Why Google Gears? Thoughts from Google Developer Day

By tim, on May 31st, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Google Gears is a browser plug-in to support running web applications offline. It has several components:

A local server – not a complete web server, but a cache for web pages. One of its benefits is to solve versioning issues. For example, what if you had an application that retreived one page from the cache,

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May 31st, 2007 | Category: internet, software development | Leave a comment

SQLite will be everywhere

By tim, on May 31st, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

One of the core components in Google’s new Gears API is SQLite, an open source database engine. I’ve been an enthusiast for SQLite for a while now – I first blogged about it in 2003. I’ve also worked a little on SQLIte wrappers for Java and Delphi.

It’s a superb embedded database engine and I’m

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May 31st, 2007 | Category: software, software development | Leave a comment

Google’s offline problem

By tim, on May 31st, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Here at Developer Day I attended the workshop on new Maps API features. Unfortunately I was one of the last into the session and could not connect to the internet. I suspect a problem with IP number allocation but I don’t know for sure. I spend some time trying to get it working, then gave

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May 31st, 2007 | Category: internet, software development, web authoring | Leave a comment

My question to Google

By tim, on May 31st, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

I grabbed the first question after the opening keynote today. It was prompted by my visit to the Google Gears site – I’d intended to install the beta. I was confronted with this dialog:

I asked:

Why does Google display an 8-page agreement in a box 7 lines high?

More significantly, why does it

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May 31st, 2007 | Category: internet, software, software development | Leave a comment

Google Developer Day begins

By tim, on May 31st, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

I’m early to the London event; but registration is open and I get a flimsy red bag with oddments including a tin of “Goo” which turns out to be thinking putty. The event is at The Brewery in the heart of the City. We are ushered into the Blogger Lounge – stylish, with bright-coloured cushions,

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May 31st, 2007 | Category: internet, software development, web authoring | Leave a comment

Not convinced by LINA

By tim, on May 30th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Set for public release next month, LINA is a new approach to cross-platform development. Write your app once, for Linux, then deploy using a lightweight virtual machine, implemented for Windows, Mac and Linux. Why even Linux on Linux? Well, on Linux compatibility is a problem, with a multitude of different distributions out there. A VM

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May 30th, 2007 | Category: software, software development | 5 comments

Offline blog authoring with Word 2007

By tim, on May 29th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

After writing a blog with Adobe’s Contribute, part of the new Creative Suite, I thought I should try the same task in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s quite a contrast. Word does not attempt to display the surrounding furniture of the blog, so it feels less cluttered than Contribute, and you get the benefit of Word’s

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May 29th, 2007 | Category: blogging, web authoring | One comment

Offline blog authoring with Adobe Contribute

By tim, on May 29th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

I generally use Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer to write my blog entries. It has a few annoyances, but I like it better than trying to type directly into WordPress. After installing Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 I noticed a new Contribute toolbar appearing in my web browser, including a Post to Blog button, reminding me that

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May 29th, 2007 | Category: blogging, software, web authoring | 5 comments

How many XBox 360s have failed?

By tim, on May 28th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Simple question. In the early days Microsoft stuck to its story about 3-5%, muttering about “industry average”. More recently Peter Moore, in an interview with Mercury News, ducked the question, saying:

I can’t comment on failure rates, because it’s just not something  – it’s a moving target. What this consumer should worry about is the way that

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May 28th, 2007 | Category: gaming | 4 comments

Sutter on Concurrency

By tim, on May 25th, 2007 Follow tim on Twitter

Herb Sutter, Software architect at Microsoft and C++ guru, has posted his slides (PDF) from OGDC, a game development conference. His talk was on the challenge programming for concurrency. If you’re not familiar with the subject, the earlier article The Free Lunch is Over is a great starting point.

The free lunch is the assumption

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May 25th, 2007 | Category: software development | 2 comments
 
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