Tag Archives: google

google, internet, software development, web authoring

My first Google Chrome Web Application

Update: this post is based on obsolete beta code. Please go to the updated version here.

When I read Patrick Aljord’s blog on how to create Chrome Apps I thought, “that looks easy”. So I installed the dev channel version of Chrome as advised here, though on a VM just to be safe, and set about creating my own.

Well, WordPress is a web application; so my example is this blog. I created a manifest in Notepad.

image

Next, using my artistic skills, I made two icons of the required size: 24×24 and 128×128.

I ran the dev. build of Chrome using the –enable-apps switch. On the Extensions tab there are tools for building a .crx, which is the container for a Chrome Web App. I built the app, then installed it.

image

You get a generic warning about the extension. I was surprised not to see a stronger complaint about my app having no authenticated signature – it could be from anywhere. I guess this may be changed for the final release.

After installing, the app appears in the Chrome New Tab page.

image

You can try my web app here.

The whole process is very simple, which I like. It is also almost the same thing as a bookmark or favourite link. The main differences that I can see:

  • Apps get pride of place on the default Chrome Home page.
  • Apps can be installed from the forthcoming Chrome Web Store, with user reviews, a payment model, and so on.
  • Apps can have extra permissions.
  • Apps can be locally installed as “serverless” apps – this is huge, especially for the forthcoming Chrome OS which has no other provision for local applications.

Incidentally, if you try installing an app into the current standard build of Chrome, it installs as an extension but does not do anything. I also had to omit the “permissions” section of the manifest, otherwise I got an invalid permissions error when installing. In the developer build all was fine.

I tried dragging my app from Chrome to the desktop to make a shortcut. It worked, but simply created a standard web shortcut, which opens in your default browser, not necessarily in Chrome.

It is all so easy that it will make sense for almost anyone to create a Chrome Web App from their web property. Which also means there will be plenty of junk web apps around.

I’m not clear exactly how the Web Store will work. While I would love to sell URLs for money, they are not inherently of any value, though a serverless app is different. Presumably the normal thing would be to sell some sort of subscription, which implies registration and user authentication. No doubt everything will work smoothly if you use a Google ID as your authentication provider, though I hope Google will also provide for alternative systems.

apple, google, internet, search

A great day for Android at Google I/O; not convinced by Google TV

1 Comment

Yesterday’s Google I/O was remarkable for several reasons. The most significant was not a specific technical announcement, but rather the evidence for a successful Google-led alliance against Apple in the mobile device market (and perhaps also in home entertainment with Google TV). Apple has hardly put a foot wrong since Jobs rejoined the company in 1996 – well, aside from a few minor lapses like the iPod Hi-Fi. With steadily increasing sales for the iPhone, it was beginning to look as if Apple would do to the mobile phone market what it did to the market for portable MP3 players, including the all-important App Store.

After Google I/O 2010 that seems less likely. Google showed off the momentum behind Android – there are now over 100,000 Android activations daily, according to Vic Gundotra – and then gave a compelling demo of new features in Android 2.2, code-named Froyo, including:

  • New Dalvik just-in-time compiler with 2-5x speed improvement in CPU-bound code
  • Better Exchange support with account auto-discovery, calendar sync, Global Address List support, and device policy support
  • V8 JavaScript engine in Android browser, 2-3x speed improvement
  • Apps can backup data to the cloud, for instant restore on a replacement device
  • Ability to make Android phone a portable wi-fi hotspot for your Windows, Apple or Linux machine
  • Stream your home media library to your Android device
  • Cloud to device messaging
  • Crash reports with stacktrace uploaded for developers to review
  • Some great demos of voice input combined with Google search and maps

In some ways the details do not matter; what does matter is that Google persuaded the world that Android mobiles would be more than a match for iPhones, but without the Apple lock-in, lock-out, and censorship.

Support for Adobe Flash is almost more a political than a technical matter in this context. I cannot help wondering whether Microsoft is working on Silverlight for Android; it should be, but probably is not. The Mono team on the other hand is there already.

Apple now has a bit of a PR problem; and while I am sure it will ride it out successfully and impress us at WWDC next month, the fact that it has a PR problem at all is something of a novelty.

Next came Google TV, with which I was less impressed, and not only because the demos were shaky. I understand the thinking behind it. You could almost see the $ signs revolving when Google mentioned the $70 billion annual spend on TV advertising. Google TV adds an Android device and internet connection to your living room television set, bringing YouTube to the largest screen in the house, enabling web browsing, and opening up interesting opportunities such as running Android apps, combining TV and web search, and overlaying TV with social media interaction.

It sounds good; but while I am a firm believer in the Internet’s power to disrupt broadcasting – especially here in the UK where we have BBC iPlayer – I am not sure that injecting the Web into TV like this is such a big deal. In fact, games consoles do this already. Sony’s Howard Stringer was at Google I/O to support the announcement, which has his company’s participation, but a PS3 already offers BBC iPlayer, Adobe Flash 9, and a basic web browser. I use this from time to time and enjoy it, but a TV is not great for web browsing since you are sitting at a distance, and wireless keyboards are a nuisance kicking round the living room – we tried that for a while with Windows Media Center. Activities like online shopping or simply Tweeting are easier to do on other devices.

Maybe it is just waiting for the right implementation. If it does take off though, I will be interested to see what the broadcasters think of it. What if Google manages to serve contextual ads based on the content you are viewing? That would not please me if I had invested millions in creating that content, specifically in order to attract advertising.

It may be developers that make or break Google TV. Add a few compelling apps that work best in this context, and we will all want one.

adobe, apple, internet, iphone, java, mobile, silverlight, web authoring

Adobe’s campaign against Apple misses the target

8 Comments

Nothing better demonstrates Adobe’s concern about being locked out of Apple’s mobile platform than a huge advertising campaign attempting, one assumes, to win public support and pressure Apple into yielding ground.

Still, if you are going to run a big PR campaign it helps to be right. But Adobe seems to be arguing that Flash support is essential to an open web, which is incorrect.

We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs. No company — no matter how big or how creative — should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web. … In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web? And we believe the answer is: nobody — and everybody, but certainly not a single company.

says the open letter from Adobe founders Churck Geschke and John Warnock.

Very good, but this is not an argument in favour of Flash. Flash is not part of HTML, Flash is not a standard, and Flash is not open – the specification for the player is published, but what goes into that specification is controlled solely by Adobe, and its player implementation is not open source. Flash is a proprietary plug-in. Are Geschke and Warnock arguing that all browsers on all devices should allow all plug-ins to be installed – including Silverlight, Java, ActiveX, and anything else you can think of? Or are they arguing that Adobe Flash is a special case? It is certainly a special case for Adobe, but any company will argue in favour of its own stuff.

The full-page advertisement that I’ve seen in various newspapers is not much better. Adobe’s pitch is that Apple is:

taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the web

This again is incorrect. Apple has an excellent mobile browser based on WebKit, as also used by Google, Adobe and others. You can do what you want on the Web, but if you use Flash it won’t render on Apple’s mobile devices. All that means is that Apple has chosen not to support Adobe’s plug-in. It is not an issue of freedom.

Personally I don’t like Apple’s approach. I’d prefer it to support the leading plug-ins (not only Flash); I don’t like the appification of the web -  dubbed the splinternet, or splintered web, by some. And I particularly object to Apple’s clause 3.3.1 in its new developer agreement, which blocks apps that are created with cross-platform tools, no matter how well they perform or how good they look. That, it seems to me, is anti-competitive in spirit.

I think Adobe should make more of clause 3.3.1, rather than indulging in special pleading for its plug-in. And if I were Adobe, I wouldn’t be whinging about Flash being blocked. Rather, I’d be highlighting all the great things Flash can do, and all the content you will miss without it. My full-page ad would say, “Mr Jobs, your iPhone is broken”, and extol the merits of Android and other devices that will run Flash.

I’d also be working on the technical arguments, that Flash is unstable, insecure and resource-hungry. Is it Apple’s fault? Is it because of poorly coded SWFs, and if so what is Adobe doing about that? And how will Adobe improve Flash so that it behaves better in future, and not be perceived as the new Vista?

Maybe next time round?image

adobe, apple, flash, google, internet, web authoring

After Apple’s Flash ban, what next for Adobe?

2 Comments

I imagine there must be urgent meetings taking place at Adobe following Apple’s prohibition of Flash content or applications on its iPhone and iPad devices, and last week’s open letter from Apple CEO Steve Jobs which leaves little hope of a change in policy.

The problem is that until now Adobe has put the Flash runtime at the heart of its strategy. The Flash Platform is a suite of tools and technologies including middleware (LiveCycle Data Services), web and desktop runtimes (Flash and AIR), design and developer tools (Creative Suite and Flash Builder). The company has worked to integrate Flash and PDF, using embedded Flash content for multimedia and to blur the boundaries between documents and applications.

If you look at Creative Suite 5, the latest release of Adobe’s flagship tools and from which it derives most of its revenue, there is scarcely a product within it which Flash does not touch.

Adobe’s hosted document and collaboration platform, Acrobat.com, uses Flash for online document viewing and editing, for web conferencing, for online presentations.

Adobe’s abandoned Flash to iPhone compiler was not only something for third-party developers, but also for Adobe itself, and the company has already been using it to enable access from iPhone to some of its Flash-based online services. For example, Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro Mobile for iPhone, which lets you attend Acrobat Connect Pro meetings:

This application was developed using the Flash platform and the Packager for iPhone to publish it as a native iPhone application. We will also be able to use the same code to deliver this application on other mobile devices when AIR for mobile devices becomes available later this year.

Of course Adobe is not solely a Flash company. It’s also a PDF company, and while there is no Adobe Reader for iPhone, it is at least possible to view PDFs on Apple’s devices. Adobe is an HTML company too, and products like Dreamweaver and Fireworks are geared towards HTML content.

Still, Apple has created a big problem for Adobe. The appeal of the Flash Platform starts with the ubiquity of the runtime.

Let’s assume that Apple trundles on, grabbing an increasing share of the Smartphone market and encroaching into what we now think of as the laptop/netbook market with iPad and possibly other appliance-type computing devices. What can Adobe do? Here are a couple of top-level choices that occur to me:

1. Resign itself to being an anything-but-Apple company. There is life beyond iPhone and iPad; and Adobe is making good progress towards establishing Flash elsewhere, from Android mobiles to set-top boxes to games consoles. Unfortunately the Apple-owning community is a wealthy and influential one; the impact of losing that part of the market is greater than its market share implies. Nevertheless, this seems to be Adobe’s immediate reaction to the Jobs bombshell. It is rumoured to be giving Android phones to its employees, for example, and there are signs of an Adobe-Google alliance forming against Apple – note that Google is building Flash by default into its Chrome browser.

2. Pull back on Flash. For example, redesign Buzzword, its Flash-based online document editor, in HTML and JavaScript. Tune its PR message to emphasise how useful its tools are in an non-Flash context, rather than presuming its runtime will be everywhere. I think Adobe will have to do this to some extent.

A mitigating factor is that while Adobe has (until now) done a great job of deploying the Flash runtime, it has done less well at monetising it. If you look at its latest financials, you’ll see that Flash Platform (including AIR) accounted for only 6% of its revenue, compared to 50% for design tools including Creative Suite and Photoshop, 28% for business use of Acrobat, and 10% for the recently acquired Omniture web analytics. Although some of its design market is Flash-dependent, there is plenty more that is not.

google, internet, search

Google flexes page rank muscles, hits Daily Express?

3 Comments

It’s been reported that the Daily Express newspaper is selling paid links, in other words links that look to Google’s web crawler like links from independent editorial, but in fact are paid for by advertisers.

The consequence of doing this, according to Google:

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

I then saw a report saying that Google has indeed penalised the Daily Express. I checked the page rank of the Daily Express home page here and found that it is indeed lower than could be expected.

image

While it is difficult to say what the page rank should be, Alexa shows the Express site as among the top 15,000 worldwide and in the top 1000 in the UK, with over 4,000 incoming links.

Although the Daily Express is not to my taste, I have misgivings about this process. A significant proportion of web traffic comes via Google, and lower search rankings have a direct effect on traffic and therefore business. Exactly how Google determines search rankings is a commercial secret, even though the gist of how it works is well known. There is not much you can do if mistakes are made, other than to complain to Google and hope someone pays attention to you.

There is nothing illegal about selling paid links, and the article highlighted in the Express is marked as “Sponsored”. While it is right for Google not to count these links as genuine recommendations, I am less sure about whether there should be additional punishment for running them. It puts too much power to make and break other companies into the hands of Google.

Of course we don’t know if the low ranking is a result of the paid links or not; that is speculation. Nor do we know how closely the published page rank corresponds which how Google actually determines the order of search results. Looking at Alexa’s report, there’s no conclusive evidence of declining traffic, though Alexa’s figures are based on a relatively small sample.

Still, I get a ton of these paid link requests and this kind of story makes me glad that I always turn them down.

cloud computing, google, internet

Mad or brilliant? Google Chrome OS will print via the cloud

1 Comment

Google Chrome OS, the operating system that is essentially a browser on a netbook, does not support printer drivers. Given the problems these things still cause, you might think that is a good thing. At least, until you want to print a Google map to give to a friend. Or an invoice to stick in the post. Or any of those other innumerable reasons for printing that we somehow find, even in the age of electronic documents.

The solution Google has come up with is called Cloud Print. You register your printer or printers with Google, then print over the internet. The printer might be a “cloud-aware printer”, none of which yet exist, which sits with its internet connection waiting for print jobs; or a “legacy printer” which works via a proxy running on a PC. Google will distribute this proxy with Google Chrome. The proxy gets the print job from Google, then prints using the local printer driver. Since Chrome OS does not have any printer drivers, the proxy cannot run on Chrome OS itself.

This is mad, of course, because it means that in order to print a document from Chrome OS to the printer sitting on the same local network, you have to send it to Google and back. If your internet connection goes down, you cannot print from Chrome OS at all.

Still, given that printers still have a habit of grinding and whirring a bit before actually printing, a little delay while a document travels to Google and back probably won’t upset you.

The brilliance of the idea is that cloud-aware printers will just work, and you can print to them from anywhere. If it’s your boarding pass, you are in New York and the printer is in London, that won’t help you much; but there are other scenarios where it might. Printing a receipt while away can be handy, for example; it won’t be needed until you do your accounts.

I like the way Google is thinking creatively about what it means to have a computer that is wholly cloud-centric. If it can make such a device usable, it will be revolutionary.

I don’t like the idea of having to sign into Google to print a document. Google says:

We expect other entities to provide their own cloud print services as well. Users associate printers with their Google Account via the service.

It’s another of these, “you are welcome to our standard” offers. In practice, signing permanently into Google will be the deal with Chrome OS, as it is to a large extent with Android. The whole thing revolves around your Google identity, which is why it pays Google to make the investment.

adobe, flash

Adobe no longer investing in Flash compiler for iPhone, sings Android praises

4 Comments

Adobe’s Mike Chambers has posted about Apple’s new restriction on how applications are built for the iPhone or iPad. He says Adobe is ceasing development work on this feature:

We will still be shipping the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5. However, we are not currently planning any additional investments in that feature.

Of course he says “currently” so development could be resumed, presumably if the restriction is lifted.

He also suggests that Apple may be specifically targeting Flash despite the general wording of its notorious clause 3.3.1:

While it appears that Apple may selectively enforce the terms, it is our belief that Apple will enforce those terms as they apply to content created with Flash CS5.

Chambers spends much of his post saying how well Flash runs on Android – though Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 for Android are still in beta – and suggesting that Flash developers target Android instead.

The problem is that developers will go where their customers are. If Apple continues to increase its market share, its platform will continue to attract developers.

This is another instance of something I blogged about two years ago: the risk of building your business on a third-party platform. My post then was about Amazon, eBay and Facebook. Now the focus is on Apple. Other platforms like Salesforce.com and Google have the same inherent problem.

I think this problem will get worse rather than better, as people migrate from general-purpose open platforms to more locked-down appliances.

borland, cloud computing, delphi, google, internet, microsoft

Jewels from the loft: launch of Delphi, Netscape’s Constellation, HTML to die, Longhorn for developers

5 Comments

It’s the Easter holiday in the UK and I’ve suffered a bout of spring-clean fever. It is time, I decided, to clear out a mountain of old books and magazines.

A job like this always prompts reflections, the first of which is the sad decline of print journalism in the field of software development. It hurt to send piles of Byte, Exe, Dr Dobbs’s Journal, Application Development Advisor and others off for recycling.

image

A few things caught my eye. Exe June 1995, and there is a young Anders Hejlsberg talking to Will Watts about his new creation: Borland Delphi:

Before Delphi, you always had to make a choice. Do I go for the performance of a native code compiler, or the ease of use of a visual development environment? Do I go for a powerful object-oriented language, or a proprietary 4GL client/server tool? What programmers really want is all of the above, in one package. That’s what we set out to do.

What is striking about Delphi is that this was not hype. It delivered on that promise. It was better than its obvious rival, Microsoft’s Visual Basic, in almost every way (I will give VB a point for sheer ubiquity, especially in VBA guise). Delphi is still with us today, not bad after fifteen years. However, it never came close to VB’s market share, which shows that quality has never been the sole or even the most important determinant of sales success.

Next up is Byte, March 1998. “Reinventing the Web”, the cover proclaims. “XML and DHTML will bring order to the chaos”.

image

Inside there is a breathless description of how XML will change everything, and a quote from Jon Bosak:

HTML, this so-called ‘hypertext markup language,’ implements just a tiny amount of the functionality that has historically been associated with the concept of hypertext systems. Only the simplest form of linking is supported – unidirectional links to hard-coded locations. This is a far cry from the systems that were built and proven during the 1970s and 1980s.

Indeed. “We need to start replacing simple HTML with more powerful alternatives”, the article concludes. “The migration to XML must begin. The future of the Web depends on it.”

Here’s one thing that mostly did not work out as planned. The W3C tried to retire HTML, failed, and is now belatedly engaged in specifying HTML 5.

Byte March 1997 is also intriguing. Netscape’s Marc Andreessen smiles out of the cover.

image

Jon Udell, in the days before he disappeared into some Microsoft corridor, writes about Netscape’s “Constellation: the network-centric desktop”:

Netscape’s Constellation takes a less Windows-centric approach and puts more emphasis on location-independent computing, regardless of the platform. No matter what kind of system you’re using or where you are, Constellation presents a universal desktop called the Homeport. Although the Homeport can appear in a browser window, Netscape usually demonstrates it as a full-screen layer that buries the native OS – certainly one reason Microsoft is not embracing Constellation.

Netscape got a lot of things right, a true pioneer of what we now call cloud computing. What went wrong? Well, Microsoft went all-out to conquer Netscape by removing its browser dominance. Microsoft’s weapon was the free Internet Explorer.

It is all a pre-echo of what is happening now with Google and Microsoft, the difference being that Google has huge financial power thanks to its marriage of internet search and internet advertising. Unlike Netscape, Google is winning.

This blog is long enough; but I’ll give a brief mention to another jewel from the archives: a book given out at PDC 2003 entitled Introducing Longhorn for Developers.

image

It describes Microsoft’s vision for Longhorn: a radical new application model for Windows, building on XAML, WinFS and “Indigo”, the communication framework. It bears little resemblance to what eventually appeared as Vista, which is a shame as it was compelling in many ways.

google, mobile, symbian

Android the new Windows?

I’ve just reviewed the LG GW620 Android phone. I was impressed by its features but disappointed by its usability – it’s not that bad, but scrolling web pages accurately with touch I found almost impossible – it’s hard to avoid scrolling too far and missing out a chunk – and why does LG supply the device with four different email clients?

Apple’s iPhone is much more expensive and compares badly on features, but has the usability and polish that the LG phone lacks.

OEM Android versus Apple iPhone – it reminds me of Windows vs Apple on the desktop.

One is for the mass market, cheap, feature-rich, a bit chaotic, always a few annoyances, but you put up with them because you can still get things done, and it’s an open platform which lets you do what you like.

The other is premium-cost, single-vendor, less annoying, and you spend more time getting on with what you want to do and less time fighting the machine.

I don’t intend this as a  complete parallel. There are more than two popular operating systems in the SmartPhone market right now – Symbian, Meego, WebOS, Blackberry; and Microsoft has big hopes for Windows Phone 7. That said, it is hard to see all these platforms thriving long-term.

sony

Sony locks down the PS3 – removes Other OS support from all models

2 Comments

Sony is removing the ability to install an alternative operating system such as Linux on the Playstation 3. In a blog post, Sony’s Charlotte Panther says:

PS3 Firmware 3.21 will be available this Thursday. It will disable the “Install Other OS” feature that was available on the PS3 systems prior to the current slimmer models, launched in September 2009. This feature enabled users to install an operating system, but due to security concerns, we’re now removing this feature.

Panther suggests not upgrading the firmware as a workaround, but observes that this will block access to the PlayStation Network.

It is a move that will matter little to most PS3 owners, but a great deal to the few who were doing interesting work with the cell processor that runs Sony’s games console.

The wider picture is that we are seeing a rise in locked-down devices across the industry. Games consoles are generally like this – the Xbox 360 is the same – as are most mobile phones. Apple is now extending the iPhone model, where users have limited access to the device, to the larger iPad. As I understand it, Google intends that ChromeOS devices will also be locked down, though it is too early to say whether installing alternative operating systems on these will be possible. Sony mentions security, and certainly having a protected operating system that can only be updated by the vendor is an excellent security feature.

The downside is that it gives greater power to the vendor, to control what you can do with the device, stifle creativity, and potentially to charge more for applications and extensions than is possible with an open system.

There is a good explanation of how this works in Daniel Lyons’ recent piece on the Apple iPad.