(Photo: Onswipe)

Hey you, what are you doing next weekend? Would you like to flex your HTML 5 and Javascript skills with the potential to win some sweet prizes? If the answer is yes, Onswipe has a hackathon for you! If the answer is no, what's your problem anyway?

On October 19th, Onswipe is holding its first ever 48-hour hackathon at the company's Union Square-based HQ. The startup assures us, in bolded font, that there will be beer. The theme of the hackathon is HTML5--unsurprising given Onswipe's own underlying code infrastructure.

According to a post soon to be published on the Onswipe blog:

We know that [HTML5] covers a broad range of web apps, libraries, and general hackeries. That's the point! We're looking forward to creating cool HTML5 stuff with you, whatever it is you can think of.

Keep in mind you'll have Onswipe's arsenal of 30+ touch devices available for you to develop on, if you want. We have everything from iPads, to Galaxies, to Kindle Fires. In general you'll have the whole Onswipe office at your disposal, plus a bunch of Onswipe's best hackers.

The hackathon is a leadup to Empire.js, an event that will feature speakers and projects from New York's Javascript community. Hackathon winners will have the chance to win tickets to Empire.js, as well as some sweet iPads. You might even get to meet Onswipe's adorable office dog, Johnny.

"We've wanted to do a hackathon for a while and figured now was the right time to do it," Onswipe CEO Jason Baptiste told Betabeat. "Apps are clearly still bullshit and we think an HTML5 hackathon is a great way to get passionate engineers to build some awesome things for the web. Onswipe was originally started as a weekend hackathon-like project and maybe the next Onswipe will come out of this hackathon."

Interested participants can register here.

Betabeat gets fontBombed.

It's pretty rare that a "Show HN" post actually makes it to the top of the front page of Hacker News, as a lot of them are just half-baked startup ideas. Not so with fontBomb, a delightfully fun plugin that lets you blow up the text on your favorite (or least favorite) websites.

fontBomb is an HTML 5 plugin by Canadian programmer Philippe-Antoine Lehoux. As one commenter put it, "So awesome. Spent 10 min blowing the hell out of hn. Now instead of raging against trolls I can simply blow them up."

The video is worth watching, too: the bombs blow up on Hacker News, the Apple page and The New York Times in time with "Waltz of the Flowers" from The Nutcracker.

The Financial Times released a HTML5-based web app that works exactly like something users would purchase in the iTunes store. It's the first move by a major publisher to sidestep Apple completely while continuing to offer their product on iPhone and iPad in the app format users have come to expect.

"The App Store is a phenomenon, but it's one that comes at a price," said Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com. "We don't feel its worth our while and so we're walking away from it for right now."

At their annual developer's conference yesterday, Apple unveiled Newstand, which makes all compliant papers and magazines available for download in a single place with a single click, much the same way iBooks now operates.The deadline for publishers to start paying Apple is later this month and some big names like the New York Times have already agreed to the tithe.

"A lot of this is more in the minds of publishers than consumers," said Grimshaw. "We've already got more than 200,000 digital subscribers."

With a solid user base established, the FT wanted to reach the broadest swath of mobile devices. "We want to be on every platform without having to pay to develop a different app. We want our site to appear in search and to be able to link to stories in an email campaign," said Grimshaw. "It's about far more than Apple, it's about the future of the web."

Aviary rolled out the Beta of its new site today in an effort to become more of a portal for users that aren't experienced with online editing tools.

It's in keeping with Feather, the light weight HTML5 editor that Aviary introduced a few months back. The photo editor is now right at the top of the homepage, meaning a new visitor is prompted to jump right into creating something. I gave Spark Capital's Mo Koyfman a new look in under 20 seconds.

The bigger story is the API, which CEO Avi Muchnik teases in the blog post:

"The next step in our goal of powering the world's creativity, is to fully open up the powerful bulk Effects API that helps run Feather's filters behind the scenes. This API will enable web and mobile apps to batch process photos and improve them in three major areas without any needed user interaction:

* Auto-correction (i.e. remove red-eye, fix lighting, fix blurriness, contrast and color levels)
* Apply stylistic filters (i.e. retro, polaroid-like, frames, comic book, etc..)
* Utility operations (i.e. smart-crop a photo to a person's face, rotate a photo, make thumbnails, etc...)

If Aviary can find some big commercial partners, like social networks or mobile photo apps, that are dealing with loads of user generated content, their tools would suddenly have a lot more visibility. Keep an eye out for some big announcements when that API is ready to go public.

Source: http://blog.bit.ly

Bit.ly has finally launched a mobile version of its basic URL shortener last week. Other than the slight inconvenience of navigating to a website rather than opening an app, the process of shortening a link is painless--which should be refreshing for anyone who's ever tried to clunkily use the full site from a mobile browser. It's actually superior to using the site with a mouse and a desktop browser, we'd argue; The Next Web called it "app-like!"

Bit.ly's built in some thoughtful features, like offline caching and thumbnail previews, that will make mobile users' lives easier. There were seven billion clicks on Bit.ly links last month alone, according to TechCrunch, and the new mobile site will funnel even more Bit.lys into the social media ecosystem.