Here’s a great little video by the PhotoSynth showcasing their product, on the updated PhotoSynth homepage. I really like the look of PhotoSynth:
The team has also put together a few pages explaining what it is, and how it works. It’s fascinating stuff.
Although I had heard that Microsoft had announced it was going to release Silverlight, I h
adn’t actually had the time to look into it. Got back from the gym this evening and decided I’d find out a bit more about it. I have to confess at first glance im very impressed.
First things first you can find out more about it at the Official Product Homepage. You can download Silverlight Community Technology preview from here. Once installed you’ll need to restart your browser and now if you go back to the Silverlight product homepage and click on the video in the centre of the screen to view it in the embedded Silverlight player.
You can also click on this link to view a demo of the Silverlight Page Turn media feature. This demonstrates how Silverlight uses XAML to create a presentation of images. When the demo loads, hold down your mouse button on the page turn icon and drag the page as though you were actually turning a page in a book. It’s quite nice.
On their own these two demo’s dont really give you a huge insight into where MS is headed with this product. Naturally its being positioned to compete with Adobe’s Flash. However to get a feel of just how far Microsfot has come watch this video! This video shows the power of MS Expression Media Encoder and Silverlight working together. The Real Time video editing capabilities using hardware graphics acceleration is really impressive. So too is the ability to create and stream media with chapter links, so you can jump to predefined points in the stream, by embedding meta data into the video’s.
By far the most impressive feature is called Video Brush, that in the demo is used to overlay a video on a jigsaw, here’s the impressive thing you can move the individual pieces of the jigsaw around and the video is still plays inside the pieces. Whilst this is eye candy, it could have amazing real world uses … picture in picture over the web for example!
Learn more about Expression Media Encoder and SIlverlight over at Tim Sneath’s Blog.
Came across this video on the Official Google channel on YouTube. It’s a tutorial that demonstrates how organisations can improve their productivity by adopting Google App’s. It show’s some of the customisation capabilities Google are providing for organisations to brand the apps. There’s heavy focus on how you can use Gmail for more than just email – e.g. instant messaging, calendars etc. There’s also a great deail of emphasis on the collaboration features in the tools, which are quite impressive. They also demonstrate how easy it is to for administrators to configure the tools, branding and permissions. The premier addition also allows organisations to switch of adverts.
The aim of OLPC is to change how kids learn.
Ivan Krstic, Chief Security Architect at OLPC gives a technical talk on how the laptop was designed and how they are going about building it. He goes to great length to explain why they are doing this, the rationale behind the project, and why this influenced many of the technical decisions.
How do you build laptops for kids?
The Original XO-1 laptop has the following spec:
The newer version has the following hardware spec:
The laptop has no moving parts which helps keep the power usage down. It;s peak power consumption is 4-5W, the standard consumption is closer to 1-2W. Compare this to a normal conventional laptop which is around 40 – 50W. One of the things that stands our for me in this talk is that the OLPC team and doing what is probably the most aggressive work in Power Management using Linux anywhere in the world. In order to conserve more power they’re goal is to suspend the machine every 2 to 3 seconds if nothing on the screen is changing. They actually target they have set is to be able to suspend and resume the machine at the edge of human perception which is ~100ms. That’s incredible!
If you set aside the social aspects of this project and focus purely on the technical goals they’re attempting to achieve, the OLPC project could radically change the way laptops are built. It’s well worth watching the talk, there’s a number of other unique advancements the project has made, and I for one will be keeping a close eye on its development.
It’s official, Google has acquired on-line advertising outfit DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. The sky high price though may be less a function of DoubleClick’s actual worth and more about what it can strategically provide for Google – and what it could have done for Microsoft, who were also bidding for the company.
Through this acquisition Google has gained a vibrant advertising business for banners, videos and other so-called display-ads intended to promote brands rather than to generate immediate sales. It’s widely known fact that DoubleClick has relationships with almost every major online publisher and almost half of all online ad agencies. This means that Google can now go head to head with its main search rival Yahoo! in the display advertising business.
To get an idea of why this is so important, analysts predict that the paid search advertising market will account for more than 40% of the $19.5 billion expected to go to on-line advertising this year (Mar. 7 eMarketer report).
David Rosenblatt, CEO of DoubleClick, made an interesting comment about this acquisition – he’s excited at the prospect of using DoubleClick’s relationships and Google’s targeting to sell off-line ads in the future. He also believes that DoubleClick’s existing clients wont think of this as a threat, but as a tool that makes advertising easier : ” I think they will see this as a best-of-breed combination – the leading platform technology provider and the leading monetization engine”.
Even more power for Google.
Came across this article over at madpenguin.org. The author, Matt Hartley, argues that Web Apps will never be desktop replacements. After reading the article I think the most compelling arguments he provides are:
Firstly, I think never is a long time 😉
I am not sure if either would dissuade me from using web based applications instead of desktop ones. I already use Google’s web based applications and I think they are pretty good in terms of delivering my day to day needs. I suppose if I’m honest I’m hard pressed to think of what I do with a word processor or spreadsheet on a daily basis that I can’t do using these applications.
As for availability. I can’t remember the last time I suffered from an internet outage that prevented me from getting on line for any significant amount of time. I certainly can’t remember any time I’ve tried to use one of Google’s applications to find that it was down or unavailable, or one of 37Signals applications.
Speed of response as I see it is a big stumbling block for web based applications. I’ve not experienced many such issues using Google applications, but I know how much I get irritated when I’m sitting there waiting for a page to load in BaseCamp for example. However, any organisation, worth its salt, that is serious about providing software as a service over the web has to consider the responsiveness of its software as a key metric in gauging the applications success, because users using it will.
Data security is a bit a funny topic, if you consider the prevelance of behaviour logging spyware on most computers , I’m not convinced the average persons data would be more secure on their own PC, or even works machine. I suppose it feel comforting to think that your somehow responsible for your own data but Microsoft is Microsoft, spyware is spyware, rootkits are rootkits and hackers are hackers.
Realistically thought, it’s certainly going to be a while before people will actually bring themselves to trust third party company’s with their corporate data. Any form of outsourcing raises questions. Google is making some inroads with its Google Apps premium service – which basically allows companies to have their corporate email provided by Google, and use slightly richer versions of Google’s web based applications as opposed to Microsoft Office.
Ultimately, I do wonder though if the reality around the viability of this transition from desktop to web is less about the technical issues but more the commercial ones:
Web apps will slowly replace desktop apps so long as desktop apps fail to turn the same profit that web apps and subscription services can. To some extent we can figure in the level to which users acquiesce to the transfer but the fact simply is that there are larger entities than end users calling the shots on this one. It’s like pushing a bill through Congress: if at first they don’t succeed they’ll launch a campaign to poll the public for the conflicting arguments, they’ll pay enough lip service to make people think that the issues have been resolved, and then they’ll resubmit next year. If the major business partners on Wall Street decide that they’re making more money from companies which offer web based applications then, slowly but surely, venture capital will be steered away from desktop application vendors and to world wide web application providers. We, the end users, have no control over this.
Yahoo Widgets 4 is now available for download. The new version makes significant performance improvements over earlier releases. They have also finally provided a built in method of updating widgets, as well as discovering new ones – something I’ve been keenly looking forward to, since I had to implement my own update listener for a set of widgets I wrote last year.
Also new in this verison is the Widget Dock, which is very similar to the Google and Vista Dock bars, basically allowing you to manage and neatly organise widgets on the desktop. I also like the new Flickr widget which is bundled with version 4. The widget not only streams photos from Flickr directly to your desktop it also provides drag and drop upload capability so you put your photos onto Flickr with relative ease.
From a development point theyve made massive performance improvements with DOM traversal of XML and XPath seems substantially faster against large XML DOM’s – which is something I used to whinge about a lot. You can view a list of all the changes in the versions release notes.
All in all, its not bad!
An interesting tech talk by Mark Birbeck CEO of X-Port. Some of my colleagues saw Mark talk at the mashup* event in London last month. Although I have reservations about the Sidewinder framework he proposes, we at Talis are doing more and more work to make API’s available to developers that can be called from desktop based applications like the widgets and gadgets Mark describes. The problem with Sidewinder though is it provides a wrapper around web based applications allowing you to run them on your desktop – and im struggling to see the value in that.
I’ve done a fair bit of work creating Yahoo (Konfabulator) Desktop Widgets that use our API’s which will be released in the new few months, as exemplars of how developers out there can mashup our API’s with other services to create interesting and even compelling new applications. We like mashups at Talis, in fact we held a very successful mashup competition last year, which we are running again this year so if your interested why not enter the competition.
One of the projects on I worked on at Talis before christmas was our Project Cenote exemplar.
Put simply Cenote allows you to search our platform for information on books and stuff. It’s a bit of a mashup since it seamlessly integrates our data and content with data and content from Amazon, and some other partners.
Cenote was created to serve as an example of how simple it is to create applications using the new Talis Platform. Rob and I worked on it for a few days, although we spent a lot of that time developing the rather unique look it has. The last thing we wanted it to look like was a traditional, stoic, boring OPAC. Amazing what you can do with a little CSS and some imagination, huh?
Looks aside what was really cool about Cenote was that Rob and I were able to build the application in very little time, we paired up on it, which meant we sat at one desk and pretty much coded it from scratch together over a couple of days or so. It’s actually a pretty thin skin built upon the platform.
Cenote is basically a small PHP5 application sitting inside Apache 2. The application makes web service calls to the Platform which returns data in RSS format. The application then uses a couple of XSLT stylesheets to transform the data into the UI you see.
You can find out more about Cenote over at the Talis Developer Network, we’ve decided to Open Source so it so that developers can see how simple it is build upon our platform services. It serves as one of several examples already published, and many more on the way. I’ve written an article on the TDN that explains briefly how to install the sources and get it running locally. So have a play 🙂
L.A.S.E.R Tag is really, really cool! I never thought vandalism could be cool before I saw this 😉
