Test Drive Your Type With Google Font Preview

Google launched a new web-based tool Wednesday that helps you configure, test and easily embed one of the company’s free fonts into your web pages. The Font Previewer lets you pick one of the open source fonts from Google’s Font Library, then tweak the size, spacing and decorations using simple sliders and buttons. Once you have [...]

Typekit Gets an API

Font startup Typekit introduced an API Thursday that lets web programmers generate kits from the Typekit library behind the scenes. The company has previously only offered the option of picking fonts and generating kits using the web-based tool on its site. But by releasing an API, it’s giving people the option of building Typekit into their [...]

W3C’s Unicorn Validator Checks Multiple Standards at Once

Want to find out how magically terrible your web code is? Just ask the Unicorn. The web's governing body has launched a new validation tool called Unicorn that checks the quality of your website's code against multiple web standards at once.

Apple Updates Safari, Turns on Extensions

Apple released an update to its Safari web browser Wednesday. Safari 5.0.1 is available from Apple as a free download for Windows and for Mac OS X (Leopard or better). This is an incremental upgrade, but it comes with one big new feature: Safari now has a real platform for third-party extensions, a feature that Firefox and Chrome have had for some time.

Second Beta Release of Firefox 4 Arrives

The second beta release of the next version of Firefox is now available. Download Firefox 4 Beta 2 from Mozilla and test it out. Windows, Mac OS X and Linux builds are available in multiple languages. We were originally expecting it to arrive last Friday, but the release was delayed a few days for quality [...]

Play Pac-Man in HTML5

Programmer Dale Harvey has created a playable version of Pac-Man using only web standards. To rebuild the same gameplay found in the arcade classic using browser-native code, he’s relying on local storage, HTML5 audio, Canvas and @font-face. Harvey is sharing all the code on Github as well, so you can run it locally. Reminiscent of Google’s recent [...]

Next Beta of Firefox 4 Delayed a Few Days

The second beta release of Firefox 4 won’t arrive until the middle of this week at the earliest, Mozilla says. We were expecting Firefox 4 beta 2 last Thursday or Friday. But the Mozilla Wiki page for the browser has been updated with this statement: “Hi! We’re glad you’re interested in Firefox 4 Beta 2 – [...]

Early Birds Will Dig Chrome Canary

People who like to run pre-release versions of browsers in order to access the latest features have a new choice: Google Chrome Canary. Canary has all the bleeding-edge features found in the developer and beta releases of Google Chrome. But unlike the other channel releases, Chrome Canary allows you to run the pre-release browser without overwriting [...]

Big Data in the Deep Freeze: John Jacobsen of IceCube

John Jacobsen works for the IceCube telescope project, the world's largest neutrino detector, located at the South Pole. The project's mission is to search for the radioactive sub-atomic particles that have been generated by violent astrophysical events: "exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars," according to the project website.

Jacobsen is one of the people in charge of handling all the Big Data collected by IceCube. In the video, shot this week at the O'Reilly OSCON 2010 conference in Portland, Oregon, John explains how they collect a terabyte of raw data per hour, then send everything to IceCube's remote research and backup facilities using a finicky satellite hook-up.

Antarctica is one of the least accomidating places on Earth to perform scientific research with computers. It's the driest place on the planet -- atmospheric humidity hovers around zero -- and bursts of static electricity can cause catastrophic harm to IceCube's data stores. The lack of humidity causes the server clusters' cooling systems to break down. And if something fails, a spare might take six months to arrive.

Firefox Offers a Taste of Tab Candy

Are you one of those hyper-multitaskers (aka insane weirdos) who keeps a bazillion browser tabs open at once? Here’s something for you, and for the tab-curious: Tab Candy, a new experimental feature in Firefox that groups tabs into topical clusters to improve your workflow. It’s made entirely with JavaScript and HTML. Firefox creative lead Aza Raskin offers [...]