UILayout

Adobe will announce the new version of Dreamweaver and the whole CS5 Suite of products on April 12th. I know I am so very, very late on a wish-list; but I have been using Dreamweaver a lot lately and find the following points fresh in my mind -and worthwhile repeating. Note the wish list is

Is it my imagine or has Google gone half-Bing[no pretty picture background] as seen in the screenshot above? Now the rumors have been circulating at various shows that Google was changing its interface for Search results – and clearly what I have experienced is now out in the wild according to SearchEngineLand. And the new

Are you on a Cable Modem or DSL wireline service like me?[Got em both but I have just just dropped DSL]. Well this year  marks the move to Mobile Wireless as the primary data and voice carrier with superior capacity/bandwidth. Call it the iPhone  and smartphone effect. Every major carrier is now offering WiFI connects

Regular Keep an Open Eye Eye Sir  readers will note a lot of changes to the styles and themes of the the blog in the last few weeks. I am in the midst of making some large architectural changes and so I am benchmarking  different themes and tracking their “live performance” in the background to

David Pogue has a great two part review of Apple’s iPad in the NYTimes. The first part is devoted to so called techies who find the iPad missing a lot of basic amenities and therefore less than desirable. The second part is for the rest of us and I will let David do the eloquent

There are a ton of great AJAX Mashables and Widgets becoming available on the Web and even for design use on your PC. Here is one of the better tools, Visual Lightbox which implements a very customizable image viewer  for a web page use anywhere – its  open and free jQuery based. The screen shot

UPDATE:  A number of stories have hit the media describing Palm’s survival as going critical. LATimes – Smart phone maker Palm facing fight for survival StreetInsider – Wall Street Weighs In On Palm’s (PALM) Disastrous Report – Two Say It’s Worth $0, Another Highlights Growing Chance of a Takeover Washington Post – Palm’s phone sales

This summer should be very interesting for developments on the eReader/Tablet/Slate market. Apple’s iPad at $500 to $900 will be the seventy cents spread … and a number of products from HP’s Slate to Amazon’s spiked up Kindle will be vying to show that they are a notch or two ahead of the iPad. Apple

I can remember back in the mid 1990’s when Java first came out and was quickly dismissed as being a major player in the IT world. This was going to happen despite Java’s cross platform capabilities and rich set of standard libraries because Java was a slow, interpreted language. Maybe on the Web Java could

Linux users, particularly those on the desktop constantly lament the languishing of their favorite OS well behind Windows and even MacOS. This is true despite the fact that a)Microsoft has badly botched Windows Reborn as Vista even while b) Linux has some very good distributions for free desktop usage. One can name at least 10

Amazon Kindle,Apple iPhone +  iPad,  Google Nexus, Blackberry smartphones, and the dozens of other devices are all building up incompatible application libraries in a race reminiscent of the PC software/hardware wars of the late 1970;s and early 1980’s. Apple  was a leader then but Microsoft arrived late but with a huge partner in IBM –

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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].

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

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

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

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

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