Category Archives: internet

internet, web authoring

Sweet harmony between W3C and WHATWG

The new-ish W3C working group set up to create a new version of HTML has voted to adopt the work of WHATWG as its starting point, in particular the work on HTML 5. Here are the details from the co-chairs. This will speed up the process, and more significantly, brings together the W3C and the WHATWG. WHATWG was set up by browser vendors (Microsoft excluded) out of frustration with the W3C process and its abandonment of HTML in favour of XHTML.

Does this now make WHATWG pointless? That’s the obvious conclusion; but the group may not want to disband itself.

Thanks to Simon WIllison for the link.

 

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internet, multimedia, software development, web authoring

Mix Unmixed

Microsoft had a good Mix07. Let’s start with the provisos. Silverlight with .NET may have been announced, but it’s a long way from delivery, with alpha code just posted and no date set. Adobe already has a widely deployed cross-platform runtime with an embedded Javascript engine, complete with JIT compiler.

Next, Microsoft is miles behind its rival in the design world; it’s Expression tools are just now appearing, while products like Illustrator, Photoshop and Dreamweaver are de facto industry standards.

Third, Mix07 had its share of hiccups, not least the bizarre closing plenary. The theme seemed to be the future of advertising: XBox maestro Robbie Bach entertained us for a short time with clips of in-game advertising, following which came a lengthy and less than sparkling panel debate, only redeemed by pithy comments from Economist Publisher and Managing Director Andrew Rashbash who reminded us that editorial independence still matters, which is a relief.

That wasn’t enough for most delegates. A little way into the debate I became aware of a distracting bonging noise from somewhere behind me. It was the doors clanging as attendees headed for the exit.

I have never seen so many people leave a Microsoft plenary, and I can’t shake off the suspicion that something else was planned for this slot, but pulled at a late hour.

Never mind, this was nevertheless a good conference for Microsoft. It is all about a one-two Silverlight punch. Punch one is online video. You know the story: streaming internet video used to belong to Real, Apple and Microsoft until Adobe sneaked in with a marvellous “it just works” implementation in the Flash runtime. How can Microsoft now compete? Two ways: price and quality. On the price front, it is giving away space on its streaming servers, a more than generous offer that is likely to be widely taken up.

Another factor is codecs. Flash has two, H263+ and VP6. H263+ is cheap to implement, thanks to to support in FFMPEG, but the quality is poor. The newer VP6 codec, from 0n2, is equally high quality but according to Microsoft’s Forest Key, less efficient:

We are 20% better. At constrained data rates, or at HD data rates, because it’s computationally more effective, we can do a significantly better job . We can do HD on a significant number of machines. You will be able to do HD video with Silverlight. That is something that Flash can’t claim.

On2 may dispute this, judging from the claims on its site; but even if Microsoft is only on a par, that might be good enough, bearing in mind the low cost of encoding and delivering:

Expression Media Encoder is a batch processing tool for delivering media to Silverlight. It’s an enterprise scale product. We have a streaming server that is part of Windows server. It is very cost effective. By comparison Flash has a very expensive SKU.

says Key. Another plus for Silverlight video is ease of development. Program Manager Wayne Smith closed his demo with a jigsaw puzzle video, by which I mean a jigsaw image, pieces strewn everywhere, with each piece playing a segment of video. This is not useful in itself, but it nicely illustrates that in WPF video is just another graphics brush. This makes it easy to integrate video into an interactive application, with overlays, user configuration options, multiple simultaneous videos playing, and so on. Welcome to interactive broadcasting.

I am not personally a video person; I’m more interested in the programming side. The second Silverlight punch is the announcement of official cross-platform .NET, something I’ve speculated about for a long time, since before .NET 1.0 was released. Why is Microsoft doing it now? In one sense it’s an admission of failure: there will never be a Windows-only internet, thank goodness. For the rest of us it is good news.

Will Microsoft compromise Silverlight to keep the full WPF better? That must be a risk; but Key insists not:

That’s not our concern. We’re going to make Silverlight as good as possible. We shouldn’t artificially sabotage Silverlight to keep differentiation.

Overall it’s a good story, and accounts for the generally enthusiastic reception which Mix delegates gave to the opening keynote, which was as good as the closing plenary was bad. Pay special attention to what the guys from Major League Baseball talked about, as this is where it comes together into a compelling deliverable.

With Silverlight and Expression, I now think Microsoft will make real impact.

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internet, itunes, multimedia

Linn Records adopts FLAC for hi-res downloads

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I was interested to see that Linn Records now offers FLAC downloads in its music download store. This is a download store done right – no DRM, no lossy compression (unless you specifically choose MP3).

It’s still something of a struggle finding a file format to please everybody. Linn now has three: MP3, lossless WMA, and FLAC. MP3 is no hassle. WMA is tiresome for Mac users. FLAC won’t play in Windows Media Player without an add-on. It’s even worse when it comes to high-res (typically 96/24) files. Linn says that high-res WMA won’t play at all in iTunes on the Mac, and that high-res FLAC won’t play in Windows Media Player.

Personally I shall choose FLAC if I buy any of these, as I have done with Robert Fripp’s DGM download store.

It’s great to see a small but highly regarded label adopting an open-source format for its downloads. How about it Apple?

 

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internet, software development, web authoring

Mono may implement Silverlight for Linux

Mono lead Miguel de Icaza likes Silverlight. He says:

It makes tons of sense for us to start looking at an implementation of Silverlight on Linux with Mono. There is already a XAML loader, it is the perfect excuse to use Antigrain for high-speed graphics and that only leaves the pesky media issue to be solved.

In fact, am kind of happy that Microsoft did not do the port themselves as implementing this sounds incredibly fun and interesting.

Microsoft should grab this offer, if it is serious about cross-platform. Although Linux currently only forms a small proportion of desktop operating systems, it is nevertheless significant; Ubuntu in particular is making a big impact. Mac/Windows only may be kind-of good enough for the USA, but that’s not the case worldwide.

 

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internet, software development, web authoring

Times Reader and offline Silverlight at Mix07

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I’m attending a panel discussion on the WPF-based Times Reader, with Tom Bodkin, Assistant Managing Editor and Design Director at the New York Times, and media designers Roger Black, and Filipe Fortes.

Bodkin is talking about the Times Reader, which is sees as offering the best of both worlds – print and web. He is an enthusiast for the tablet PC, but prefers the smaller ones like the Fujitsu P1610 [I agree 100%, I’m on a Toshiba Portege M400 now, but still miss my old, smaller Acer C110]. He thinks that multi-purpose tablets have more future than dedicated devices like Sony’s reader.

He likes the fact that Times Reader publications feel like a publication – “it’s not webby”, he says. He’s showing off some of the features of Reader, including newer features like “news in pictures”, which is a slideshow of images, and the ability to add ink notes to stories when using a Tablet PC. “It’s a print publication plus”, he says. He demonstrates the intelligent reformatting that Reader provides. There’s also a great new search feature, which includes word search and a graphical topic map that shows related stories.

I asked about the cross-platform issue. According to Bodkin a Silverlight implementation is on the way, which includes most of the features in the full version, in “a matter of months.”

This intrigues me, as I had been told by some Microsoft people that Reader would be difficult to implement in Silverlight. Two obvious issues are the limited text features, and the lack of offline storage. There is isolated storage coming in Silverlight 1.1 (far more than a matter of months away), but this will be inadequate for Reader.

It turns out that Nick Thuesen is here, the lead developer for Times Reader. I spoke to him afterwards. He has a neat solution for Silverlight’s limitations. The plan is to use an embedded browser (Safari web kit) and to host Silverlight within that. This way, the native desktop app can handle offline storage; Silverlight becomes more like Adobe’s Apollo, a desktop rich internet application.     

Why not Adobe PDF? “There’s no reflowing, PDFs are really limited,” says Bodkin. “We had an electronic New York Times in PDF, but to read anything… it’s just impractical.” “And this can update,” adds Roger Black, “But the big thing to me is the type. How this will work in Silverlight is not completely worked out.”

Fortes talks about magazine publishing through a WPF Reader, with a more intensively visual appearance, embedded video, and community features like most popular articles, most popular ads. He is also saying that typical web content still lacks the sophistication that print provides (think fashion images, carefully designed text). I find this thought-provoking: is the Web really so bad for this? Clearly this is impossible for naked HTML, but when supplemented by Flash and/or clever CSS?

There’s discussion about the continuing bias towards metaphors that work in the print world but not in the web world. The suggestion is that we still have a lot to learn about how to present content electronically.

Bodkin says that the NY Times writes two sets of headlines; web headlines are more literal than print in order to work well for search engines. This reminds me of a post I made three years ago called Google edits the internet:

…how much of what we read on the Web is influenced by Google’s search and advertising algorithms?

Black talks about a problem with the Reader, which is its dependence on templates into which XML content is poured. Good though they are, this is restrictive in design terms, compared to the complete flexibility of print.

What’s coming in Times Reader? Bodkin mentions plans for video, downloaded on demand, and the possibility of interactive features such as those Fortes has described.

Finally the panel considers some of the business issues. Income from web sites such as nytimes.com remains only a tiny fraction of what is needed to run a newsroom with a global network of reporters; armies bloggers do not remove the need for professional journalists. If print is slowly declining (and I think it is – Thuessen mentions that he has never bought a newspaper), then the question of “who pays” is important and largely unanswered.

Sadly, I stopped using the Times Reader when it went pay-only.

 

internet, software development, windows

Pay and play: how the Silverlight .Net runtime is kept small

Silverlight 1.1, currently in Alpha, will include a cross-platform version of the .NET runtime. The desktop version of this runtime is over 22MB, yet Microsoft is promising to keep Silverlight at around 4MB. How is this size reduction achieved? In part by stripping down the libraries to a minimal core, but Microsoft is also using another technique which it calls pay and play. This means that further class libraries are downloaded as needed, increasing the effective range of available libraries without impacting the size of the core runtime. Sleight of hand perhaps, but it does make sense for online apps.

Developers coding for Silverlight will need to know which of the libraries available in desktop .NET are also in the Silverlight framework. Because of pay and play, some will be in the core, some will be available on demand, and others will never be available. Apparently Visual Studio will give you a visual indication of which is which.

How big will the Silverlight runtime be if you include all the pay and play libraries? Here at Mix07, Microsoft’s Joe Stegman would not say, but I got the impression it will be substantially larger. Of course this is still Alpha; everything can change, and final decisions about what is core and what is pay and play are yet to come. Stegman was also uncertain about some aspects of delivery. You would imagine that pay and play DLLs would be downloaded from Microsoft’s servers, and that once downloaded they would be persisted and shared so that other applications can use them without a further download. Stegman says this is probably what will happen, but there seems to be some doubt.

The Silverlight 1.1 runtime will not be as small as it first appears.

 

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internet, multimedia, software development, web authoring

Silverlight on the Mac: picture

Here at Mix07 we’ve seen some impressive demos of Silverlight running on the Mac. All the demos worked; the applications looked the same on the Mac as on Windows. Scott Guthrie showed “Silverlight Airlines”, which uses .NET code to call an ASP.NET web service. You draw a line between cities to show where you want to travel, select a date, and a grid populates with the available flights. Here’s my fuzzy picture, though I imagine the demo itself may be put online soon:

 

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internet, software

Do you want Office in the cloud?

David Berlind has a series of interesting posts about Google apps versus Microsoft Office; the series starts here, more or less. Today there’s a related post from Dan Farber, who reports Microsoft’s claim (from Jeff Raikes) that there is little demand for Microsoft Office in the cloud.

Cloud-based applications have huge advantages – easy collaboration, zero install – but it happens that for me, there is little incentive to use Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets or the like. Cloud storage is more important than cloud applications. Cloud storage solves several problems including anywhere access and off-site backup. I also use an internet-based subversion repository that gives me document history. But I don’t need to use cloud applications in order to benefit from cloud storage. When out and about I usually work on my own laptop, not in internet cafes or on other people’s PCs. 

When I first saw Amazon S3 I knew immediately that it would be useful to me. When I saw Docs and Spreadsheets (and its predecessors like Writely), I was greatly impressed but had little reason actually to use the applications.

I am speaking personally because this will not be true for everyone. For some, the collaboration and zero install benefits of cloud apps will be more significant than they are for me. Further, these online applications are also an easy route to cloud storage; I realise that not everyone wants to mess around with S3 or Subversion. There is friction in having to think about where to save a document. With online applications that friction is removed.

What if Microsoft made cloud storage as seamless in Office as it is in Google Docs and Spreadsheets? It is surprising that an option to save to Windows Live is not built into Office 2007. Of course there is Sharepoint, whichI presume is the underlying platform for Live storage, and there is Groove, but the average home or small business user won’t have these set up. There are a couple of mysterious options in Word, under the Publish menu, for saving to a Document Management Server or creating a Document Workspace. They don’t do much out of the box. There is no wizard to help users create a new free Live account, with extra space and features for subscribers, for example.

There is also the question of bloat, which Berlind considers here and here. This is one of those things you don’t care about, until you do. I don’t care about bloat if an app performs well and the unneeded features are not in my way. I do care when it turns into an Outlook 2007 debacle. You run Outlook; then you run Thunderbird; and you see the downside of bloat. Word and Excel? Not an issue right now, they hum along fine.

So what does next-gen Office look like? Is it an improved Docs and Spreadsheets? Or Microsoft Office/Open Office plus cloud storage? I’m interested in opinions.

 

internet, software

Why I’m not using Google Web History

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Google Web History has two main benefits.  First, it enables smarter search. Google can take account of which pages you visited, presumably giving greater weight to sites where you viewed numerous pages rather than diving in and out quickly. Second, you get a nice Google-ised search of pages you’ve viewed, instead of attempting to find what you want in the history list of links, in IE or Firefox.

So why not? First, because Google has enough of my data already. I use Google for search, because I find it the best search engine more often than not. I use a Gmail account occasionally. I use Adsense. I’m experimenting with Docs and Spreadsheets. That will do.

Don’t I trust Google? Sort-of. It has a good track record, as far as I know. And it is not that I have anything particularly to hide. Still, the AOL disaster last year was a warning flag. And I do read the privacy policies, and don’t find them reassuring.

There’s a second reason. To sign up for full Web History, you need to install the Google Toolbar. This is how Google gets a record of pages you visit beyond your searches. However, I have a minimalist approach to add-ons, especially those which run all the time. My reward is a more stable and better-performing operating system. So I would need a strong reason to install the Toolbar, and I don’t have one.

There’s more. When you are invited to install the Toolbar, you are given an opportunity to read Google’s terms of service. Despite its generally excellent usability elsewhere, the big Goog doesn’t make it easy to read this document. The terms of service are in a narrow scrolling window. I recommend that that you Select All, Copy, and then Paste into your word processor. It comes to 14 pages in Word:

Except – here’s something strange. If you get to this page in FireFox, you get the general terms of service as mentioned above. If you get to this page in IE, you get a different document, which is for the Google Updater and the Google Pack:

The document is actually shorter than the general terms, but not good news if you like to keep control of your PC:

The Software may communicate with Google servers and/or Third Party servers from time to time to check for available updates to the Software, such as bug fixes, patches, enhanced functions, missing plug-ins and new versions (collectively, “Updates”). By installing the Software, you agree to automatically request and receive Updates.

There’s a similar clause in the general terms, but without the reference to third parties. Further, in this document you agree to stuff from Adobe, Real, Skype, Symantec and others. In practice I’m sure you can install the toolbar without all these other pieces, but still … this is a big red flag from my perspective.

As an aside, I wonder if corporate legal departments ever make the connection between what employees may be agreeing to online, and their normal legal policy? Put another way, what if I copy this agreement into an email, fire it across to legal, and ask, “Is it OK if I agree to this?” Complete with some wide-ranging indeminities, limitations of liability, non-warranties, and in some cases, the right to install stuff on your computer without asking again?

Bottom line: I’ll live without Google web history.

 

internet, software development

How not to get support

I’ve had four successive emails of increasing urgency from someone using my simple sqlite wrapper.

It’s sometimes difficult to handle such requests – the code is free and there is a limit to how much time you can give away – but in this case I’m unable to reply. The sender is using an email address that is not valid on the internet; the domain ends .local and it is not obvious what the real email address is.

If that’s you – please reconfigure your email client and try again.

 

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