Six Apart is shutting down its Vox blogging service . Users have until Sept. 30 to export their data to other services, including Six Apart’s TypePad blogging service. After that, Vox will be gone. If you’ve got a Vox blog, there are several export options — Six Apart has instructions for moving to TypePad , Posterous and WordPress . There’s also an option to move your photos and videos over to Flickr. Of course none... 

Google is celebrating the second birthday of its Chrome web browser with the release of a new, improved version. Chrome 6 arrives with an updated user interface, better syncing tools that include support for web form data and extensions, and — as should be expected with every new browser release these days — increased speed and numerous bug fixes. If you don’t want to wait for Chrome to automatically update, head over to the... 

With all the attention being paid to HTML5’s tag, few have clued in to what is perhaps the most useful magical pixie dust hidden inside the web’s next markup language: the new semantic tags . Rather than using tags to wrap your page sections, HTML5 offers much more sensible elements like , , , , , and . Of course, cool as the new tags are, they don’t cover every situation, which is why, as with HTML 4, you can extend HTML5’s... 

Word is out that Firefox 4, when it ships at the end of October or thereabouts, will probably not include support for older, non-Intel Macs. Mozilla’s director of Firefox Mike Beltzner hinted at the change on a Mozilla developer mailing list last week: “I am gathering data on the number of PPC users we have, but the likely…  Read More →

The good folks at Google have published a very cool multimedia showcase for what’s possible in HTML5. Using music by Arcade Fire (the 21st century hipster equivalent of ELO ), filmmaker Chris Milk has made an interactive video of sorts that spans multiple browser windows. Eliot Van Buskirk has a full write-up , including an interview with Milk, over on Wired’s Epicenter blog. “ The Wilderness Downtown ,” features HTML5... 

It’s been two years in the making, but Ruby on Rails 3.0 is finally here . You can grab the third generation of the popular web framework from the official website , or update via the command line with: gem install rails –version 3.0.0 Rails 3 is a major overhaul for the framework and merges the Rails and Merb frameworks to create a single lightweight code base for web applications …  Read More →

Google’s Chrome web browser will soon gain hardware-accelerated graphics — the latest trend for web browsers that has already shown up in early builds of Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4 . Hardware acceleration allows the browser to offload intensive tasks like image scaling, rendering complex text or displaying scripted animations to your PC’s graphics card. It has the benefit of freeing up the PC’s main processor and... 

The web is littered with design galleries showcasing beautiful websites, but most such galleries focus on the site as a whole — where do you turn if you just want some inspiration for a navigation menu or a really slick sign-up form?* We stumbled across Pattern Tap , which is a design gallery of sorts. But it breaks the showcased site down into specifics, like sites with awesome navigation menus, great looking web forms or really eye-catching... 

Every programmer wants to write better software, whether that means writing cleaner, faster code, sticking to best practices or documenting your work for long-term upkeep. But if your code doesn’t serve the needs of your users then it’s worthless, no matter how great it may be. So how do you make sure your beautiful code isn’t just an abstract work of art, but actually serves the end goal of making your users happy? Tom Preston-Werner,... 

HTML5’s canvas tag is a blank slate that allows you to manipulate all sorts things with JavaScript — everything from complex animations to interactive infographics to videos. For those that want to trick out their images — including background images set in CSS — developer Dave Shea has released PaintbrushJS , a lightweight image processing library that can apply various visual filters to images on your page. Behind the... 

Mozilla Labs has announced an update to its Jetpack extensions system that makes it easier for developers to write browser add-ons that more closely interact with a person’s computer desktop. The new Jetpack SDK is version 0.7. It is quickly reaching the level of maturity required for it to become a standard feature in Firefox. Jetpack is a new extensions framework for Mozilla’s browser designed to offer developers an easier, faster... 

The group that oversees patents on the H.264 video format has announced it will not charge royalties for H.264 videos that are freely broadcast on the internet. The MPEG Licensing Association (MPEG LA) holds patents on AVC/H.264, the most widely-used video format on the web. The group announced earlier this year that it would extend a moratorium on royalty fees for H.264 videos on the web from 2011 until the end of 2015. Thursday’s announcement... 

The new design for Microsoft’s next web browser is expected to be unveiled September 15th, but the company’s Russian press site may have inadvertently spilled the beans a bit early. A screenshot of what appears to be the new IE9 made a brief appearance on the site before being yanked down. It wasn’t taken offline fast enough to escape the press, though. Long-time Microsoft specialist Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet grabbed a screenshot... 

With the two most-popular web browsers ready to drop new versions within the next couple of months, you’re going to have to adjust a few twiddly bits on your website if you’re sniffing user agent strings . Internet Explorer 9 Microsoft’s new browser , due in September, has a new UA string. Details are on the IE blog , but here it is: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0) Firefox 4 Likewise, the new... 

If the latest flashy HTML5 experiments have you fired up to experiment with HTML5’s canvas element yourself, one seasoned developer has some advice for newcomers — particularly those coming from Flash backgrounds. Hakim El Hattab, whose experiments with HTML5 were featured in our round up here on Webmonkey earlier this week, has a short, instructional write up on the Canvas tag that includes some tricks to make your JavaScript experiments...