Showing posts with label JavaScript. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JavaScript. Show all posts

Saturday, August 04, 2012

Map Clash


This is one space Google can't afford to slacken. It will have to double down and go for it.

How Apple's new vector-based Maps leave Google Maps looking jittery
Apple isn't just declaring its independence from Google Maps with its new in-house backend for Maps in iOS 6. It has developed a superior way to deliver map data that relies on resolution independent vectors rather than Google's multiple zoom levels of bit mapped images. .... resolution independent vector images ..... allows users to smoothly zoom in with a pinch of the fingers, while details and labels pop up as space allows. ..... When using to vector maps, all coastlines, roads, labels and other data are represented as mathematical lines rather than as fixed graphic images. This enables Apple to allow users to freely rotate the map however they want; the text of map labels dynamically reorients itself to remain legible. When users zoom in or out, the text size of labels scales smoothly, because it is being rendered live as dynamic text, not as a graphic image that includes text and must be "repainted" for every zoom level..... if you load a map of San Francisco then turn off network access, you can still zoom in and out all over a very large surrounding area without getting Google's zoomed in jaggies and blank grid spaces. ..... Apple's new vector maps can deal far more gracefully with a lost data connection ..... vector graphics (among other technologies) have the potential to revolutionize mobile maps .... Google acquired Where 2 Technologies in 2004 to release its initial web app for online maps, relying heavily on JavaScript and AJAX technologies to enable map zooming and exploration features on the web that nobody had ever seen before..... as Google focused its attention on delivering Android as a competitor to the iPhone, it began launching new map features exclusively on Android as differentiating features iOS didn't have .... Since 2009, Apple has only acquired a dozen different smaller companies. A quarter of these highly selective, strategic moves involved mapping companies. In July 2009 Apple bought Placebase, followed by Poly9 the next July. In August 2011, it bought C3 Technologies, known for work in developing 3D images based on aerial or satellite images. ..... But Apple didn't just want to clone Google Maps. It made plans to replace it with superior technology. By delivering maps as vector graphics, rather than static bit maps, Apple realized it could enhance the navigation experience and take fuller advantage of the graphics capabilities of its newest mobile devices. ...... Google is also working on its own next generation Google Maps that makes use of vectors, but it has a more difficult job because it is targeting several major platforms: the web, which relies upon the experimental new MapsGL enhancements of WebGL; Android, which has a native JavaME-like platform; and its existing public API, which is rooted in how Google Maps has worked in the past. ..... Apple can introduce entirely new technologies very rapidly because it only has to optimize for one platform: iOS Cocoa Touch. Apple isn't serving up a public web version of its own maps as Google does, so it isn't constrained by the limits of web-based technologies. ..... When iOS 6 ships later this fall, Apple will essentially take away about half of Google's mobile maps users, and virtually all of its iOS users. When Apple ships its own Cocoa version of Maps for Mac OS X users, Google will likely lose another valuable segment of desktop users as well. This new competition should push Google to deliver mapping tools that iOS and OS X users will want to go out of their way to download and use
Microsoft just made a legit push in the email space too. This is 3D chess.

Yahoo used Google Search like Apple used Google Maps. But Yahoo did not ditch Google Search for a better Yahoo Search. Too bad.

One great thing about having a successful IPO (here is looking at you Facebook) is you get to engage in wonderful acquisitions. Android was also a Google acquisition.


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Monday, July 30, 2012

Open Source Victory

Image representing MySQL as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
There was a time when open source felt like a crusade. It was considered rebellious. Microsoft talked it down. Now the biggest corporations depend on open source to do cutting edge work. Open source is like this big ocean you fish in.

Open source won
open source is now mainstream and a new norm .... After more than a decade of the low-cost, lean startup culture successfully developing on open source tools, it’s clearly a legitimate, mainstream option for technology tools and innovation. ..... large organizations are actively adopting many of the open source technologies we track, e.g., web development frameworks, programming languages, content management, data management and analysis tools .... MySQL appears as popular as ever and remains open source after three years of Oracle control and Microsoft is pushing open source JavaScript as a key part of its web development environment and more explicit support for other open source languages. Oracle and Microsoft are not likely to radically change their business models, but their recent efforts show that open source can work in many business contexts. ..... open source permeates most interactions on the web. ..... the collaborative, sharing culture that permeates the open source community spreads to the enterprise and government with the same impact on innovation and productivity.
You have to ask, what drives and sustains the open source contributors? A lot of people toil on open source projects with no monetary return in sight or mind. I think they are responding to a basic creative urge.
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Sunday, July 29, 2012

HTML5 Richness

English: W3C HTML5 Badge in SVG.
English: W3C HTML5 Badge in SVG. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
For the longest time it has been that the richness on the desktop has far surpassed the richness possible in the browser. That is about to reverse with HTML5.

Ninja power: open-source HTML5 toolset aims to enable richer Web apps
Three new open-source software projects developed at Motorola Mobility .... a new content creation tool called Ninja, a JavaScript development framework called Montage, and a testing automation tool called Screening ..... The Ninja authoring tool .. 3D scenes and vector graphics ... Montage bridges the gap between developing native applications and Web sites. .. Screening completes the toolset, providing an interface for creating, editing, and manipulating application test scripts. Screening is built with Montage for the front end and NodeJS for the server, and it integrates with WebDriver implementations for Chrome, Opera, FireFox, and Internet Explorer to script the browser. .... Ninja creates all the required HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (if necessary) to render the content you create
The article talks at length and into great technical detail. It has been written by the very people who came up with the technologies being talked about.

Looks like Motorola is not strong only in hardware. It seems to have a deep bench when it comes to software as well. This work might as well have been done at Google. It is so at the edge.


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Monday, April 16, 2012

Skype On HTML5 Has Smartphone Implications

Image representing Skype as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBaseWP Sauce: Web version of Skype confirmed by Microsoft job posting

I have long expressed the belief at this blog that HTML5 is where it is at. Smartphone apps are transitional authorities. If Skype becomes available on your browser, and if the HTML5 browser is the primary player on your smartphone, what is your Skype ID? I want it.

Smartphones are computers. They have been misnamed. PC is personal computer. SC should be small computer. Smartphones are small computers.
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Friday, February 10, 2012

HTML5


Wikipedia: HTML5
the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 1997) ...... core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4, but XHTML 1 and DOM Level 2 HTML as well ..... introduces markup and application programming interfaces (APIs) for complex web applications ...... Many features of HTML5 have been built with the consideration of being able to run on low-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets. In December 2011 research firm Strategy Analytics forecast sales of HTML5 compatible phones will top 1 billion in 2013. ...... new video, audio and canvas elements, as well as the integration of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) content that replaces the uses of generic object tags ........ new elements, such as section, article, header and nav, are designed to enrich the semantic content of documents ...... The W3C is developing a comprehensive test suite to achieve broad interoperability for the full specification by 2014, which is now the target date for Recommendation. ..... advancing HTML5 to Recommendation provides the entire Web ecosystem with a stable, tested, interoperable standard. ...... Ian Hickson of Google is the editor of HTML5. ...... Some deprecated elements from HTML 4.01 have been dropped, including purely presentational elements such as font and center, whose effects are achieved using Cascading Style Sheets. There is also a renewed emphasis on the importance of DOM scripting (e.g., JavaScript) in Web behavior. ......... In addition to specifying markup, HTML5 specifies scripting application programming interfaces (APIs) ...... The canvas element for immediate mode 2D drawing. ..... Timed media playback ..... Offline Web Applications ..... Document editing ...... Drag-and-drop .... Cross-document messaging ..... Browser history management .... MIME type and protocol handler registration ..... Microdata .... Web Storage, a key-value pair storage framework that provides behaviour similar to Cookies but with larger storage capacity and improved API. ..... Geolocation .... HTML5 alone cannot provide animation within web pages. Either JavaScript or CSS3 is necessary for animating HTML elements. ..... XHTML5 is the XML serialization of HTML5. .... XHTML5 requires XML's strict, well-formed syntax. ...... September 2011, 34 of the world's top 100 Web sites were using HTML5 ..... As of 1 April 2011, this logo is official. ..... The W3C then said the logo "represents HTML5, the cornerstone for modern Web applications".

Sunday, January 01, 2012

5G + HTML5 = Magic

Deutsch: HTML5 Logo English: HTML5 official lo...Image via WikipediaWhen we get there it will be like there is just one operating system on all smartphones and tablets. Better, it will be like there is not even an operating system. The browser is all you need. And it will be a rich browser.

For the longest time the underlying assumption has been that if you want rich applications you need to do it on the desktop. On the smartphone we call them apps. By the time you hit 5G and HTML5 we will have crossed a threshold. The reverse will be true. The not rich applications will be on the desktop and in the form of apps on smartphones. The truly rich apps will be all browser based. That is really something.

This is not just an always on premise. This is an always on, and really really fast premise. And HTML5 is that architecture that all top tech companies are rapidly gravitating towards. When we get there it will be like all of software will have to be reinvented, redone. All apps will need a redo. There will be a lot of work to go around for sure.

The single biggest failure of the stimulus bill of 2009 was that taking every American into gigabit broadband territory was not the centerpiece of that legislation.

Sunday, August 07, 2011

Kevin Shitstorm Of Instagram

Android robot logo.Image via WikipediaKevin Shitstorm of Instagram takes great pride in saying their team is only four people and they have still managed to take over the world. I think that is one remarkable record to have. I mean, they have been acquiring a million new users a month.

But don't you think they should maybe grow the team a little and release an Android app like maybe six months ago?

Lightbox Android app could be an Instagram killer This Android app is aiming to replace your regular camera functionality and, from what I’ve seen, it has a very good chance of doing that as well as giving the little, green robot something to crow about when iPhone owners talk about Instagram...... a social photo-viewing app that can tie in to your various social networks to display photos. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare and the company is compressing those photos on its servers to make sure the pics pop up quickly..... many of the innovative mobile photography companies are focusing on the iPhone only

Monday, August 01, 2011

Adobe Was Always Going To Do HTML5

Logo of Adobe Systems IncorporatedImage via WikipediaI am not at all surprised that Adobe is getting into HTML5. It never was Flash versus HTML5 for Adobe, even when Steve Jobs suggested it was so.

Verdict: The iPhone Is Not Open, Flash Is Not Cutting Edge
HTML 5 And Online Video

Also Mark Zuckerberg's response to Google Plus can not be Facebook News, it has to be HTML5. HTML5 is what will finally eat the iPhone's lunch.

Apple Going After Google's Cloud? Facebook Going After Apple With HTML5
Fred Wilson On Android And HTML5
HTML 5 And The Small Screen
Facebook's Next Major Breakthrough

The idea that you have to create one app for the iPhone and another for Android and a third one for Blackberry, and another for a Windows phone, not to say for the iPad, that is just weird.

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Google Wave Architecture: Designed For Mass, Massive, Global Innovation


The technologies behind Google Wave have been designed to bring desktop like experiences into the browser paradigm, but end up doing more than that. The shift and growth are so sure and certain soon we will be missing browser like experiences while on the desktop. Why can't I don this with a desktop client?

The browser is about to take off. The richness will only grow. The speeds will only get faster. The bandwidths will go way up. The masses of people involved will go up both on the production and the consumption sides, and there will be not be any distinct boundary between the two.

The desktop was designed for one person. The browser was always meant for the masses, for crowds. Finally the promise is catching up with capabilities.

This is barely the beginning. Google Wave is three things: a tool, a platform and a protocol. There are many ways to use Google Wave as it exists today. There can be much innovation in how it gets applied. It is the difference between Blogger the service and all sorts of wonderful blogs you end up with. And then there are the platform and protocol aspects. Get geared for major technological leapfrogs. Here it is the difference between the iPhone and all its many applications, it is the difference between Hotmail and Gmail.

The Google Wave Architecture
17 Suggestions To Blogger
Square Search
Google Wave Ripples
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Blogger Search Gadget: What Took You So Long?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

From The Google Blogs

Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

On The Web

InfoQ: Google Wave's Architecture Google Wave is three things: a tool, a platform and a protocol. The architecture has at its heart the Operational Transformation (OT), a theoretical framework meant to support concurrency control. ....... based on hosted XML documents (called waves) supporting concurrent modifications and low-latency updates. ...... using JavaScript and HTML5 on the client side ....... Java + Python on the server side ..... a public API and the company promises to open source the entire platform ......... modify the base code and extend it with gadgets and robots. ....... Gadgets are small programs running inside of a wave, while robots are “automated wave participants.” Wave can also be embedded in other mediums like blogs. ....... Each wave has a globally unique wave ID and consists of a set of wavelets. ...... A wavelet has an ID that is unique within its containing wave and is composed of a participant list and a set of documents. The wavelet is the entity to which Concurrency Control / Operational Transformations apply. ....... A participant may be a user, a group or a robot. ....... Documents form a tree within the wavelet. ....... the crucial part of Wave’s technology. Google Wave makes extensive use of Operational Transformations (OT) which are executed on the server. ....... Operations are sent to the server and propagated to each client on a character by character basis ......... To start communicating on a wavelet, a client sends an Open Request containing the Wave ID and the Wavelet ID to the server. The server responds with a snapshot - the serialized state of the wavelet - or a history hash of the corresponding version. ........ The Google Wave Federation Protocol allows multiple entities (wave providers) to share waves with each other.
InfoQ: Is Google Wave Going to Have an Impact on RIA/Silverlight? Wave is actually a competitor for Microsoft’s SharePoint and Exchange ....... Flash, Silverlight and Java FX ...... Some of the new features to be introduced in HTML 5 and web API proposals from W3C and WHATWG are: canvas, video, geolocation and web workers. ........ Wave which is making extensive use of HTML 5. ....... the company is “betting big on HTML 5”. ...... The Wave client is a major proof of concept (or pilot project) for HTML5. If the wave client becomes a killer app, it will have a major (negative) impact on other RIA architectures. ....... Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters ........ “Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything.” ........ today, it is Google which is driving web standards forward. ....... HTML5 is a working draft still. ....... people have to use those new browsers. The slowness of standards leads me to believe that RIA platforms will be around a while ....... “[Wave] is more about competition with Exchange + IM + OneNote w/Sharepoint Integration + Outlook”. ........ The primary reason we want to open source our code is actually adoption of the protocol. ....... Wave's effect on Silverlight is indirect. HTML will enter in the RIA space with HTML 5, taking a share from Flash and Silverlight. Google's heavy support for HTML 5 will contribute to that.
Google Wave Architecture | High Scalability hosted XML documents (called waves) ..... users from different wave providers can communicate and collaborate using shared waves
Google Wave Federation Architecture ‎(Google Wave Federation ... the Google Wave Federation Protocol for federating waves between wave providers on the Internet. ........ various elements of Google Wave technology - data model, operational transformation, and client-server protocol ...... The wave federation protocol enables everyone to become a wave provider and share waves with others. ....... A robot is an automated participant on a wave (see the robots API). Examples are translation robots and chess game robots. ........ A gateway translates between waves and other communication and sharing protocols such as email and IM. ....... Different wavelets of a wave can have different lists of participants. ......... there is a designated wave provider that has the definitive copy of that wavelet. We say that this particular provider is hosting that wavelet. ......... different users have different wave views for a given wave. ...... the user's read/unread state for the wave, is stored in a user-data wavelet ....... A wave is identified by a globally unique wave id, which is a pair of a domain name and an id string. ......... Like a wave id, a wavelet id is a pair of a domain name and an id string. ......... Wavelets in the same wave can be hosted by different wave providers. ........ a federation gateway and a federation proxy. ........... "local wavelet" and "remote wavelet"
Salesforce rides on Google wave : News : Software - ZDNet Asia
Google Wave Architecture
Google's move to introduce a Wave of synchronicity | Web Apps News ...

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The Google Wave Architecture


With Google Wave, Google has proven it is still the 800 pound gorilla of web technology innovation. So you have to ask, what is behind Google Wave? What's under the hood? Looking at the architecture also gives us a better idea of all that might become possible with this new heart-pounding innovation.

Google wants Wave to become a fundamental web application like email, that most fundamental of all web applications. Email is not actually a web application, it has been around for decades, it just migrated to the web when Sabeer Bhatia came along. Microsoft already had email but still paid Bhatia $400 million for Hotmail, so I guess the migration was a seismic event.

Google offers email, so do Yahoo and Microsoft and every ISP worth its salt, and all those web programs talk to each other. I have the option to send an email from paramendra at gmail dot com to paramendra at yahoo dot com or paramendra at hotmail dot com. Wave is going to be like that.

But only Google does the innovation in Gmail. Wave is not going to be like that. Any outside party could innovate Wave and add new and exciting features, and numerous will. I expect there to be so much innovation in the Wave space that I expect Wave to become like an operating system. We have now moved beyond talking of a browser as an operating system. Now we are going to have to talk of a web application as an operating system. That application is Wave.

Square Search
Google Wave Ripples
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Blogger Search Gadget: What Took You So Long?
Of Waves And Tsunamis
Google Wave: Wave Of The Future?
Google Wave: If Email Were Invented Today

From The Google Blogs

Google Wave team heads to Google Developer Days in Asia
Introducing the Google Wave APIs: what can you build?
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

What's your IQ ? a free, online course to increase your knowledge about Google Analytics. The curriculum consists of over 20 self-paced online lessons
Activities and Tasks Design Guidelines how to enrich the user experience you are creating. .... multitasking, activity reuse, intents, and the back stack. .... what it means to design and develop an Android UI.
Top 10 Malware Sites recent surge in compromised web servers ...... more than 4,000 different sites that appeared to be set up for distributing malware by massively compromising popular web sites. Of these domains more than 1,400 were hosted in the .cn TLD. Several contained plays on the name of Google such as goooogleadsence.biz, etc. ...... All domains on the top-10 list are suspected to have compromised more than 10,000 web sites on the Internet. .... our Safe Browsing API is freely available and is being used by browsers such as Firefox and Chrome to protect users on the web.
Google Chrome, Sandboxing, and Mac OS X Google Chrome for the Mac is coming along fine Keyboard shortcuts & Search Operators c: quick call
Improving Freenet's Performance Freenet divides all files into 32KB blocks (called CHKs), which are each fetched and decrypted separately ..... the project took one developer most of a year, the final diff was over 46K lines of code covering 320 files
Introducing the Conversations element Have you been looking for a way to easily add your favorite Google products to your own site? Now you can with Google Web Elements. .... the Conversation element.

A Speedier Google Chrome for all users It's been about 8 months since we launched Google Chrome. Aside from exclaiming how fast it is, users have been sending us lots of feedback and feature requests. We've increased our focus on speed and also added some of the most-requested features. ....... Google Chrome is more stable than ever--we have fixed over 300 bugs that caused crashes since launch. ....... Making the web faster continues to be our main area of focus. Thanks to a new version of WebKit and an update to our JavaScript engine, V8, interactive web pages will run even faster.
Launching Google Suggest in Swahili Today we have added full support for Swahili - on our domains in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo. ...... The Google Suggest feature originally started as a 20% project in 2004, and we are thrilled to now have Suggest in Swahili.
The best and the brightest I can't think of a better environment than academia for asking hard questions and trying to solve the unsolvable. It's at universities that graduate students perform some of the most exciting and game-changing research in computer science and technology. ...... find the best and brightest PhD students ...... The breadth of research covered by these students and the scope of their vision was astounding. ..... The Google Fellowship will provide them with funding to cover their tuition and expenses, plus an Android-powered phone and a Google mentor.
Google News gets a makeover 7-year anniversary of Google News. ..... a better news browsing experience and connect you to a wide variety of perspectives on current events. Product Ideas - Now for Blogger!
The Google Sites blog is moving Google Sites already has features built in from other Google applications, like when you insert Picasa web albums, YouTube videos, gadgets, and Google Docs into web pages
Monetize!
New in Labs: Automatic message translation Since the heart and soul of Gmail is about helping people communicate, I'm proud to announce the integration of Google's automatic translation technology directly into Gmail. ..... Google's automatic translation technology ...... a language you can understand.
Hierarchical navigation and other new features for Google Sites
Import your mail and contacts from other accounts
30,000 Valeo employees put Google Apps to work putting complex, expensive on-premises IT systems in the past. ..... integrated voice and video chat. Valeo – an auto parts manufacturer with 30,000 Internet-connected employees in 27 different countries – has joined the movement. .... the Google Blog
Tasks, now in Calendar too
Bringing your contacts to the cloud
Calling all teachers we enjoy seeing people learning and working together on Google Sites.
Share your location with your Gmail and Google Talk friends
Manage your contacts, outside of Gmail
New in Labs: Google Search right in Gmail
Spruce up your surveys: 70 colorful themes
New in Labs: Extra emoticons
Sheet protection gives you finer control of your spreadsheets
Calling Video Publishers find any video, at any time, from any site.
Statistical machine translation live Most state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems in use today have been developed using a rules-based approach and require a lot of work by linguists to define vocabularies and grammars. ....... a different approach: we feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. ....... Arabic is a very challenging language to translate to and from: it requires long-distance reordering of words and has a very rich morphology. ..... you probably should not try to translate poetry
Translate between 41 languages with Google Translate we can now translate between languages read by 98% of Internet users. ........ For several languages, Google Translate is the first freely available machine translation system for these languages. ....... We've heard stories of people using Google Translate to help them do business internationally, and we've seen many websites (e.g., New York's Metro Transit Authority) and blogs add the Google Translate My Page Gadget to their pages to make their content more accessible to people from all over the world. ...... the cross-language search feature .......... Translate provides people who may not otherwise have a lot of web content available in their own language with access to the wealth of content on the truly worldwide web.
30,000 new Google Apps business users at Valeo and voice and video chat. ...... Gmail was really the beginning of how we're rethinking personal and group productivity, and over the last couple of years, business adoption has accelerated rapidly as the hosted suite has emerged as a powerful, affordable successor to on-premises business technology. ....... Today, more than a million businesses have moved beyond traditional software and hardware to cloud computing – where data and applications live online – and they're using the Google Apps suite not just for Gmail, but also for shared calendaring, collaborating on files without attachments, private video sharing and quickly deployable internal and external sites. IT managers are refocusing the money and time saved towards core projects that help their individual businesses become more competitive.
Gmail voice and video chat I happen to work in the New York City office (one of Google's many distributed offices), while most of my teammates work in the Mountain View headquarters. While we make good use of video conferencing, there are times when I need to talk to a teammate at a moment's notice. .......... Learn more about voice and video chat


On The Web

InfoQ: Google Wave's Architecture
InfoQ: Is Google Wave Going to Have an Impact on RIA/Silverlight?
Google Wave Architecture | High Scalability
Google Wave Federation Architecture ‎(Google Wave Federation ...
Salesforce rides on Google wave : News : Software - ZDNet Asia
Google Wave Architecture
Google's move to introduce a Wave of synchronicity | Web Apps News ...



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