WordPress 3.1 Beta 1

It’s that time in the release cycle again, when all the features are basically done, and we’re just squashing bugs. To the brave of heart and giving of soul: Won’t you help us test the new version of WordPress? As always, this is software still in development and we don’t recommend that you run it on your normal live site — set up a test site just to play with the new version. If you break it (find a bug), report it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it. (Especially you U.S. types who are taking a long weekend for Thanksgiving! )

If all goes well, we hope to release WordPress 3.1 to the world at large by the end of the year, though that is (as always) subject to change/dependent on how the beta period goes. The more help we get with testing and fixing bugs, the sooner we will be able to release the final version.

If you want to be a beta tester, you should check out the Codex article on how to report bugs. Some of the new features to check out include:

• Post Formats (#14746)
• Theme Search (#14936)
• Internal Linking (#11420)
• Admin Bar (#14772)
• Ajaxified Admin (#14579)
• Updated Tiny MCE (#12574)
• Multi-taxonomy Queries (#12891)
• Custom Post Type Index Pages (#13818)
• Admin CSS Cleanup (#14770)
• User Admin (#14696)
• Network Admin (#14435)
• Password Reset Redux (#5919)

There are also some known issues: things that aren’t *quite* finished, but that weren’t worth holding up the beta release. They will be fixed before 3.1 is released for general use. Note that as things get fixed, the beta release will update nightly. What you should know:

• Fatal error: Call to a member function is_page() on a non-object in /wp-includes/query.php. is_page() may be any conditional tag. This issue occurs when a theme or plugin is doing something wrong. Some code is checking the value of a conditional tag before we actually set up the Query, which means they don’t work yet. In 3.0, they silently failed and always returned false. In 3.1 Beta 1, this is throwing a fatal error. This will be handled in the final release, so use this opportunity to fix your plugins. (#14729)
• All known issues slated for fixing before launch are listed in Trac. Please check this list to see if a bug is already on the list before reporting it.

Remember, if you find something you think is a bug, report it! You can bring it up in the alpha/beta forum, you can email it to the wp-testers list, or if you’ve confirmed that other people are experiencing the same bug, you can report it on the WordPress Core Trac. (I recommend starting in the forum or on the mailing list.)

Theme and plugin authors, if you haven’t been following the 3.1, please start now so that you can update your themes and plugins to be compatible with the newest version of WordPress.

Note to developers: WordPress is built by the contributions of hundreds of developers. If you’d like to see this release come out on time, I encourage you to pitch in. Even if you don’t have time to do testing on the beta version, you could help us by contributing a fix for one of the many bugs we already know about.

To those of you in the U.S., have a lovely long holiday weekend, and if you’re looking for something to occupy your post-turkey hours, we hope you’ll take the beta for a spin!

Download WordPress 3.1 Beta 1

100 Million Plugin Downloads and Counting

WordPress 3.0 Thelonious passed 3 million downloads yesterday, and today the plugin directory followed suit with a milestone of its own: 100 million downloads.

The WordPress community’s growth over the years has been tremendous, and we want to reinvest in it. So we’re taking the next two months to concentrate on improving WordPress.org. A major part of that will be improving the infrastructure of the plugins directory. More than 10,000 plugins are in the directory, every one of them GPL compatible and free as in both beer and speech. Here’s what we have in mind:

We want to provide developers the tools they need to build the best possible plugins. We’re going to provide better integration with the forums so you can support your users. We’ll make more statistics available to you so you can analyze your user base, and over time we hope to make it easier for you to manage, build, and release localized plugins.

We want to improve how the core software works with your plugin and the plugin directory. We’re going to focus on ensuring seamless upgrades by making the best possible determinations about compatibility, and offer continual improvements to the plugin installer. And we also want to give you a better developer tool set like SVN notifications and improvements to the bug tracker.

We’re also going to experiment with other great ideas to help the community help plugin authors. We want it to be easy for you to offer comments to plugin authors and the community, including user reviews and better feedback. We may experiment with an adoption process for abandoned plugins as a way to revitalize hidden gems in the directory. I’m not sure there is a better way to show how extendable WordPress is and how awesome this community is at the same time.

As Matt said in the 3.0 release announcement, our goal isn’t to make everything perfect all at once. But we think incremental improvements can provide us with a great base for 3.1 and beyond, and for the tens of millions of users, and hundreds of millions of plugin downloads to come.

How to Print With Any Printer From iPad, iPhone

Apple’s latest mobile operating system update introduces a much-demanded feature: wireless printing. Problem is, it will only officially print from printers labeled “AirPrint-compatible,” which you likely don’t own. However, if you want to print from just about any printer, there’s a mod for that.

AirPrint Hacktivator offers a solution for Macs to set up wireless printing with iOS 4.2 with any printer shared on your network. Here’s how to set it up, with instructions courtesy of the hack’s maker, Netputing.

You will need:

• Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.5
• iTunes 10.1 (if you have neither, select the Apple icon in the upper-left corner of your screen and click “Software Updates” to download the latest software.
• iOS 4.2.1 on an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad (click “Check for Updates” in iTunes if you don’t have the latest iOS.)
• AirPrint Hacktivator [.zip]

Instructions:

1. Copy the AirPrint Hacktivator software into your Applications folder, then launch the app.

2. Toggle the switch to “ON.”

3. Enter your admin password.

4. A window will prompt you to add the printer you want to use with AirPrint.

5. The hack will launch the Print & Fax utility in your Settings folder, and you’ll be able to perform the add-printer task here.

6. And you should be ready to start printing!

See the video below by Netputing for a visual tutorial.

New Flash Player 10.2 Goes Easy on the CPU

[Updated, see below] Adobe has released the first beta of Flash Player 10.2, an update that focuses primarily on speed and performance improvements. New in Flash 10.2 is something Adobe calls “Stage Video hardware acceleration,” which the company claims will “decrease processor usage and enable higher frame rates, reduced memory usage, and greater pixel fidelity and quality.” And the hardware acceleration technology does do all of these things, though your mileage will vary depending on what kind of hardware and software you’re using.

To try out the new Flash Player 10.2 beta, head over the Adobe download page. Be aware that, while 10.2 appears to be relatively stable, it is a beta release and there may be bugs.

The Stage Video hardware acceleration means that Flash Player 10.2 can leverage your graphics card for not just H.264 hardware decoding (which works in Flash Player 10.1) but also color conversion, scaling, and blitting.

Adobe’s press release makes a rather bold claim: “using Stage Video, we’ve seen laptops play smooth 1080p HD video with just over 0% CPU usage.”

Sadly, we have not seen such results. While we won’t argue with the smoothness of the playback in this new release, Flash is still going to use quite a bit of your PC’s CPU. Based on my testing (done on a Macbook Pro laptop using both Firefox 4b7 and Safari 5, and a Mac Pro tower using the same browsers — Wired is an all-Mac office), while CPU usage is down in Flash 10.2, it’s still a long way from zero.

Update: Since this article was published, we’ve been hearing from you, our awesome readers, in the comments and over e-mail. Some things to note: The new beta performs much better on Windows computers than it does under Mac OS X. Also, full hardware acceleration on Mac OS X requires Snow Leopard or later, otherwise it falls back to using software rendering in the CPU. Thanks for the comments, and keep them coming!

On our Macs, we tested several 1080p videos on YouTube in Flash Player 10.1 and found that on average the 10.1 plugin used between 44-48 percent CPU. Watching the same movie in Flash 10.2 did drop the CPU usage down to the 18-22 percent range, but definitely not zero.

Worse, running the same tests on Adobe’s Stage Video optimized demos, Flash 10.2 actually performed worse than than it did on normal 1080p movies with the cpu usage varying widely between 5 and 60 percent (the 18-20 percent range appears to be the norm).

The short story is that, while Flash 10.2 does offer decreased processor usage, it doesn’t quite live up to Adobe’s claims. While Flash Player 10.2’s performance falls short of the hype, there’s no question that it’s a huge leap forward in terms of performance. The smaller CPU footprint alone is well worth the upgrade, provided you don’t mind running beta software. So far Adobe has not set a final release data for Flash 10.2.

One other thing to keep in mind: to take advantage of the new Stage Video tools, sites like YouTube and Vimeo will need to alter their video players. So, it may be some time before the full benefit of Stage Video’s improvements makes it to your day-to-day web browsing.

As for other new features in this release, there’s Internet Explorer 9 GPU support and support for fullscreen mode with dual monitors — meaning that you can have a movie on one screen and keep working on another.

Custom cursors get some love in this release, too, with Flash Player 10.2 handing off the job to the operating system rather than using resources to manually draw custom cursors. The beta also improves text rendering, adding sub-pixel rendering enhancements that should make your typography look a bit nicer and more readable.

It’s worth noting that the Flash Player 10.2 beta does not replace the Flash Player “Square” preview release — in other words, Flash Player 10.2 still isn’t 64-bit native. If 64-bit support is important to you, stick with the Flash Player “Square” preview.

See Also:

• Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Arrives
• Adobe Revamps Flash Player for Netbooks, P2P, Private Browsing
• Adobe Fights Off HTML5 Threat With New Flash Player 10.1

LG to offer 10 free apps for WP7 handset buyers

Buyers of an LG Windows Phone 7 handset get to choose 10 free, third-party software apps they’ll be able to install on their new device.

Apple adds calendars back to iPhoto

When iLife ’11 software was introduced two weeks ago, calendars were strangely missing from iPhoto. Now they’re ready to go, Apple says.

Originally posted at Circuit Breaker

Mac App Store opens doors to developers

Those who want to sell their Mac software through Apple’s coming online distribution channel now can start building out its virtual inventory.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Microsoft Giving Up On Silverlight, Joining HTML5 Party

We now have further confirmation that Microsoft is giving up on its Silverlight rich Internet application platform. Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s president in charge of server and tools, told ZDNet that the company is “shifting away” from Silverlight as a cross-platform development framework, and pushing the HTML5 web standard instead.

There’s been plenty of evidence to suggest this was the case. After all, with the launch of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft has fully embraced and touted many of HTML5′s features. But it doesn’t just stop there; Microsoft will be leveraging HTML5 for the latest version of its Bing search engine, and is using H.264-encoded HTML5 video in lieu of Silverlight Smooth Streaming for delivery of live video on its Xbox 360 game console.

Microsoft will continue to develop and lean on Silverlight, especially for application development on its recently launched Windows Phone 7 operating system for mobile devices. However, Muglia told ZDNet, “HTML is the only true cross-platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform.”

That Microsoft would align itself with Apple, especially in the embrace of a web standard, might seem peculiar to some. After all, the two software makers have been battling for decades in the PC space, and now are bumping heads in mobile as Microsoft tries to offer up a compelling alternative to Apple’s iPhone.

But it also makes sense that Microsoft would begin de-emphasizing Silverlight as a cross-platform development platform. Despite some of the advances Microsoft was able to push with its development, including HTTP and adaptive bit rate streaming, it wasn’t able to dethrone Flash as the de facto rich Internet application and video platform on the web. And with the emergence of HTML5, it was no longer a matter of playing second fiddle to Adobe, but lagging behind a web standard that was also being rapidly adopted.

To see what Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch has to say about adoption of HTML5 and its positioning against Flash, come see him speak at NewTeeVee Live on November 10 in San Francisco.

Related content on GigaOM Pro:

• HTML5’s a Game-Changer for Web Apps
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Apple Has Already Won the Flash-HTML5 War

A majority of web video is now HTML5-ready, according to new research from MeFeedia, showing that web standards — and Apple — are winning the day when it comes to how video is delivered and viewed online. The research shows that the amount of video viewable in an HTML5 video player has doubled in the last five months and now accounts for 54 percent of all video content online.

It’s important to note that HTML5 video is not replacing Flash video on the web, but augmenting it; most HTML5 videos today are available through a universal embed code that auto-detects the device requesting the video and serves up the appropriate version. That means for most of these videos, there are at least two versions — one Flash and one HTML5  – stored online.

It’s not only HTML5-ready web browsers that are pushing the envelope; it’s a multitude of mobile devices, which have caused publishers to rethink the formats for delivering online videos. The biggest proponent in the move to HTML5 video has been Apple, which refused to support Adobe’s Flash on its iOS devices — including the iPhone and iPad — meaning that publishers that wanted to have videos on those devices would have to turn to standards-based, in-browser delivery.

The launch of the iPad, in particular, has been instrumental in leading this change. Despite the iPhone being HTML5-only for years, the amount of video available through the nascent web standard in January was just 10 percent. But owing to the iPad’s larger screen real estate and its propensity to be used as a video consumption device, many more publishers were forced to jump on board. At the time it was launched, just one-quarter of web video was available in an HTML5 video player. Now it’s up to more than half of all web videos.

The iPad has been the biggest driver of HTML5 video, but all mobile devices should benefit from the change. Despite the fact that newer Android-based devices come with Flash pre-installed, theoretically giving them access to all the web’s video, our own tests have shown that it’s not always a great experience. In fact, sometimes it’s shockingly bad.

While launching the video in a separate Flash player might help, Flash is still a processor hog and mobile devices don’t really have the gigahertz, nor the spare battery power, to keep Flash happy. HTML5, which delivers video natively (without extra software) is leaner. That’s bad news for Adobe, which has been banking on embedding the Flash player into mobile and connected TV devices. But if a native HTML5 implementation is available for most videos online, it might be smarter for those videos to be delivered in HTML5 than in Flash. Why waste cycles and power if a device doesn’t need to?

It seems that even Adobe has conceded this point, recently rolling out an HTML5 video player widget that serves up standards-based video to devices that don’t support Flash. The widget works by trying to serve up HTML5 video, but defaults to Flash when the standard isn’t supported. With mobile viewing growing in importance, that delivery scenario may be the future for most web video, which leaves Adobe Flash hanging on by its fingernails (or rather, a widget).

To learn more about Adobe’s plans for HTML5, come see CTO Kevin Lynch at this year’s NewTeeVee Live on Nov. 10 in San Francisco.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Cameron Russell.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: (subscription required)

• Mobile Operators’ Strategies for Connected Devices
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Boxee Offers HD Streaming Movies with VUDU

When it comes to streaming media, it looks like Boxee has the best of both worlds. That is, its hardware solution – the Boxee Box – makes it easy to bring streams like YouTube, Netflix or Pandora to your disconnected television. Now, its software solution will perform a similar feat with the addition of VUDU, a previously hardware-only provider of HD movie rentals.

In reality, both the hardware and software version will be bringing VUDU to your screen, whether TV or computer monitor. This morning, the two companies announced that VUDU would be coming to the Boxee platform in November.

Sponsor

VUDU was previously available on a number of devices, including Blu-ray players, HDTVs and home theater systems. Its inclusion in Boxee will be a win both for VUDU and for Boxee users, as VUDU finds a new distribution channel and Boxee users get a way to quickly stream HD, surround sound versions of newly-released movies. VUDU claims to have the largest HD library available, with more than 3000 HD titles available for $2 for two nights. In addition to coming to the Boxee software, VUDU will be integrated onto the soon-to-be released Boxee Box.

Avner Ronen, CEO and co-founder of Boxee, noted that “The fact that Boxee Box users will have access to the largest selection of HD content through Vudu in the highest quality available today really sets us apart from our set top box competitors.”

The movement to bring streaming, Internet video to the television is heating up with a number of providers, from Google TV to Roku to Apple TV and more, and any point of distinction could be a big one in this field. Newly-released movies (that you would only find on DVD and not on Netflix) could be a big attraction for some.

Discuss