Augmented Reality (AR) brings digital information or media and interweaves it with our experience of the real world. In recent years Augmented Reality has become apparent in the consumer space in two major formats: head-mounted displays such as the Microsoft HoloLens and the Magic Leap along with more widely available experiences on mobile devices.

Automating browsers provide many benefits including faster execution of repetitive tasks, ability to parallelise workloads and improved test coverage for your website. Google recently announced Puppeteer, a new tool to assist with Chrome browser automation.

The short answer: Yes, if it changes its strategy to one that embraces and augments the open web ecosystem, rather than continuing down the path of trying to compete with or replace it. With the recent anti-Flash, pro-HTML5 buzz caused by the iPad and sites like YouTube offering HTML5-enabled video alternatives, I thought it would be useful to share my thoughts on the opportunities and struggles Adobe faces with the Flash platform.

Recently, a number of performance tests have been released that are based on the performance of the top 100 web sites such as SpriteMe savings, the IE8 100 top sites test results, or the JSMeter research. These are in direct contrast with tests such as ACID3 which attempt to test the future of the web rather than just what’s possible today.

It was recently reported that Google Dumps Gears for HTML5. If true, with the investment Google has made in HTML5, Chrome, Chrome OS, and Chrome Frame, this is not surprising, but it does leave a potential short-term gap for offline application development.

Google today announced Chrome Frame, a plug-in that selectively upgrades Internet Explorer without breaking existing sites. Think of it as working like Flash, but for open web technologies, replacing Internet Explorer’s entire rendering engine for sites that include a single meta tag indicating that they would prefer to use Chrome Frame rather than IE.

Recently, there’s been an increasing emphasis and enterprise-organized uprising focused on eliminating IE6 from the world as quickly as possible. For the unaware, supporting this outdated browser is expensive and limits our creative abilities when it comes to web development.

Dijit has a tremendous wealth of high quality and feature-rich form elements providing key functionality including validation, time calculation, spinner controls, calendars, and much more. Furthermore, Dijit gives you a set of themes to choose from: Tundra, Soria, Noir, and Nihilo.

With the proliferation of real web browsers on mobile devices (iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Nokia), an increasing number of browsers (Chrome) or browser-like platforms (AIR, Titanium, Jaxer), portal standards for widgets and gadgets (Caja, AdSafe, work by the OpenAjax Alliance, and much more), are the days numbered for a JavaScript toolkit that uses the same code base across all platforms without a compile step numbered? Consider the following: “We hear your words. Why another JavaScript framework?! When development of PhoneGap was under way we noticed slow load times for modern JavaScript frameworks (such as Prototype, MooTools, YUI, Ext and (yes) even jQuery.

Recently, using the Deft project, I created a multi-file uploader Flash component for DojoX. It uses a typical design pattern: embed a hidden SWF in the web page, and with the ExternalInterface, trigger the FileReference’s browse() method to open a system dialog.

Recently I was writing a “tips and tricks” blog post that was going to focus on the idea that it is better to use an object as a “string buffer”; the idea was that by passing this object around to various functions and pushing string fragments into it, you can get better performance from a JavaScript engine. My friend and colleague Alex Russell challenged me to show him hard data supporting this hypothesis—and the results were quite eye-opening! For this analysis, I used two sources for tests: the dojox.string.Builder Builder performance test, and a custom test implementing three versions of a common JavaScript task: a JSON Serializer.

Brad Neuberg, of the Gears team, took a stab at defining the “Open Web”. We at SitePen are very strongly in favor of the Open Web concept, because it’s the Open Web that has gotten us what we have today and will ultimately lead us to the best “web of the future”.

Recently Apple delivered Safari 3.1 with some very exciting features. While we still can’t use things like multiple background images and drop shadows across all browsers, we are getting to play with the future and I, for one, am loving it.

Today, I was eating lunch alone at a restaurant and reading some news via my iPhone’s EDGE connection. Suddenly, Surfin’ Safari – Blog Archive » Optimizing Page Loading in the Web Browser made even more sense.

It’s not very often that I get to work on some software that has the potential to appeal to developers, testers, designers, and the marketing team all at once. And of course when I do get to work on something like that, it usually means there is a significant amount of pressure to get it done and done quickly.

Over the past few years designing and developing I’ve come to rely on a number of tools. Most of these are obvious like Photoshop and Firebug, however I’ve come to realize that a few tools I use aren’t as well known.

While the media has beat us to the punch with countless “on AIR” puns (and the list of companies using the word air grows), we completed work to make the Dojo Toolkit compatible with Adobe AIR in time for its recent launch. It’s a platform for web app deployment that’s somewhat similar to a browser: web applications are deployed to the desktop using AIR, giving web applications some of the capabilities of desktop apps while retaining the ability to use web app development tools like the Dojo Toolkit.

In response to recent articles by Andy Clarke and David Baron, Alex recently said that the W3C cannot save us. The most significant point being made is that you cannot standardize the future, and you should not punish those who attempt to push the envelope through experimentation and invention.

Google released the first preview of Android today. It is chock full of features and a great emulator, but there was one interesting omission.

I can only imagine what kind of a political nightmare it must have been for the IE team to pull this off, but they deserve praise for finally liberating their browser from the clutches WGA (whose “advantage” has always been unclear). When it became clear that IE 7 was going to be tied to WGA in an early beta, it left a lot of angry developers scratching their heads.