Web Dev Digest Episode 6 Intro ...INTRO MUSIC... Welcome to the Web Dev Digest, your daily web development news roundup. This is episode number six, for Wednesday, July fourth, 2007. I'm your host, Ara Pehlivanian. ...MUSIC INTERLUDE... Hello and welcome the show. Technorati loses one more Yesterday I reported on the departures of both Adam Hertz and Tantek Celik from Technorati. It seems there was a third departure that was left out of Dave Sifry's announcement. Product manager Liz Dunn has also left the company to become the director of product at Will Ferrell's comedy video website funny or die dot com. Apple releases official iPhone web dev documentation Apple has released official iPhone web development documentation. The docs are quote guidelines [that] will help you prepare web content and design a website or web-based application for [the] iPhone unquote. Among the topics covered by the docs are, "Understand[ing] User-iPhone interaction", "Use of standards and tried and true design practices", and "Knowing what Safari supports on [the] iPhone". The latter states that though PDF documents are supported, Java applets and Flash are not. It says quote You’ll want to avoid using Flash and Java for iPhone content. You’ll also want to avoid encouraging users to download the latest Flash on their iPhone, because neither Flash nor downloads are supported by Safari on iPhone unquote. BD4D and Wellcome Collection design compo BD4D in association with Wellcome Collection is introducing it's first annual interactive design competition. They're looking for highly creative, playful and engaging interactive submissions to be added to the Wellcome Collection. First prize is a dual core two gigahertz MacPro with an Apple twenty inch TFT monitor. Second prize is a 2 point one six gigahertz MacBook Pro. Five runners up will receive two gigabyte ipod nanos. Winners also will have their work showcased within the Wellcome Collection in Central London as well as on the BD4D site. Google Seattle Conference on Scalability New videos have been posted from the June 23rd Google Seattle Conference on Scalability. In "Lessons In Building Scalable Systems" Google staff Engineer and technical lead for the Google Talk servers Reza Behforooz discusses the integration of Google Talk with two large existing products: Gmail and Orkut. Behforooz discusses several practical lessons and key insights from their experience that can be used for any project. The lessons cover both engineering and operational areas. Special Comment And now for a special comment. It seems that in the buildup to the iPhone's release and ever since then, there have been a rash of quote unquote iPhone emulators being released. The purpose of which is of course for developers to be able to test their pages in them. The trouble is, these so called emulators amount to nothing more than a picture of an iPhone surrounding an iframe with the device's dimensions. What use is that to anyone who really wants to test the way their site will behave on a machine that doesn't treat mouse events the way any other browser does? If I wanted to test my site on Firefox or even Safari for that matter at three twenty by four eighty, I'd just as soon resize my browser than use an iframe. As a web developer, what I'm looking for is something akin to Opera's mobile browser emulator. A Java applet that's running the exact same code as what's on the iPhone. Anything else is just a waste of time. Outtro ... OUTTRO MUSIC FADE IN ... You've been listening to the Web Dev Digest, your daily web development news roundup. This was episode number six, for Wednesday, July fourth, 2007. I'm Ara Pehlivanian. Show notes with links to the news covered in this episode can be found on web dev digest dot net.