May 4th, 2008
Poll: No Microhoo for you: Good or bad?
Over the weekend, Microsoft announced that it was ending its bid to buy Yahoo!. The proposed deal, and its ultimate demise, was the subject of speculation for weeks. Now that it’s over, what do you think about the outcome? Are you happy with the decision for the two companies not to combine? Feel free to elaborate on your vote in the comments.
Loading …May 1st, 2008
Adobe opens up Flash, but leaves out Google and Apple
In a well timed move today Adobe announced the Open Screen Project and lifted restrictions on the use of Flash related specifications. The initiative is supported by several industry leaders including ARM, Intel, LG, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, and Verizon. Notably absent from the list were Google and Apple, creators of the Android and iPhone platforms respectively.
While Flash players have always been free of charge and some Flash tools are open source, until now Adobe has kept tight reins on the format that the player consumes. “Previously, in order to look at the SWF specification you had to sign a licensing agreement not to use it to create competing players,” writes Adobe’s Ryan Stewart, “but in the interest of expanding the reach of the Flash Player we’re removing all of those restrictions.”
Adobe is also publishing the device porting layer APIs for their Flash player, and removing all licensing fees. With this change, any handset manufacturer (*cough* Apple *cough*) who wants Flash to run on their device can do so without paying Adobe a dime. That’s assuming, of course, a version of Flash player has been compiled for the specific processor used by the device. With ARM and Intel on board, the two major mobile architectures are covered.
The reason I say the announcement was well timed is that it came two days after comments from Mozilla warning developers not to rely on proprietary technology like Flash, and a week before the opening of Sun’s JavaOne conference in San Francisco. Java powers many of today’s mobile programs, and Java and Linux form the foundation for Google’s upcoming Android platform.
“You’re producing content for your users and there’s someone in the middle deciding whether users should see your content,” said Mozilla Europe founder Tristan Nitot at a conference Tuesday. “If Adobe or Microsoft decides to compete with you and you’re using their technology, you cannot compete.” Nitot says that HTML5-compliant browsers from a variety of vendors will provide much of what people use Flash for today such as audio and video. This is true, though people use Flash for much more than that. Increasingly, it’s being used for entire rich internet applications.
The source code for the Flash player is still closed source and proprietary, but removing restrictions on licensing and even looking at the format specifications goes a long, long way towards alleviating fears of vendor lock-in. This will give a boost to open source players like Gnash and swfdec. While it’s unlikely that the open source players will ever catch up to the performance and features in the official Adobe player, it’s nice to have the option to get the technology from multiple places in case something happens to Adobe such as, say, getting acquired by Microsoft.
April 28th, 2008
Hardy Heron is hardly a snap
When I received my super-cool Android PC from Eric Burke he thoughtfully installed a copy of Ubuntu 7.10 for me, so naturally when the new Ubuntu 8.04 (”Hardy Heron”) was released I wanted to upgrade it to the latest and greatest version. “Installation is a snap,” writes Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. Ubuntu is user-friendly and ready for the mass market, so this should be easy, right?
Just to be sure, I asked a friend for advice on the best way to do it. “Wipe your disk and re-install from an ISO image,” he said. “If you have anything on the machine, make a backup first.” Eh? That seemed extreme to me. Since I have such a deep respect for my friend’s opinions, I proceeded to ignore his advice. That was my first mistake. Read the rest of this entry »
April 20th, 2008
1,788 entries compete for $5mil Android prize money
Submissions for the $10million Android Developers Challenge have closed, and Google has announced that when the dust settled there were 1,788 entries from over 70 countries. Azhar Hashem writes:
When we announced the Android Developer Challenge back in January, developers started submitting entries right away but it wasn’t until the April 14 deadline approached that the flood really began. The rate of submissions spiked in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, reaching as high as 170+ submissions per hour.
Entries included games, social-networking applications, utilities, productivity, and developer tools. Now, over 100 judges, mostly from OHA member companies, will vote on the winners. 50 semi-finalists will be announced in May. The semi-finalists will receive $25k each and move on to the round 2. 10 of those will win $100k, and 10 will win $275k.
50 prizes of $25k each equals $1.25mil. 10*$100k = $1mil, and 10*$275k = $2.75mil. That’s a total of $5mil, so what happened to the other $5mil? It turns out there will be completely separate challenge launched after the first Android handsets become available. The submission deadline for “Challenge II” has not yet been announced, but it will likely be about this time next year. If you missed your chance to enter the first challenge, don’t despair because you can try for the next one.
April 9th, 2008
52+5 reasons to go to Google I/O
On May 28th and 29th, Googlers from all over the world will converge on Moscone West for Google I/O, the company’s largest ever developers conference. At last count, Google is sending 52 employees to speak at the San Francisco event, plus 5 more experts from outside the company. I’ll be there to absorb as much as I can and (of course) to blog about what I learn.
Here are just a few of the folks who are scheduled to appear:
Dan Bornstein
Dan Bornstein is the tech lead at Google for Android’s virtual machine and core library efforts, where he developed the specification for the Dalvik virtual machine. He continues to contribute to its implementation along with several coworkers. He studied computational linguistics as an undergrad, earning a B.S. in Cognitive Science from Brown University. Dan lives in San Francisco, where he particularly enjoys participating in the experimental electronic music scene.Jeff Dean
Jeff joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Fellow in Google’s Systems Infrastructure Group. While at Google he has worked on Google’s crawling, indexing, query serving, and advertising systems, implemented a number of search quality improvements, designed and built various pieces of Google’s distributed computing infrastructure such as MapReduce and BigTable, and worked on a variety of internal and external developer tools.Ben Galbraith
Ben Galbraith is a frequent technical speaker, occasional consultant, and author of several Java-related books. He is a co-founder of AJAXian.com, an experienced Chief Technical Officer and Enterprise Java Architect, and is presently a consultant specializing in enterprise architecture and Swing/AJAX development. Ben wrote his first computer program when he was six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce just after turning twelve. For the past few years, he’s been professionally coding in Java. In 2005, Ben delivered over a hundred technical presentations at venues including JavaOne, JavaPolis, and the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposiums.Bruce Johnson
Bruce Johnson is an engineering manager at Google, and the co-creator and tech lead of Google Web Toolkit (GWT). He joined Google in 2005, founding Google’s engineering office in Atlanta, Georgia. Prior to Google, Bruce was the Director of Engineering at AppForge, an Atlanta startup specializing in cross-platform mobile development tools. Despite his recent Java focus, Bruce will always be a Bjarne Stroustrup devotee, and he keeps a copy of D&E in his night-stand.Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major programming languages on and off the web. The Python community refers to him as the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), a title straight from a Monty Python skit. He moved from the Netherlands to the USA in 1995, where he met his wife. Until July 2003 they lived in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC with their son Orlijn, who was born in 2001. They then moved to Silicon Valley where Guido now works for Google (spending 50% of his time on Python!).Steve Souders
Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book High Performance Web Sites explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug. Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network.
Google I/O will feature over 70 sessions on Ajax and JavaScript, App Engine, Web APIs, OpenSocial, Mobile development, and more. They’re holding 8 talks on Android alone! In addition to the regular sessions there will be tech talks, informal fireside chats, and code labs.
Attendees will even be able to host their own “lightning talks” using an unconference format. On day one anyone can submit topics for inclusion, which are voted on by attendees. The ones with the most votes will get a 20-minute slot on day two.
I already have my ticket, how about you? Hope to see you there.
April 3rd, 2008
Firefox 3 beta 5: How many connections is too many?
I woke up this morning to an auto-update message from Firefox saying that beta 5 was available. Aside from some polish and a few bug fixes, beta 5 does have one big change over the last version: by default it will now keep three times as many connections to the server open at once. This change is somewhat controversial so let’s look at it in a bit more depth.
When you open a web page that has many different objects on it, like images, Javascript files, frames, data feeds, and so forth, the browser tries to download several of them at once to get better performance. The effect is dramatic for the user, but hard on web servers.
Most HTTP servers and browsers use a protocol called “keep-alive” that doesn’t close the connection when the client is done with it. This makes sense; opening a remote connection is expensive so it’s much faster to open one and download 20 small items than to open and close a connection 20 times. Unfortunately the server can’t tell exactly when the client is done, so all these connections are kept alive and consume resources on the server for some time.
April 1st, 2008
Google’s blast from the past
Google has launched a new feature called “Custom Time” that lets you manipulate the headers on your email so it appears to have been sent in the past. The email will show up in the proper chronological order in your recipients inbox, and you can even have it marked as if they had already read it. One beta tester writes:
I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the ‘first’ to respond to a co-worker’s ‘first-come, first-serve’ email. Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again.
Other possible uses include generating evidence for “Judge Judy”, and sending un-belated birthday greetings.
In other news, Google and Virgin announced a new project called “Virgle” to build a permanent human settlement on Mars. Read the rest of this entry »
March 27th, 2008
Mozilla blasts Acid3 as Safari and Opera grab the brass ring
Ask Mozilla co-founder Mike Shaver what he thinks about Ian Hixie’s Acid3 test and he’ll give you an ear full. On his blog today Shaver defended the Mozilla Firefox team as they watched both Opera and Safari/WebKit apparently achieve a 100% pass rate Wednesday.
Ian’s Acid 3, unlike its predecessors, is not about establishing a baseline of useful web capabilities. It’s quite explicitly about making browser developers jump — Ian specifically sought out tests that were broken in WebKit, Opera, and Gecko, perhaps out of a twisted attempt at fairness.
A review of Hixie’s criteria, however, shows that tests were required to not crash current browser versions and be justifiable using only web standards.
Shaver also takes issue with Acid3’s use of only older well-established standards. “I think that such a test,” he writes, “should be built on more long-term criteria than lining up the starting blocks for a developer sprint.” Acid3 doesn’t test the areas that are hard to work around, says Shaver. “If Hixie could stomach digging around in the SVG specification I wish he’d spent his time on things like filters or even colour profiles.”
Mozilla developer Rob Sayre concurred, calling Acid3 “worthless” and WebKit’s efforts to pass “shameful”:
I was looking over the spreadsheet covering Mozilla’s Acid3 failures, and it struck me that very few of the fixes would substantially improve the Web or the browser. They are bugs and they will be fixed (except maybe SMIL… wtf?), but they don’t impact authors or users at all. Looks mostly like an opportunity for grandstanding about “commitment to standards.” I think testing createNodeIterator while text nodes don’t interoperate is both misguided and hypocritical. Besides, commitment to standards is strong at Mozilla, where we don’t constantly seek to rubber stamp our own implementation.
Acid3 could have had a positive effect on the web, says Shaver, but instead it has turned into a game. Microsoft and Adobe must be “chuckling about the hundreds of developer-hours” that have gone into fixing special cases no one cares about, he says. “It could have been a lot more.”
Ed’s analysis
It’s unfortunate that Mozilla is has adopted such a sour-grapes position on Acid3. One wonders how the message would have been different had Firefox been the first to pass. I’m reminded of Microsoft’s comments on Acid2. Remember back in 2006 when Microsoft’s All Billings wrote:
We’ve written about the Acid2 test before. It is not a compliance test but is, instead, a wish list. We’ve been clear that we were not going to pass this test since we were first asked about this. The author of the test is well aware of this.
And yet in 2007 they were all too proud in announcing that IE8 had passed Acid2. Calling it “a milestone”, Dean Hachamovitch gushed:
I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode. While supporting the features tested in Acid2 is important for many reasons, it is just one of several milestones for the interoperability, standards compliance, and backwards compatibility that we’re committed to for this release.
Presumably, we’ll be treated to a similarly “delighted” announcement from Mozilla when Firefox gets around to passing Acid3.
March 26th, 2008
Opera aces Acid3 (updated)
The Opera browser today became the first browser to pass the Acid3 test. On the Opera desktop team blog, Lars Erik Bolstad writes:
I have a quick update on where we are with Acid3. Since the test was officially announced recently, our Core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support. Today we reached a 100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those sorted out shortly.
Bolstad continues:
We will release a technical preview version on labs.opera.com within the next week or so. For now, the screenshot above shows the Acid3 test as rendered in our latest WinGogi Desktop build. WinGogi is the Windows version of our reference builds used for the internal testing of Opera’s platform independent Core.
So there you have it. 23 days after the test was released, Opera is the first to cross the finish line, at least in an internal build. The rest of us will have to wait a few days before we can verify the results, but this is exciting. Now it’s a race between Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Microsoft IE to see who will come in second. Place yer bets…
Update: That didn’t take long. At almost the same time as the Opera announcement, the Safari Webkit team announced that they had also passed the test. Unlike Opera, the version that passed is available for immediate download.
March 25th, 2008
Microsoft, Apple, and the death of the desktop
In his article titled “Dear desktop, welcome back“, Ryan Stewart claims that “the desktop is exciting again in a number of interesting ways.” Unfortunately (for Microsoft, Apple, and others with a vested interest in the desktop), most of his points actually lead me to the opposite conclusion. For example, Ryan writes:
This dustup between Safari and Mozilla? It’s over a desktop application! Why? Because the desktop is important. It’s the most valuable place. From there you can control the search path, you can control the experience and you can keep rolling out updates. It’s easy to leave a webpage and never come back. But uninstalling a desktop application? A browser? That’s harder.
Installing and uninstalling and maintaining anything on the desktop (be it Windows or Mac or Linux) is hard, and more and more people won’t bother. Why? Because there’s a better alternative. Another way of saying this is, the browser is the new desktop.
Case in point: My wife has been complaining lately that her “computer was slow”. She’s running Windows XP on a Dell machine, so first I checked out the usual suspects. Viruses? Nope. Spyware? None found. Crapware? Already gone, from the day after we got the machine. Startup programs?The browser is the new desktop. Removed a few but it didn’t help. I started the task manager, but saw nothing suspicious. No processes using CPU or disk I/O. But still, she said it was slow.
So I watched what she was doing. She brought up the browser to check web-based mail on gmail.com. She used google.com to search for something for our kid’s classwork. She went to cartoonnetwork.com and webkins.com to play games with the kids. And so forth. Notice a pattern here? Everything was in the browser. It was the *browser* that was slow, not the computer. In her mind, the browser was the computer.
The problem turned out to be too many plug-ins in the browser. She had a Upromise plug-in, a Google toolbar plug-in, a Real media plug-in, and a bunch of other plug-ins I didn’t even recognize. I turned it all off, restarted the browser, and poof, “the computer” was several times faster. Cue fanfare.
My point is that even with the technical limitations under the covers–things like browser incompatibilities, offline storage, JavaScript memory leaks, etc. (all those things that developers pull their hair out about)–the convenience of internet-delivered applications is just so compelling that all other issues are falling by the wayside. In the span of a few years, we’ve witnessed a major paradigm shift in the way computing is surfaced to users.
Sure, there will always be some niche applications that need an old-fashioned desktop. Right now, those include 3D interactive games, graphic design tools, software development tools, and some office productivity tools. As web technology gets more and more powerful, though, expect those to slip more and more into obscurity as internetworked alternatives replace them.
We’ve already passed the tipping point, Ryan. We’re not welcoming the desktop back; we’re saying our goodbyes.
Ed Burnette has programmed everything from device drivers and compilers to video games and multi-user servers. He is currently writing enterprise software in a variety of languages including C, Ruby, Python, and Java. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here.
Recent Entries
- Poll: No Microhoo for you: Good or bad?
- Adobe opens up Flash, but leaves out Google and Apple
- Hardy Heron is hardly a snap
- 1,788 entries compete for $5mil Android prize money
- 52+5 reasons to go to Google I/O
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