also the first Release Candidate from the CampHappier Project: a group of code components arranged around the concept of making 37Signals' Basecamp Project Management app more feature rich via the API. Chime in on the Wiki or via GetSatisfaction.

Drop me a comment and let me know how you're using the code.

Google Mobile Apps Just Keep Getting Better

This morning the GMail team blogged about a new feature for the Google Mobile Apps - a map view of your contact list... nice.

Although this has been seen before (I'm sure there's an iPhone commercial of something similar), Google will make it significantly more useful by not limiting it to a single platform: the app has runs on Android, Blackberry, S60, Windows Mobile at launch, and (eventually) will support the iPhone.

This just makes me miss my Blackberry even more...

Official Gmail Blog: See where your friends are with Google Latitude