Category Archives: internet

.net, internet, microsoft

Silverlight: 1.5 million installations per day, says Microsoft

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Scott Guthrie, Corporate VP Developer Division at Microsoft, spoke at Remix in Brighton about Silverlight deployment. He says there are around 1.5 million installations per day, and that version 1.0 will auto-update to version 2.0 when it is released, which he says is “shortly”.

Wide deployment is critical for Silverlight, though a limitation of version 2.0 (the one with the .NET runtime included) is that it does not work on PowerPC Macs.

Guthrie also mentioned Internet Explorer 8, which he says will ship “towards the end of the year”.

apple, google, internet, iphone, java, mobile, software development

Actual Android device spotted at Google Developer Day London

During the keynote at Google Developer Day London, Android evangelist Mike Jennings gave us what he says is the first showing of an actual device – prototype, of course – in Europe. I took a few blurry pics.

Perhaps inevitably, it seems reminiscent of Apple’s iPhone. It even has an accelerometer so you can code it to respond to tilts and turns.

The web browser is based on WebKit, of course.

We were shown a spinning cube created in Java using an OpenGL library. The Android SDK is based on JDK 1.5.

Another thing that was mentions is Gears for Mobile. Now that Gears has a geolocation API it will be particularly useful in this context.

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internet, multimedia, sony

Streaming media to a PSP

Here’s a Playstation Portable streaming music from FLAC files on a Linux server.

What’s going on here? Well, this is the PSP’s Remote Play feature, which lets you view and control a PS3 remotely. As I mentioned before, the FLAC files get transcoded to PCM on the fly by Mediatomb, a free and open source DLNA server for Linux. The clever bit is that this works across the Internet as well as on a local network, allowing you to play your FLAC library from anywhere with a wi-fi connection.

There are a couple of snags. Although the sound is decent, I get occasional stutters which spoil the effect. It also strikes me as inefficient (which means not green), running both a Linux server and a PS3 at home just to play music on the move. So this isn’t all that practical; but I found it an interesting experiment.

I’m not sure why Sony hasn’t joined all the dots with the PSP. It has a great screen, good sound, and would make a delightful streaming media client if the software were better. As it is, the only supported way (that I know of) to stream media is via the RSS client, which is far from ideal, or with the Remote Play feature as above.

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adobe, amazon, apple, google, internet, iphone, microsoft, silverlight, web authoring

Defining cloud computing

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I liked this post by Larry Dignan on the cloud computing buzzword and how meaningless it has become.

Writing on the subject recently, I was struck by the gulf between what some people mean – online apps like Google Apps and Gmail – and what others mean, on-demand utility computing such as that delivered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or Flexiscale. These things have little in common.

Dignan has even more examples.

Should we abandon the term? Maybe, but I find it useful if only as shorthand for describing how the centre of gravity is shifting to the Internet.

Some services are more cloudy than others. Dignan refers to this Forrester report (though you’ll have to look at the blog post for the extracts, unless you want to buy it) which has a table of “six key characteristics.” I don’t agree with all of them; the business model, for example, is not an inherent part of cloud computing. I am interested in number two:

Accessible via Internet protocols from any computer

Any computer? OK, probably not the Atari ST which I have in the loft. Any computer with a web browser? What about requiring a “modern” web browser, is that OK? Java? Flash? Silverlight? A specific version of Java or Flash? What about when we need a runtime like Adobe AIR or Microsoft Live Mesh? What if it doesn’t run on Linux? Or on an Apple iPhone? What about when there is an offline component such as Google Gears? All these things narrow what is meant by “any computer”.

This is the old “rich versus reach” debate; it is still being played out. My point: cloud computing isn’t a boolean characteristic, but a continuum from very cloudy (NTP) to not cloudy at all (Microsoft Office).

adobe, flash, internet, salesforce.com

Adobe’s Genesis: enterprise mashups wrapped in AIR

I’m not at the Office 2.0 conference, sadly, but fortunately for non-attendees the organizers have done a great job of making the content available online in a timely manner. Aside: I love the way this site includes social networking features, like the ability for users to comment on sessions beforehand, so that they can influence the content; and the way videos have appeared on the same day as they were presented.

One of the first things that caught my eye was Adobe’s Genesis. I watched the presentation by Matthias Zeller. As I understand it, Genesis is an AIR application plus online services, that enables enterprise mashups, organized into workspaces. AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a way of using the Flash runtime on the desktop.

What’s in a Genesis Workspace? A collection of “tiles”, actually Flex applets, which can hook into other enterprise or web applications. It is a good fit with SAAS (software as a service) providers such as Salesforce.com. There is also a web browser tile (presumably based on WebKit), enabling the inclusion of any browser application; and a file repository tile that contains documents, using some of the functionality we have already seen in Acrobat.com. The idea is that these workspaces are easily created using drag-and-drop. The real value comes when they are shared online, through Adobe’s hosted services, enabling communication and collaboration.

Zeller says the Genesis client will be free, with monetization coming from subscriptions to hosted services and tiles; third-parties will also be able to market tiles for the system. There is an online slideshow here.

This is only my brief first impression; please follow the links for more detail. I found it interesting on several levels: a new approach to the cloud; a business use for AIR; and also this comment in the presentation, “Adobe-quality aesthetics for the enterprise”.

google, internet, microsoft, software, web authoring, windows

What happens to the browser market when Google plays the OEM card?

Here’s a bit of speculation. My initial thinking about Google Chrome was that it would mainly take market share from Firefox; and that while IE’s share may continue to erode, Chrome is unlikely to accelerate that much.

I’m beginning to change my mind. One factor is OEM installs. We all know what a huge influence default installs have on users, which is why software vendors are happy to pay the likes of Dell and HP for space on the desktop, or to be the default anti-virus engine, for example. This has often been to the detriment of the user’s experience overall, to the extent that it helped to damage Vista’s reputation, but that is an aside.

Now, one thing I’ve noticed is that Google’s toolbar often turns up by default in OEM installs of Windows. When you start up for the first time (or the first time for real, after all those reboots), IE confronts you with Google’s terms of service. However, I have not yet seen Firefox installed as the default web browser. I’ve presumed that Mozilla doesn’t quite have the financial muscle to do it, or maybe there are other reasons.

Google is a more formidable presence than Mozilla. What if Google buys browser share by being the default browser on machines from the leading OEMs? I suspect that would soon impact IE’s share. Microsoft cannot prevent it because of anti-trust constraints.

Since Chrome is in effect the new Google toolbar, this move strikes me as inevitable.

This would mainly impact the consumer and small business space. IE has some special advantages for enterprises, since it hooks in tightly to Microsoft’s software management tools, and there are further improvements to this aspect in IE8. The consumer/business separation is a leaky one so it could still have a big impact.

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google, internet, web authoring

Building Chromium

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I’ve successfully downloaded the Chromium source and completed a successful build:

The source is delivered as a Visual Studio 2005 solution, making it relatively straightforward for Windows developers who have this installed. You also need the Windows SDK, but other than that there are few dependencies.

Chromium is not quite the same as Google Chrome. The logo is shades of blue, rather than Chrome’s red green and yellow, and the word Google does not appear at top right in the title bar. If you squint carefully, you can also see that it is a later build: 0.2.151.0 instead of Chrome’s 0.2.149.27 – both at the time of writing.

Oh, and I believe you can download and build without agreeing the onerous Google EULA that is attracting some discussion.

google, internet, software, web authoring

Chrome browser memory usage: a good start

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If you go to the special url about:memory in Google Chrome, you get a summary of memory usage in all your running browsers, not just Chrome. I tried the following test:

1. Close all browsers.

2. Reopen all browsers – IE7, Chrome, Firefox, Safari – navigate to bbc.co.uk

3. Open the Chrome memory status page:

There are figures for virtual memory as well; I’ve truncated them to make the image fit better. Chrome is easily the smallest.

google, internet, software, web authoring

Microsoft.com blank in Google Chrome browser history

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Google Chrome is available for download. I’ve done it in fact; very smooth install. It looks like the company is serious about getting this widely deployed quickly, despite its beta status – there’s a download link on the Google home page – must be important to break the 28 words rule.

Chrome shows your “most visited” sites as a kind of home page. I was amused to see that Microsoft.com shows up here as blank:

No doubt there is a good technical reason. People used to say “DOS Ain’t Done until Lotus won’t run”; and that was not true either.

Update: Honesty compels me to admit that the Microsoft snapshot eventually filled in. Still, it is not much better:

The problem is that the central Silverlight panel is failing to load; the main site looks like this in Chrome as well. OK, so Silverlight doesn’t support Chrome. But Microsoft no doubt has something better than a blank panel for incompatible browsers. Was it warned in advance about the advent of Chrome? Was anyone? I know this is WebKit and that what works in Safari should work here; but we all know that browser compatibility is complex. Still, it is entertaining.

Further update: It looks the same in Safari on Windows! I should explain that there is some more stuff to the right and below the empty panel; but the empty sky background occupies the main part of the page.

To get the full picture, I visited the page with FireFox on Linux:

 

This looks better, but it’s a tease. It has a link to download Silverlight; if you follow it, it eventually reveals that your browser or operating system is unsupported. Sloppy Microsoft; Google exonerated.

More on Chrome soon, no doubt.

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apple, google, internet, microsoft, open source, software, software development, web authoring

The new Google Chrome browser: a bad day for Firefox

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The Firefox angle is what puzzles me about Google’s announcement that it is is launching a new open source browser. We should get to try it tomorrow; perhaps we’ll see that Google is successfully reinventing the browser. In particular, this is a part of what is sometimes dubbed the Google OS: the client for cloud applications running on Google’s servers:

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better.

Google is using some proven technology in the form of the Webkit rendering component (as used in Apple’s Safari). I imagine it can do a decent job. But why? From Google’s perspective, the browser market was shaping up nicely already. Microsoft’s IE has a still large but declining market share; Mozilla Firefox is growing, has a vibrant community, and relies on Google for the bulk of its income in return for making it  the default search engine – a deal which has just been extended for three years.

Now Google appears to be going head-to-head against Firefox. It won’t necessarily succeed; Firefox has lots of momentum and will be hard to shift. Equally, I doubt that Microsoft’s market share will decline significantly faster against a Google browser than it would anyway against Firefox.

The risk is that this will split the open source community.

As for Firefox, this can only be bad news. It has the embarrassment of relying on a major competitor for its income, and the knowledge that it is driving traffic to a company that will push users to switch to an alternative.

Maybe Google Chrome is so good that it will all make sense when we get to try it. For sure, it is an intriguing development for web applications and I’m looking forward to seeing how well Google can substantiate its claims that it is “much better” for the job of running them.