Who Will Win Browser War 2.0 ?

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Few days back I was in Bangalore for TechEd, and saw the demo of what IE9 could do and started wondering about who will win browser war this time, here is what I think.

Nobody.

We all know who won the first web browser war, but that was then and the real fight was between just two Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator and only one platform.

Now there are 5 major contenders,

  1. Chrome
  2. Firefox
  3. Internet Explorer
  4. Safari
  5. Opera

And two major platforms desktop and mobile.

Personally I am only excited about the fight between Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox, and to see how they push web forward.

So what will really happen?

Well, they are all going to end up following the same common standards for which HTML 5 is the blanket term. There will be some hiccups/incompatibilities before this happens, but it will happen.

To me this is the only outcome that makes the most economic sense, as they(Microsoft, Google, Apple) all move there native application to web they will want to make sure that the features they are going to use is available on all the browsers as part of standards.

While right now focus of war is on desktop browser in a year or two it will shift to mobile(phones and tablets) and this is when it will become even more interesting.

What do you think, do you really see a single winner in this war of web?

Written by Amit Singh

March 30th, 2011 at 1:10 pm

Vodafone Steals WebRupee’s Font Without Acknowledging It!

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Font from: http://www.vodafone.in/_layouts/1033/styles/css/rupee/rupee.ttf

Bitten by the MNP bug, I was checking out some GSM provider’s website and what they have to offer. While browsing Vodafone’s website it was really nice to see that they used the Rupee Symbol instead of writing “Rs”. Out of curiosity, I started checking how was the symbol displayed and found that the stylesheet looked like the one from WebRupee with few changes:
1) Licence Removed (We had Apache Version 2 license)
2) “WebRupee” changed to “rupee”
3) Links to font file on their server
4) Almost all css same(even the whitespaces) except for the places where they had added some small styling information.

I was still unsure whether the font was copied, so I downloaded the font file to check. And the above screenshot verified it.

So they not only stole the files but were devious enough to change the name. They should really learn from railtourismindia.com, blanketofrelief.org who has been using it without changing the name.

Not only them, rimweb.com has been using it from their own servers, but have left the Licences untouched.

Below are the screenshot of css file contents.

http://www.vodafone.in/_layouts/1033/styles/css/rupee/font.css

http://cdn.webrupee.com/font



Written by Aman Kumar Jain

January 20th, 2011 at 12:01 pm

Posted in general

Now Add Links Via Twitter

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Now we have one more way for you to add articles to your digest. We can now pick your links from your favourite tweets and add it to your digest.

You can specify your twitter handle on the right side in your dashboard.

twitter-handleWhen you add your twitter handle for the first time we will only import links from first 20 favourite tweets, and from then on, we will keep adding new links that you add to your favourite list.

Only thing you need to remember is that, for now we can only pick links, if your tweets are public.

This is just a start, a deep integration with twitter is coming, meanwhile do let us know your feedback so that we can keep improving it.

Written by Amit Singh

January 5th, 2011 at 6:32 am

Posted in magazinify

Tagged with ,

Magazinify API

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Updated on: Jan 4, 2011

Magazinify now allows third party application developers to add URLs to user’s account.

Basics:
We currently support basic HTTP calls, which means URL’s should be accessed along with their respective parameters and plain text response will be returned.  The status will also be reflected via HTTP status code.

Dictionary:
Username: The email address used by user for receiving emails.
Key: The API Key provided on user’s dashboard after logging in.
AppId: Id of your registered application. Application can be registered at http://magazinify.com/developer/register
AppSecret: Your application secret key.
Authentication API:
It is used to validate the user’s credential. This can be used if you want to check credentials without adding an URL. You do not need an registered application to access this api.
URL: http://magazinify.com/api/authenticate
Accessible via POST method.
Parameters:

  • username
  • key

Response status codes:

  • 200: OK
  • 400: Bad request. Missing username/key.
  • 401: Invalid username or key.
  • 500: Some error occurred while processing the request.

Adding URLs API:
It can be used to add URLs to the Magazinify account. Authentication API need NOT be called every time a URL has to be added. This API is only accessible to authenticated applications.
URL: http://magazinify.com/api/add
Accessible via POST method.
Parameters:

  • username
  • key
  • url
  • appid
  • appsecret

Response status codes:

  • 200: OK. Request processed, but the URL has already been added by the user previously. No new entry created.
  • 201: The URL has been successfully added to the user’s Magazinify account.
  • 400: Bad request. Missing username/key/url/appid/appsecret.
  • 401: User+Key Combination or AppId+AppSecret Combination error.
  • 403: Revoked access to application.
  • 500: Some error occurred while processing the request.

Cheers!
Keep Magazinifying 🙂

Written by Aman Kumar Jain

January 2nd, 2011 at 5:48 pm

Posted in magazinify

Quick Tip: Use Your Kindle With Magazinify

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Here is a quick tip, for owners of Kindle, on how to get the daily digest from Magazinify directly on your kindle.

First go to manange you kindle page and add ‘@magazinify.com’ in your safe email sender list, then simply login to Magazinify dashboard, change your email address to kindle email address, and next digest will be send directly to your kindle.

 

Magazinify  Dashboard

Written by Amit Singh

January 2nd, 2011 at 5:39 am

Posted in magazinify

Tagged with ,

Webrupee Team Merges With AmiWorks

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I am happy to announce that Meher and Aman, the guys  behind webrupee.com has joined AmiWorks as part of our core team, and they will be responsible for all the experiments that we do here.

Since joining they were working on Magazinify, an experiment where they tried to make it easy to read bookmarked articles later in a digestified format, which is now live.

Written by Amit Singh

December 22nd, 2010 at 2:30 pm

Posted in general

Magazinify: Your Personal Digest

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I want to introduce "Magazinify", the latest experiment at AmiWorks.

Magazinify is a bookmarking service that allows you add articles to a personalized daily digest, that is emailed to you everyday. You can  then go through the digest in your leisure.

We generally keep bookmarking articles to read later and forget them. So, now we can keep bookmarking the articles in the ‘to read’ list and  receive them in a digest that can be read like a magazine while travelling, waiting, or any other suitable time.

Cheers! Keep Magazinifying 🙂

Written by Aman Kumar Jain

December 22nd, 2010 at 2:03 pm

Introducing ‘amiCollaborate’- the collaboration tool for web developers

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During the life cycle of a web application lots of meta data is generated, by meta data i mean status updates, bug reports, task list, development credentials and many other small small stuff, which involves sending emails or going to another website to fill the details, and reports, now if you have multiple projects to work on then you have even more data to manage.

I am not sure about you guys, but I find it a big pain to write an status update email or open yet another tab to fetch a small piece of information stored there or search it in my inbox among 100’s of emails.

As we, web developers spend most of our time on web browsers, we thought why not create a browser add-on which will allow me to leave status update, report the bugs manage my task list etc.. while i am on that web page. We wanted to see the project related information in the context of the web page we are working on.

With this thought we quickly wrote a Firefox add-on as proof of concept, We felt encouraged by what we saw, so we are now working on a version which we will release for public consumption soon.

Here is a quick screencast to show you what we found exciting, I apologize for the poor audio quality.

Here is a screenshot of how it looks right now.

amicollaborate - collaboration tool for web developers

If you want to know when our collaboration tool is ready, keep an eye on amicollaborate.com.

Do you think it will be useful to you as well? let us know in comments below.

Written by Amit Singh

November 4th, 2010 at 10:15 am

AmiWorks Is Now In Alpha

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DSC08243

Today we turned 1 year old officially, though I like to say that we had an Alpha release of AmiWorks, and to those of you who know what AOE – ROR is, we are now in tools age.

When we founded last year, we had no clear direction as to what we wanted to do, other then experiments. As we progressed, we learned lot’s of things, we build few things, some things are in pipeline and now we know where we want to go.

We started with two person team, and now we are five person team, and expanding.

DSC08287

Some more pictures are on our Facebook page.

And experiments continue…

Written by Amit Singh

October 22nd, 2010 at 8:00 am

Posted in general

Tagged with ,

An Experiment By AmiWorks

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If you have visited PHPCamp or Track Live Tweets then you might be wondering why we call them “An Experiment”.

If you would have asked this question to me a month back, it would have been very difficult for me to explain the logic behind it, but a few days back I read the book by Dale Dauten “The Max Strategy” which explained the idea in just 3 words “Experiments Never Fail”.

And before you get the wrong idea that I think simply calling our products “˜Experiments” will ensure that they succeed, let me explain.

Experiments are meant to be a way to prove a theory or hypothesis, and if it does not show the desired outcome it only means that something is wrong in our theory or logic, which means we can either change our experiment or the theory. 🙂

In either case, experiments help us understand what works and what does not. This allows us to provide simple solutions and services that work seamlessly.

This is the philosophy on which we founded AmiWorks.

Written by Amit Singh

March 4th, 2010 at 2:15 pm

Posted in general