All posts by onlyconnect

adobe, flash, google, software development, web authoring

Why Google doesn’t use Flash (much)

Here at Developer Day, I couldn’t decide between the sessions on Android and App Engine, so ended up hearing Ajaxian Dion Almaer talking on the state of Ajax. Almaer also works for Google on its developer programs.

The talk was a bit fuzzy and high-level for my taste, though I enjoyed his tour of JavaScript libraries.

Following the talk I asked him why Google makes little use of Adobe Flash (which he hardly mentioned). He said it would like to, but did not regard it as an open platform. I asked him what Adobe would need to do to change that, and he said that the key things would be to open source the Flash player, and to give the community more influence over future Flash development.

Might this happen? Almaer said that it is a subject of ongoing discussion with Adobe. The implication is that if Adobe makes these changes Google will start supporting and using it more actively.

It will be an interesting subject to take up with Adobe when I next have that opportunity.

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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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google, search, software development

A smile at Google Developer Day London

I’m at Wembley Stadium for Google Developer Day. No, Google is not filling the entire stadium (yet); but it is a decent venue. On arrival we were given the usual USB stick though this one is distinctive:

Smiley Google USB guy

Made me smile after reading nothing but gloomy economic news on the journey over.

I’m not expecting news announcements today; just a bit more detail on initiatives like App Engine and Gears. The agenda was put together before the Chrome announcement; but I’m hoping Google’s new browser will make an appearance as well.

If you are here and would like to chat please come and say hello – tell me what you think of Google’s developer activities.

google, software development, web authoring

Sophos video about hacked BusinessWeek site

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Sophos has a short video showing evidence of a hacked page on the BusinessWeek web site. I was impressed by how Google Chrome handled this:

The interesting point is that we are finding malicious JavaScript on highly reputable sites. Sophos says this one was caused by SQL injection, and I noticed that the page uses Microsoft’s old .asp technology in which it was particularly easy to code insecurely.

What’s the solution? Beats me; there are just zillions of insecure web applications out there. However, it’s disappointing that BusinessWeek still has not cleaned up the pages, which were reported last week (but perhaps that means last thing Friday).

apple, google, software development, web authoring, windows

Google Chrome for Mac and Linux will be a long while coming

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When I looked at the Chromium source code and did a build, I noticed how much of it was Windows-specific. Although the WebKit rendering component is already cross-platform, it seems that the Mac and Linux versions of Chromium and therefore Chrome are a long way from ready. This is from the build notes for Mac OS X:

Right now, the Mac build is a work in progress that is much closer to the start than the finish. No application that renders web pages is generated at the end of these instructions!

Cross-platform work usually involves compromises, and it looks like the Google team pointed the dial more towards optimising for Windows than towards ease of porting. That surprises me, since it likely means more work maintaining the application for several platforms as well as delays now.

Chrome’s ambitions as an application platform cannot be realised until it runs on the Mac. Further, a disproportionate number of web designers and developers use Apple.

How long is a long while? Good question. I’ll be seeing some Google folk tomorrow; I’ll let you know what they say.

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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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microsoft, open source, software development

Developers: will you or have you signed for ribbon rights?

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This is the dialog you see when installing Delphi 2009 or C++ Builder 2009:

There’s a similar restriction on use of the ribbon controls in the latest MFC.

The license information page is here. The license itself has two provisions that you might care about. First, you agree not to use the Ribbon, also known as the Fluent UI, in “Excluded products”:

“Excluded Products” are software products or components, or web-based or hosted services that perform primarily the same general functions as the Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access software applications, and that are created or marketed as a replacement for any or all of those Microsoft applications.

OpenOffice.org – that’s you.

The second provision is more troublesome (unless you are OpenOffice or Google Apps). You have to comply with the Design Guidelines:

Your Licensed UI must comply with the Design Guidelines. If Microsoft notifies you that the Design Guidelines have been updated or that you are not complying with the Design Guidelines, you will make the necessary changes to comply as soon as you reasonably can, but no later than your next product release that is 6 months or more from the date you receive notice.

So what are the Design Guidelines? Good question. This is where it gets silly. In order to see the Design Guidelines, you have to agree the “2007 Microsoft Office Fluent User Interface Design Guidelines Evaluation License Agreement”, which among other things is a non-disclosure agreement. Furthermore, you have to destroy them within 30 days:

3. RESTRICTIONS. The Design Guidelines are for reference only and may not be used in development. You agree that you will destroy the Design Guidelines within thirty (30) days after you first acquire them or upon termination, whichever is earlier.

I am guessing here, but I hope and suppose that if you agree the main license you no longer have to destroy the guidelines to which you are meant to be conforming. It’s not obvious that this is the case, since the main agreement refers back to the UI licensing page, and the only way I can see to get the design guidelines is by agreeing the evaluation license which requires you to destroy them.

I reckon Microsoft’s lawyers are getting carried away.

Lunacy aside, I’d presume that the guidelines are detailed and that conforming could involve considerable work. It is also unclear to me what would happen in the real world if Microsoft issued an edict requiring you to update your application to its latest version with 3D revolving icons, for example. If you are an external developer and your customer does not want to pay, what then? I suppose in theory you should insure against it, or sneak in a clause to your development contract that says the customer pays for extra work imposed by Microsoft in the event that it exercises its rights.

Pragmatically I guess it is unlikely to happen. Still, I don’t like unreasonable agreements. In any case, are we sure that if you did not agree the license, but still went ahead and used the Ribbon UI, that Microsoft could successfully pursue you? Call it a toolbar, and it’s been commonplace in software for years.

microsoft, software development

Microsoft makes up with the OMG

Microsoft has joined the Object Management Group:

Microsoft Corp. today outlined its approach for taking modeling into mainstream industry use and announced its membership in the standards body Object Management Group™ (OMG™).

I’m not clear exactly when Microsoft joined the OMG. It is already listed as a Contributing Member (the highest level) here. Still, the warm words are something new. In the past Microsoft’s modelling strategy has been presented as an alternative to the OMG. For example, here’s IBM’s Agile Development expert Scott Ambler in a 2005 article:

Luckily, the OMG isn’t the only modeling game in town. Microsoft has struck out on its own, a strategy that has clearly served it well in the past, and is suggesting a new approach to modeling: Domain Specific Languages (DSLs).

And here’s Grady Booch in 2004, on why UML is good and why he “disagrees with Microsoft’s rejection of the UML in favour of proprietary domain-specific languages.”

Before the UML vs DSL wars it was the CORBA vs COM wars, and in both cases it was OMG on one side and Microsoft on the other.

It’s different now, with warm words from OMG CEO Dr Richard Mark Soley:

Microsoft has always been one of the driving forces in the development industry, helping to make innovation possible but also simplifying many of the most challenging aspects of the application development process …[stuff about UML] … Microsoft’s broad expertise and impact will make its membership in OMG beneficial to everyone involved.

It is all part of Microsoft’s efforts to establish “Oslo”, its new modelling initiative which it hopes is the next big thing in development productivity, and will feature in the next Visual Studio.

I wonder what has happened to software factories, which was Microsoft’s modelling buzzword just a couple of years ago? Part of Oslo, or now abandoned?

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microsoft, silverlight, software development

Doubling performance with Silverlight multithreading

Bart Czernicki has a detailed post showing how Silverlight 2.0’s multithreading can improve performance. He took my counting primes code and  adapted it for parallel processing. On my quad core system the results are impressive:

As you can see by squinting at the screen grab, the processing time went from 0.43 to 0.20 seconds.

Multithreading is getting a bad rap in some quarters, because it greatly complicated debugging. On the other hand, if you have an app which does some heavy duty calculations then performance benefits like this are worth a little pain.

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