December 9th, 2008

Native Client: Google's (other) plugin play

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:10 am

Categories: Google, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Google Inc., Alchemy, C, Web Browser, Plug-in, C/C++, Web Browsers, Programming Languages, Software Development, Software/Web Development

Yesterday Google announced an early developer release of Native Client, a plugin for web browsers that lets you essentially run native code like C or C++ in the browser. In theory it could be extended to other languages. The main goal is to provide native-like performance and to let C/C++ developers start creating web applications. They’ve got a couple of cool examples, including Quake running in the browser, on the developer site.

Adobe announced Alchemy at MAX, which is a similar project for the Flash Player. Like Alchemy, Native Client uses GCC-based tools to compile C or C++ into bytecode native x86 code for the specific runtime. Alchemy uses Flash and Native Client has it’s own, I assume C-based implementation. Both of these are early projects but it’s the start of a trend and an example of the ever-expanding sphere of web applications. It’s also very interesting to see this come out of Google, a company that has been doing a lot to expand the functionality of the web browser. They’ve got Gears for offline/desktop functionality, Native Client for performance, Earth for mapping, and of course Chrome for an actual browser.

Keep an eye on this project. I see the Flash Player or Silverlight has having 3 core parts: the runtime, the rendering engine, and the video codecs. Put those three things together and you’ve got an RIA plugin. Google has a bunch of disparate projects and none that do all of these, but they have a bunch of the pieces and a ton of engineering talent. It’s also telling that Google is starting to be more and more obvious that the web browser/technologies as it exists today just aren’t cutting it. That means we’ll see more energy for projects like Native Code and Gears.

November 13th, 2008

Google's video chat plugin - a big deal for RIA developers

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:36 am

Categories: Google, Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media

Tags: Video Chat, Developer, Google Inc., Rich Internet Application, Video, Plug-in, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

A couple of days ago Google released a video chat plugin for Gmail. With Google, it’s always a little hard to figure out where all of the pieces fit - that’s why there are entire blogs dedicated to the company - but in this case, I think this seemingly innocuous Gmail feature hints at something bigger.

As I mentioned on RIA Weekly, I think there are a couple of core components to RIAs. One is a much improved graphical user interface and layout mechanism. This is part of the appeal behind technologies like Flex and XAML - they’ve got a robust set of components and it’s very easy to get pixel perfect layout. They also support vector graphics, another benefit of that increased rendering capability. The other is video and multimedia. Canvas kind of enables the first case on the HTML side, something Google could get behind. But video is tougher. Now Google has that piece. And as Dion notes, it’s not like they don’t have a way to deploy this in a wider, developer-friendly way.

The technology behind it seems a little ambiguous. They’re supposedly using some technology from Vidyo and they rely on the Flash Player for something whether that’s some behind-the-scenes communication or webcam support, I have no idea. But I’ve also heard rumblings that parts of this could be contributed back to the open source community. That would make it an interesting play for the HTML5 video tag.

So this is a big deal and it’s something to keep an eye on. Google has never been associated with the “rich” in rich Internet application, but that could start to change.

October 10th, 2008

Is Google working on the synchronization problem?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 7:55 am

Categories: Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Google Inc., Rich Internet Application, Microsoft Corp., ReadWriteWeb, Zoho Mail, Ryan Stewart

ReadWriteWeb has a post up about the fact that Zoho has added offline access to Zoho Mail using Gears. Zoho continues to do a really good job of innovating when it comes to Ajax-based RIAs. They were very early to the game in creating offline support for Zoho Docs before Google beating them by almost 5 months.

As I’ve mentioned before, the hardest part of the online/offline problem is synchronization. I’m not exactly sure how Zoho is implementing that part of offline Zoho Mail but I have to wonder if one of the reasons that Google hasn’t added support for Gears yet is that they’re spending a lot of time on the synchronization problem. Both Adobe and Microsoft have products that help handle online/offline synchronization. Adobe has LiveCycle Data Services and Microsoft has the Microsoft Sync Framework. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Google was working on something similar and looking at how to bake it into Gears.

An open source synchronization platform would be a big deal and would go a long way towards blending the browser and the desktop. In a lot of ways I think that’s one of the major problems that has to be solved before we move on to the next generation of RIAs. I’ve been doing some thinking about the cloud and RIAs recently but you can’t fully jump into that unless you make it easy for developers to use the same piece of data wherever they are.

October 8th, 2008

AdSense for Games: Could RIAs be next?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:23 am

Categories: Advertising, Flash, Google

Tags: Google Inc., Advertisement, Rich Internet Application, Google AdSense, Games, Personal Technology, Ryan Stewart

Google today announced a public beta for AdSense for Games. What’s unique about it is that it’s primarily targeted at Flash games with partners like Mochi Media, Konami, Heavy Games and others. This is significant for a number of reasons. First, because the online casual game market is growing quickly. According to Google’s blog post 25% of internet users play games every week. But perhaps more importantly this is really the first time that AdSense has been incorporated into Flash. Google has built in hooks that allow content creators to show contextual advertising at the beginning, the end, or in between levels.

Using AdSense inside of RIAs has been all but impossible until now. Scribd had a hack that allowed them to show AdSense inside of their Flash-based iPaper but beyond that there haven’t been a lot of good examples of using AdSense inside of RIAs. In fact advertising inside of rich Internet applications is something that continues to be difficult to do based on the current web model. Matthew Johnson from blist has some good thoughts on this.

My hope is that AdSense for Games can be a driver for helping bring together Google’s advertising platform into the new real-time RIA experiences on the web. It continues to amaze me that a platform like Flash which is so much a part of advertising on the web has yet to really find away to incorporate that advertising in its applications.

September 16th, 2008

So wait, Firefox is a fax machine?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 8:59 am

Categories: Google, Mozilla

Tags: Google Inc., Fax Machine, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Addons, Web Browsers, Fax, Internet, Ryan Stewart

Over on Techdirt there is some conversation about Firefox’s response to Google Chrome. Now I don’t know what they can do. Google basically looked at things, decided they weren’t moving fast enough on a variety of fronts, and said “screw it, we’ll just do it ourselves”. I understand that Google Chrome has been in the works for quite a while, so this isn’t some new revelation. Google realized that they had to take web matters into the only hands they trust - their own. Here’s what Blaise says:

He ignores the Firefox community. The life of a Firefox user does improve as the user base grows. A more vibrant community means better add-ons, bug fixes, security patches, phishing reports, translations/dictionaries, etc. — all members benefit. Mozilla is already providing the sort of incentive he describes. Sure, there may be ways to improve, but I don’t think they’re missing the point.

More users mean a better Firefox expereince. Just like a fax machine. But does any of that stuff matter? As one comment so eloquently put it:

Community! Addons! Coolness! Long live the Firefox!

Addons! Addons! Addons! Long Live the Extensions!

There, fixed that for you.

Addons are the one thing that really drive the Firefox community and drove adoption. And Google’s going to implement that. Talk of patches, translations and whatever else the “community” builds are overblown. Users just want addons and that’s what drives adoption.

Google Chrome has gigantic implications for the web. The next 6-9 months, especially when Google releases a Mac version, are going to be drastically different. We’re undoubtedly going to see some of the HTML5 stuff implemented in Chrome/Gears and I don’t think Firefox will be able to keep up. Throw in Google’s ability to drive distribution and browser war 2.0 could be a quick one.

September 2nd, 2008

Google Chrome: A browser for RIAs and a Firefox Killer

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 9:57 am

Categories: Ajax, Google, Mozilla, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Google Inc., Mozilla Firefox, Rich Internet Application, Web Browser, Web Browsers, Internet, Ryan Stewart

Google announced Google Chrome yesterday with a slick little comic and a bunch of good ideas about how to improve the browser. Even though I think everyone agrees that the shine of Google has worn off, if you picturd all of the things that should be in a Google browser, this pretty much covers it. We’ve got much better memory management, we’ve got a new JavaScript engine. Some are calling it a Windows killer, and it’s easy to see why. It’s has operating system-like features and it’s built from the ground up to run very complex Ajax appliations. In that sense, it’s very much a browser specifically for RIAs. It will include Gears support so that it can handle the offline/online problem for you. I love the feature that keeps each tab in its own memory space so that rouge applications can’t crash your entire browser. It also adds a memory inspector so you can see exactly which plugins or applications in the browser are taking up memory. Anyone who uses Windows should be familiar with this feature.

So it has everything you’d expect from a browser-based operating system and gets right to the heart of the problems. By making the browser more stable and more usable for long periods of time, they’ve created something very, very interesting, and something that should be a huge win for RIA developers everywhere - even Flash or Silverlight developers. So the easy answer is “Windows Killer”. But I didn’t see anything in the comic about device drivers. I didn’t see anything about hardware acceleration. In an extra bit of irony the beta is only available on Windows. So who’s in trouble? Firefox, even if they don’t acknowledge it.

Firefox has become synonymous with memory leaks and an antiquated code base. Despite a very good, lucrative arrangement for both sides, Google started from scratch and used WebKit as the HTML renderer. Firefox’s market share is still somewhere in the 25% range, while IE controls the bulk of the rest. So while it’s making inroads, it still appeals most to the hard-core geek crowd. And add-is are a major selling point over Safari right now. With Google Chrome you get the WebKit engine, you get add-ins, and you get a ton of more useful features in your browser. That same crowd that flocked to Firefox is going to embrace Google Chrome with open arms. The crowd of folks who just use whatever comes with their operating system? Not so much. Google will make more inroads than Firefox can, but it’s still going to take a ton of market-share from everyone’s feel-good open source browser.

I’m very, very excited about Google Chrome. This is a big day for RIA developers because Google started from scratch. They’re building a train that will actually be able to run on the high speed tracks of the internet. We’ve been pushing and pushing and pushing for a long time, but the browsers just haven’t been able to keep up with demands. Google Chrome should be a big leap forward.

August 22nd, 2008

Gears' new GeoLocation API is very slick

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:34 pm

Categories: Ajax, Google

Tags: Mobile, API, AJAX, GPS, Advertising & Promotion, Internet, Software/Web Development, Web Development, Web 2.0, Consumer Electronics

Dion Almaer blogged this morning about the new GeoLocation API in Gears. As a Geo-nut, I’m pretty impressed with how well it’s implemented. The API is clean, and as Dion notes, with the community working on the W3C Geolocation spec, we could see a lot more geolocation on the web soon.

The mobile version appears only to work on Windows Mobile devices but the API uses a combination of GPS, cell towers, and WiFi/IP information to get a fix on where you are. It works anywhere that you’ve got Ajax as Dion’s example shows.

The release comes as part of Gears 0.4 which in addition to the Geolocation API, also provides onprogress events for HTTP downloads and uploads and some localized dialogues. the onprogressevent will be a big deal for anyone doing large uploads in the browser.

August 11th, 2008

Outage of critical systems shows a hybrid web-desktop approach is still the best

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 9:27 pm

Categories: Google, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Google Gmail, Outage, E-mail Providers, Manufacturing, Cloud Computing, Internet, Ryan Stewart

Gmail pulled a fail whale and a number of people are talking about how their productivity was damaged. Systems are going to go down, it’s a fact of life. What’s important is to be prepared when those systems go down which is a major reason that some kind of offline access should be built into systems like email. In theory we’ll reach a time when the cloud really is always on, but we’re not close and it may never happen.

When a company like Google, which has a ton of redundancy built in, or Amazon S3, has issues, we’ve got to have applications and systems that let us continue to work. And Google has a built-in solution for people with Gears. So why haven’t they rolled it out yet? Because synchronization is a really, really hard problem. And I think that problem is what prevents a lot of services like Gmail like incorporating offline functionality. The web needs to focus on solving synchronization so that outages like these don’t have to affect productivity like they do currently.

August 5th, 2008

Silverlight and DoubleClick: Old news with a new press release

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 10:59 am

Categories: Google, Rich Media, Silverlight

Tags: Olympic Games, Advertisement, Microsoft Silverlight, DoubleClick Inc., Ryan Stewart

In the news but not news category we’re getting a press release from Google that basically covers what they talked about at MIX earlier this year. It’s a great deal as one of the big themes of MIX was enabling advertisers with Silverlight, but it’s not news. The only thing that’s semi-newsworthy is that they’ll be using this for the Olympics.

For those not familiar with In-Stream, it’s the advertising framework from DoubleClick that adds both distribution and analytics to video advertising. Being able to actually make money off of rich media content is priority number one and I’ve been impressed with how targeted Microsoft has been in that goal with Silverlight. The fact that they’re using it with the Olympics is good and it would be interesting to see how much revenue this actually brings in for NBC.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

July 2nd, 2008

WordPress, Gears, and the converging browser/desktop

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:19 pm

Categories: Ajax, Google, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Wordpress, Blogging, Web Browser, Desktops, Web Browsers, Hardware, Internet, Ryan Stewart

I had a good conversation today about the browser/desktop hybrid and where the converging is going to happen. Will it be more on the desktop side or will it be more on the browser side? I think we’ve seen the original browser-based development model win out as more and more people are learning HTML and JavaScript to build applications. But what about how the actual applications behave? Well today on the WordPress blog they explained to their users how they’re converging - by using Gears.

They’re using Gears to enable their “Turbo” link. What the Turbo link does is stores some data from the admin console - things like the images and HTML data - on the local machine so it’s accessible right off the hard drive instead of having to download it over and over again. It’s a small difference but it can have a big impact on the end user experience by speeding things up and providing more instant feedback. WordPress is basically making part of the internet faster by storing it on a local machine.

I think blogging is one of the more interesting examples of the browser/desktop melding. There are still a ton of desktop-based blog editors out there. People use them for all kinds of reasons including it’s easier to edit posts, they can craft posts offline, and it’s easier to drag and drop files/images/videos onto a desktop application. But I’d imagine that most people use the web-based blogging admin interface and find it perfectly adequate (I do). So can browsers evolve enough to remove the “market” for desktop blogging software or will there always be something better about using a full-fledged desktop client for some people?