There’s an exhaustive new security report out from IBM Internet Security Systems: the X-Force 2008 Mid-Year Trend Statistics report. We’ve analyzed it over on the OStatic blog from the perspective of several open source platforms arriving on the “most vulnerability disclosures” list for the first time, and web workers will find quite a few points of interest in the report too.
The X-Force report tracks trends in malware, phishing, most vulnerable software vendors, and even vulnerable development languages. One of the big themes to jump out of this year’s report is that common platforms for creating content on the web, as well as web sites themselves, pose increasing security threats.
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Web working web developers know about Firebug - the wonderful HTML/CSS/Javascript investigation and debugging addon for Firefox. But this hasn’t been any help for chasing problems in other browsers, which often have quite inferior facilities for figuring out what’s going on - until now. The release of Firebug Lite offers new hope to those trying to chase rendering and script issues in IE, Safari, and even Opera (though Opera users already have the native Dragonfly to use).
Firebug Lite is a JavaScript file that runs in the context of the page where it’s loaded, simulating some of the most important Firebug features. You can either insert it into the page source or call it from a handy bookmarklet. Supported features include the Firebug console interface, XmlHttpRequest tracking, and the Firebug command line. Worth bookmarking if cross-browser compatibility is on your job duties.
Monitoring the Internet for people discussing your product or brand can be invaluable to help understand how the public views you. Tools like Google Alerts or Filtrbox can handle news, blogs and web pages while Summize keeps tabs on Twitter. For forums and message boards there is Twing.
The last time we looked at Twing, Mike found the forum friendly search engine to be a useful tool in the search arsenal, particularly for finding help from others who may be experiencing similar issues. A recent Twing update now adds functionality to make this process even easier for those looking to monitor forum discussions for their brands or products.
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NEAT Receipts has been selling their pint-sized scanners and associated software for about five years now. Recently they put out an “advanced release” of their Mac software - the “advanced” part because it doesn’t yet have all the features of their established PC software. But it has plenty of useful features, and I took a review unit for a spin to see how well they worked. The scanner, along with the associated software, retails for $179.95 directly from the company; you may be able to beat that price slightly through a retailer.
The actual scanner is indeed small enough to tuck into a large pocket, though you’ll probably want to put it in a bag with your laptop instead: about 11″ x 2″ x 1″. The software install was simple and (apart from requiring a reboot) painless. After that, the scanner connects to your Mac via a single USB cable. Put in a piece of paper, press the “scan” button, and your document is scanned, OCR’d, and put into the dedicated database that the software creates. There’s also a “PDF” button the creates an external PDF copy of whatever you’re scanning.
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If you build software or web applications, sooner or later you need to ask what actual users think of your software. Silverback is a new OS X package designed to make this process simple and easy. Set it up on a Mac with a cam (the built-in iSight on a MacBook works fine), and launch a new session. The software sits quietly in the background, recording video, audio, and the contents of the screen. When you’re done, it exports everything to one integrated QuickTime movie, complete with highlights showing mouse clicks. This lets you see what the user did with the software, as well as how they looked and what they said.
To get useful results, you’ll still need to have some idea of how to conduct a usability test - there are pitfalls for those who don’t have a good idea of how to get unbiased results from test subjects. But Silverback does make it much, much easier to record and share test results. It’s free to try for 30 days, and then $49.95 to register.
Recently, over on the OStatic blog, I covered Sleipnir, which is a popular browser in Japan, but few people outside of that country use it. It has one primary claim to fame–an unusual one–which is that it allows you to switch between the Gecko rendering engine using by the Mozilla Firefox browser and Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. This means that if you run into a rendering problem in Firefox, for example, you can take another look using IE’s rendering engine (this is for Windows users).
The folks on Download Squad originally alerted me to Sleipnir here, and they also make the interesting point that you can use both rendering engines with a useful Firefox extension: I ETab. I’ve been using I ETab, and web workers–especially designers–may find it very useful.
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We mentioned Posterous on their launch about a month ago. At the time, they were an interesting email-to-blog platform - but they only supported creating their own custom blogs. But with some changes just announced, they’re suddenly a much more interesting platform: you can now use Posterous as an email conduit to a number of other sites.
Specifically, Posterous lets you set up passthrough posting to your Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, Livejournal, or Xanga accounts. It’s still the same workflow: send an email, get the content hosted, it shows up - but now you can vary the email to post to any of your registered sites, or to all of them at once. If you find yourself firing up a blog editor just to pass on a photo or a snippet of info, a Posterous account could help streamline your workflow considerably.
Analogies are tricky things, but one recently proposed by Ernie the Attorney should ring true for many web workers: he writes about living his life in ATM mode. To see what this means in context, and how it fits into the web worker lifestyle, let’s step back a few years.
Like many others, five years ago I treated the internet as a huge library (with, thanks to Google and the other search engines, a rudimentary card catalog). When I wanted to know something, I could turn to the web, rather than running out to the library. But frankly, I didn’t trust the web to always be there (in my case, in part, because I was living in a part of the country with a rickety telecommunications infrastructure). Read the rest of this entry »
