Apple’s iPad Leaves a Lot of Room for Competitors
Apple is leaving a lot of room to maneuver in the smartphone and tablets battle. Yes Apple has the advantages of both first-to-market and huge number of phone apps lead over its rivals[100,000++ iPhone Apps to Google Android’s 20,000++]. As well its touch screen technology is now leading UI development in the same fashion that […]
Winter Olympic Widgets & Coverage
I am surprised at the relatively few really good Winter Olympic Games widgets that are available on the various sites that are featuring Winter Olympic coverage. Here is a list of what I have found to data. wwwvancouver2010.com There are some collaborations with Facebook, but this is the only widget I could find – a […]
Google Ads
Be honest now, how many times have you seen an ad for a Google product – magazine, newspaper, web banner – any and all media accepted?? Okay, 10 years ago there were the ads for the Google Search appliance, a server box loaded up with Google search goodies that could be plugged into your network.But […]
IP-Intellectual Property and the Web
IP-Intellectual Property and the Web is becoming ever more entangled. The China vs Google confrontation is not just about censorship of the Web but rather two other and more important factors: i)continued almost total disregard for IP and Copyrights in China despite ritual Chinese government promises to police and curb blatant copying [one **(see below) […]
Update: Why Steve Ballmer/Microsoft Disappointed at CES 2010
When I wrote about Why Steve Ballmer/Microsoft Disappointed at CES 2010, I considered adding a remark on the internal morale at Redmond. Back in the late 1990’s I had occasion to visit 1 Microsoft Way campus several times. I had seen firsthand some of the rivalries among the various Microsoft divisions. But morale and cohesion […]
GigaOM on Microsoft’s Web Investments
The graph tells the essential story on Microsoft’s Web investments. The full review is here.
5 Viewpoints on Apple’s iPad
iPad Viewpoint 1 – the Gadgeterati Snub iPad After much speculation, Apple’s iPad hit the Gadget Mindscape market with a thud. To say that the Gadgeterati did not like the iPad is, unfortunately for Apple, an understatement: Gizmodo – 8 things about the iPad that sucks – No Thanks Apple PCWorld – Apple’s iPad mistakes […]
Apple Spurns Adobe’s Flash: Major Inconsistencies
One of the missing links on the Apple iPad is the continued absence of Flash as detailed here. How can you have the Universal Mobile Media Device of choice and not support the media software of choice, Adobe’s Flash Player. While investigating this inconsistency, I found initially a litany of Mac users complaints about the […]
Apple Spurns Adobe’s Flash: Update
The gadget blog Engadget covers an important point on Apple’s iPad annoucement – the omission of Adobe Flash support. If iPad is to be the mobile and media device of choice why eliminate the best media delivery software of choice for the past 10 years – Adobe’s Flash. Flash has been not only been the […]
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer on Censorship
The Guardian and Financial Times in England have been covering the China vs Google story much more closely than US media. So when the Guardian published a story about Bill Gates reactions to the conflict , curious, I took a look: After pouring billions of dollars into the global fight against malaria and rebranding Microsoft […]
Google vs Apple – the iPad Factor
The announcement today of the the Apple iPad really brings into sharp focus the emerging Google vs Apple battle coming up – especially in Mobile markets. Google is taking an open approach using open Android+open Chrome OS as Linux derived operating systems. And the use of open HTML in ChromeOS for plugins plus support for […]
Apple’s new iPad is a Giant iPhone/Kindle in Color
Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4g …. oops, iPad today and it turns out to be a giant iPhone with 10inch screen, Apple’s own processor, no support for Flash nor for multi-tasking, and a top price of $829. It will read directly and run iPhone apps but they run in half-size on the screen. Gamers […]
Ford MyTouch Helps Multi-passenger Commuting?
The Ford MyTouch in-car display and travel computing integrator has certainly garnered attention. CNET gave it a CES 2010 Best in Show award while the NYTimes also found it distractingly praise worthy – but that is part of the problem, will MyTouch, despite its touchscreen and voice command/reading capabilities be the source of greater fenderbenders? […]
Microsoft Moves from the Top of the XBox
Micosoft has sold 39 million Xboxes – and already has more than half of them connected to the Web and an unknown, but high number connected to TV consoles. Does this sound like a base for integrating games, TV. movies, media, and Web connectivity? Well the NYTimes and CNET think so – and are touting […]
Microsoft Ketchup: Internet Explorer Fails Catastrophically, Again
One of the key enablers in the recent Chinese cyberattack on Google and about 20 other US companies and corporates was a zero day hole in Internet Explorer. As Read Write Web notes this Microsoft security vulnerability has broad implications: Microsoft has acknowledged this vulnerability and is currently working on a patch. Every machine running […]
PC World: Microsoft Should Kill Internet Explorer
Expecting a short sassy article from PCWorld on why Microsoft should kill IE, I was taken aback by the length and serious examination of IE’s quandry. First, PCWorld established the current demise: 1)IE is way behind the top 4 alternate browsers [Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla firefox, and Opera] in features; 2)IE is way behind […]
Microsoft Ketchup: SVG
Readers of this blog know that I have been relentless in decrying the shortfalls in Microsoft’s support of W3C and other Web Standards. Microsoft has a serious amount of Ketchup to do in the Web arena. So now Microsoft announces support for SVG – about ten years late. However, there is no timetable or list […]
Why Ballmer/Microsoft Disappointed at CES 2010
I was surprised at the reaction of a wide range of IT analysts to Steve Ballmer’s Keynote speech at CES – Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I attended and thought it halfway palatable. Yes, people had to suffer through parabolic distortion of stats on Windows 7 and Bing’s success [see eWeek’s frank appraisal of […]
Windows Phone 7 : Unstoppable Trainwreck Unfolding 4
Update 3: eWeek’s Don Reisinger dishes out some tough love In a presentation on 10 smartphone and tablet flaws, Microsoft and RIM bear the brunt of Don’s slings and arrows, as he tells the vendors what are their “showstopper flaws”. Update 2: More Windows Phone 7 Unfoldings from Dec 27. 2010 eWeek has a late December update on […]
Web 2.0 RAIA GUI: Better Than the Desktop?
Some people believe that Web GUI operations cannot even remotely match those available on the desktop – be that Windows 7 with its Aero goodies or Apple Snow Leopard with its refined look and often copied navigational features. I would beg to differ. Desktop GUI is playing catch up to mobile and the Web. Gestures […]
NYTimes and Mobile Connections
In a previous posting,on our media site [Bookraft.com], the NYTimes was praised for its Web 2.0 savvy; but what I neglected to mention was the many mobile phone options available from the Old Lady with all the News fit to print. So this screen shot summarizes what is available from the NYTimes is a single […]
Defensive Specialist Steve Ballmer – Resign?
Its all the news chatter in the IT trade and business trade press when Newsweek had the temerity to suggest that Steve Ballmer should be asked to resign by the directors at Microsoft. Here is the essence of the argument: Ballmer’s 10th anniversary as CEO of Microsoft arrives in January, but it’s hard to imagine […]
Google Gadget Gaffe: Updated
In our previous posting on this topic, the issue of the quality of the third party Gadgets being offered by Google was somewhat remiss. True there are nearly175,000 3rd party gadgets listed; but quantity is not quality. However, what I neglected to mention is that Google has its own Google Web Elements, about 2 dozen […]
Adobe Wins NYTimes
NYTimes has chosen Adobe Air for its delivery vehicle for both the NYTimes and Boston Globe digital newspaper editions. The following shows a copy of the Boston Globe digital edition: This is a big win for Adobe because Microsoft Silverlight and JavaScript with HTML5 are nipping at Adobe heels in the race for RIA predominance. […]
NYTimes Gets Web 2.0 Technology; But …
Over the past two years the NYTimes has been showing an evergrowing Web 2.0 savvy. Like many of its large newspaper cohorts, the NYTimes is using such Web 2.0 fixtures as tabs, scrollers and accordions to make quick access to multiple stories on a single page. Its photo galleries use nifty Flash-enabled slideshow viewers. But […]
Google Gadgets Gaffe
3rd party plugins have repeatedly been the source of distinct competitive advantage in computing markets for over 40 years. From IBM’s SSL-Scientific Subroutine Library established a mainframe presence over 50 years ago thru Microsoft’s Visual Basic Component’s vital role in VB’s success in the early 1990’s to Apple’s iPhone plugins/extensions in the current smartphone market […]
Mootools Motors On
Mootools is a free, accomplished, lightweight, very close to non-obtrusive JavaScript framework. Here are two recent innovations. Much better coverage of its plugins is here. And look at this Mooshell:
Computing’s Form Factors
A girl friend of mine used to always mock me for lugging around a huge heavy laptop… and I said imagine my friend who goes to and from work moving his desktop computer [an 18pound custom design behemoth] every day. He keeps identically the same console at work and home for “quick hookup” [his words]. […]
Bloodied Windows 7 Details
Covering Microsoft in the late 1990’s I discovered that the Redmond troops were much more forthright then the executive suite – particularly when a quality storm around their software was raging. Think of the debilitating outbreak of Windows and then IE worms of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Vista has been just such a […]
WordPress is Best Overall CMS of 2009
Okay, I will admit a bias toward WordPress because I have been using it on 5 of my own blogs and dozens of other projects. But I use Drupal, Joomla. Gallery, PHPBB and Coppermine too. No one CMS is clearly dominant – you fit each CMS strengths to the tasks at hand. Interestingly, WordPress has […]
The LAMP CMS Trend
LAMP-Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP CMS-Content Management Systems like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are becoming very popular among web developers as total solutions for clients. Why? I think that despite the first sense of overkill there are three key attractions to LAMP CMS for Web users. 1)They run on every OS platform from Linux through MacOS to all the […]
Google Go
As a developer I have always anticipated programming languages adding 3D operations or APL-like vector and array operations or event handling [more beyond the current Try-Catch paradigm]. Extensions that would become universal. But that has not happened except in a perverse way – the huge functional libraries associated with all the major languages from C/Pascal/ […]
FireFox is 5 Years Old
TechRadar has a great appreciation article for the 5 year birthday of the Firefox browser. Here is the best part: We’re celebrating the anniversary of two big events this week: the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the birth of Firefox. We’ll remember one of them as bringing freedom to millions and dealing a hammer […]
Windows 7 Graphics PC: Benchmarks Versus Windows XP
The following posting is taken from our thePhotoFinishes.com blog verbatim. The performance results for Windows 7 versus Windows XP are of interest. Well we spent most of the weekend trying to figure out our benchmarks results – would Windows 7 be able to beat Windows XP in raw speed and performance? Here is that tale […]
Just Good Enough 2: Google Android
New York Times writer Saul Hansell has a fascinating piece here about why Google Android is being pushed into the smartphone OS market. Saul argues that its more than just making room for more Google ads on smartphones – but rather, not to allows one or two players [read currently Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry] […]
Browser Negligence: What to Do About Microsoft
In the previous posting showing two online and live Paint programs developed by Finnish University professors, one can get an idea of which browser vendors are supporting SVG vectore graphic and HTML5’s bitmap canvas commands. These capabilities are key to Web 2.0 flourishing. Here are the results using the latest browser versions from all the […]
HTML5 , Canvas and SVG
This paper by Bruce Lawson has a lot of the goods on whats happening on HTML5. There is mucho HTML 5 appearing at the wikipedia too. These are important briefings as HTML5 rapidly emerges. This is important to all Web developments. Also, checkout the two Finnish professors’ comparison of SVG Vector Draw versus Canvas Bitmaps. […]
Chrome Frame Opportunity
I have been having an extended discussion on this blog about the role of Web writers and savvy developers in allowing Microsoft to be very abusive of Web standards. Microsoft is simply refusing to implement CSS, DOM, HTML, and JavaScript standards [many of which they pledged to do over 10 years ago] or are prolonging […]
What, Me Worry that the Web is getting Constipat….
Game portals are the talk of the town … but I was worried. Arstechnica raises and answers the question will the Internet Die due to 1)No Net Neutrality; 2)Continuing impossible grwth rates; or 3)Continued use by high traffic video, TV, and gaming websites. They said no …what? me worry? In that spirit I offer you […]
The First Successful Tablet?
As signs that things are starting to percolate + innovate in the PC world, take a look at the Archos 9 PC Tablet. This is first strike from Archos and will be a superb test of whether Windows 7 really can run with adequate response time on a Netbook-like tablet with 1GB of memory. I […]
Touch Screens to Rescue Windows 7?
It is prudent to be from Missouri about Windows 7. Yes, the advertising and many of the IT pundit websites are saying things like “The best Windows ever since Windows XP”, but still not its equal in speed and performance from current tests. Also these sound like the same praise poured on Vista less than […]
CSS:The Missing Facts
I have just been sent CSS: The Missing Manual by David McFarland at O’Reilly Press to review. So I am scouting through the manual to see how informative it is and to get first impressions. And I come across a sidebar comment – Should I Care About IE6. As readers who have visited this site […]
PostgreSQL: Signs of Maturity
Over the past few years, PostgreSQL has caught my attention for spatial processing features, suggestions of enterprise level performance plus features and other virtues. But I have stayed away because PostgreSQL installations were problematic and the Administration features suspect. Well in the past 3 years that has changed substantially – and I have the proof […]
Google Translations II: See It Here!
I have been following the Google Translations API rather closely with remarks already in this blog. But recently Google made Translations for Web pages so easy to do it seemed worth while to try it out.The screen capture to the left can be seen in the upper right corner of this blog.Go ahead and try […]
The Old Lady Sings
Many people have written off magazines and newspaper publishers as ante-diluvian and Waiting for Godot. Watch it. There is more to publishing on the Web than the technology – it also call for great editorial skills and a feel for good stories or story telling – a business that newspapers and magazines have been in […]
FHTML – Fluid HTML
The problem with Flash is that its coding was already tough with ActionScript, it is now doubly tough to code especially for designers using ActionScript 3. But that is the price you have to pay to to get a more secure, robust and much speedier Flash 10… or so says the Adobe Flash evangelists. The […]
Google Translations
Google is making its Translation Service available for free as part of its Google API: Paris Le Monde newspaper Hamburg’s Die Zeit newspaper Buenos Aires Chronicle Sydney Australia’s Morning Herald As it turns out the Google automated translations are a little loose. But in the next few weeks I shall show the code to do […]
Google Responds to Microsoft’s Bing
For the last 10 years, Google’s display of search results has seen a slow, gradual [some would say glacial] movement. Yes there have been improvements – the display of search results with similar and then cached options allowing for different views of the search results. Or users could resort to Advanced Search – but Advanced […]
Microsoft: Just Not Good Enough?
Back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s Microsoft engineers and developers prided themselves on being on the right side of “Just Good Enough” while delivering its new features and software to market faster and with more glitz than any other vendor. The rest is business history. Perhaps this “Just Good Enough” mantra emerged from […]
What is a better Web Browser?
I thought the answer to the question would be obvious – not so as the people at Slate point out. This would help explain why Internet Explorer 8 has managed to maintain market share despite being the worst browser for features, standards compliance and performance. So what does Google do – create Chrome Frame – […]