All posts by onlyconnect

adobe, apple, flash, professional, software development, web authoring

Adobe targets Apple iPhone and iPad browsers with tool to convert Flash projects

March 8, 2011 onlyconnect 2 Comments

Adobe has released an “experimental technology” codenamed Wallaby on its Adobe Labs site. Not all Adobe Labs projects become fully released products, but it is an indication of serious interest. The experiment was first previewed at the Adobe Max conference last year.

Wallaby is an Adobe AIR application for Windows and Mac. The tool is simplicity itself: just select a .FLA file and convert it.

.FLA is the format of Flash projects, not Flash output. gauges

According to Adobe’s John Nack Wallaby has limited goals, focused on “converting typical banner ads to HTML5.” It is aimed at WebKit-based browsers, the implication being that Adobe’s main intent is to enable Flash ads to work on Apple’s iPhone and iPad, though it also works on Google Chrome and Apple Safari on the desktop. There is no ActionScript conversion, though you can edit the exported project after conversion and add your own scripting.

ActionScript is based on JavaScript so a conversion tool should not be too hard.

Other Flash features not supported include video, sound, 3D transforms, Filters, Inverse Kinematics, and gradient strokes

The fascinating aspect of Wallaby is in its potential. Users do not care whether a web site or application uses Flash or HTML5; they just want it to work. Adobe’s primary strength is in its design tools. One possible scenario is that Adobe might gradually extend its HTML5 support so that the tools are applicable for both platforms; Flash could become a workaround technology for legacy browsers.

No doubt Adobe would rather see the Flash runtime used everywhere but at least the company has a plan B. If, for example, Apple comes to dominate personal and mobile computing and continues to block Flash wherever it can, then that is important. Adobe already has a Flash to iOS packager for apps; now it has the beginnings of a solution for in-browser Flash on iOS as well.

Update: revised post with more detail about what is not supported.

.net, apple, google, microsoft, mobile, mono, open source, professional, silverlight, software development

Mono project: no plans for cross-platform WPF

March 8, 2011 onlyconnect

Miguel de Icaza’s report from the Game Developer Conference is upbeat, rightly so in my view as usage of Mono is continuing to build, not only in game development with Unity, a development tool that uses Mono as its scripting engine, but also for mobile development for Apple’s iOS with Monotouch and for Android with Monodroid. These mobile toolkits also give Mono a stronger business model; many sites use Mono for serving ASP.NET applications on Linux, but without paying or contributing back to the project.

Mono is an open source implementation of C# and Microsoft’s .NET Framework.

That said, it is interesting that Mono is still struggling with an issue that has been a problem since its first days: how to implement Microsoft’s GUI (Graphical User Interface) framework on other platforms. Mono does have Gtk# for Windows, Mac and Linux, but this does not meet the goal of letting developers easily port their Visual Studio client projects to Mono. There is also an implementation of Windows.Forms, but de Icaza mentions that “our Windows.Forms is not actively developed.”

Apparently many tools vendors asked the Mono team at GDC when Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) would be implemented for Mono. WPF is the current presentation framework for Microsoft.NET, though there is some uncertainty about where Microsoft intends to take it. I remember asking de Icaza about this back in 2003, when the WPF framework was first announced (then called Avalon); he said it was too complex and that he did not plan to implement it.

This is still the case:

We have no plans on building WPF. We just do not have the man power to build an implementation in any reasonable time-frame.

That said, Mono has implemented Silverlight, which is based on WPF, and there are some signs that Microsoft might merge WPF and Silverlight. What would the Mono team do then?

Miguel de Icaza says:

Silverlight runs on a sandbox, so you can not really P/Invoke into native libraries, or host DirectX/Win32 content inside of it.
There are other things missing, like menubar integration and things like that.

Of course, this is no longer true on Windows: Platform Invoke is coming in Silverlight 5.

Perhaps the Mono team will knuckle down and implement Silverlight with desktop integration, which would be good for cross-platform Silverlight and compatibility with Microsoft .NET.

Then again, it seems to me that Mono is increasingly divergent from Microsoft .NET, focusing on implementing C# in places that Microsoft does not touch, such as the mobile platforms from Apple and Google.

That is actually a sign of health; and you can understand why the Mono team may be reluctant to shadow Microsoft’s every move with Silverlight and WPF.

.net, delphi, development, microsoft, professional, software development, visual studio

DevExpress developers ask for more Windows Forms, say Silverlight and WPF not ready

March 4, 2011 onlyconnect 3 Comments

DevExpress, which creates add-on components and tools for Windows and Delphi, has posted its 2011 roadmap. This shows more convergence between components for Silverlight and WPF:

In essence, by the end of the year, the functionality of DXGrid, DXEditors, DXDocking, and DXRibbon will be the same across both platforms.

As for Windows Forms, or winforms, the roadmap says:

With regard to the Windows Forms controls, it is most likely that there will be a large number of smaller enhancements and new features rather than any large complex new control. The reason for this is simple: we believe that our offerings for this platform are very mature and robust.

Customers posting comments to CTO Julian Bucknall’s blog are not happy:

It is sad to see Winforms pushed back so much. WPF is still too slow on most computers for major apps and SL is not mature enough for a complete ERP app.

says Sigurd Decroos, while Heiko Mueller is more blunt:

Sorry guys, but with this roadmap I will not extend my subscription. I use only WinForms and ASP.NET and I’m not interested in WPF/Silverlight – WPF at this time for me is not suitable for my kind of applications (larger business Apps). Silverlight in my eyes is a dead technology – HTML5 is the future for rich internet applications.

Porting is also an issue says Ioannis Mpourkelis:

I believe that you should put more resources on the WinForms controls for 2011. Winforms is here to stay for many years, especially for the companies who want to support existing Winfroms applications. Currently it is impossible to port WinForms applicaitons to Silverlight and very difficult to port WinForms applications to WPF.

Check the full comments for more.

More evidence for the uncertainty around where Microsoft is going with its rich client API.

Update: Bucknall comments on this specific issue here.

apple, professional, software development

JetBrains announces IDE for Objective C to compete with Xcode

March 4, 2011 onlyconnect

JetBrains, maker of the admired IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE, has announced CIDR, an IDE for Objective C.

The 10 facts in the initial post tell us that it will be Intel Mac only, will open and create Xcode projects, and integrates with the standard interface builder and with the iOS simulator.

Xcode is decent so what is the point? Mainly I guess because of the refactoring and productivity tools JetBrains builds into its tools. W are promised refactories, on the fly code analysis, and code completion.

I am sure it will be worth a look, though taking on Apple will not be easy; it is a bit like going up against Microsoft’s Visual Studio n Windows, except that Xcode is free.

That said, it does not take much in terms of added productivity to pay back the cost of an IDE.

apple, google, mobile

Google fails to protect its mobile platform

March 3, 2011 onlyconnect

The discovery of viruses in apps on Google’s Android Market is troubling. I like the fact that Android is open, and that you can easily install an APK (Android Package) from any source onto your device if you want to. That said, it is reasonable to expect that apps downloaded from the official Android Market will be virus-free, or at least that some attempt has been made to check them for malware.

Another problem which is apparently rampant in the Android market – and also to some extent in Apple’s app store – is app stealing, where someone takes an existing app, copies and re-uploads on their own account. In most cases it seems that the malware was on apps pirated in this manner.

Note that while it took Google less than five minutes to pull the malicious apps from the store, the original developer had apparently been trying for more than a week to get them pulled on copyright violation grounds.

Google takes 30% transaction fee for apps sold in the market. Enough, you would think, to check for malware.

Most seriously for the Android market, the situation for users is that apps on Android Market might be malware, whereas apps on Apple’s App Store are not. That is a big advantage for Apple, and one that you would have thought Google would want to counter.

The only winners here are the anti-virus companies, who will be delighted to inflict their subscriptions on mobile users just as they have on Windows desktops.

apple, microsoft, mobile, professional, software development

Apple announces slightly better iPad, world goes nuts

March 2, 2011 onlyconnect

Apple CEO Steve Jobs says the iPad 2, announced today, is “magical, revolutionary and at an unbelievable price”.

The new iPad is dual-core, has front and back cameras, and a new magnetic cover which also forms a stand. It is also 33% thinner and 15% lighter.

These are nice improvements, but the truth is that it will not be very different from the first one.

It was enough though for the press to announce catastrophe for the competition:

Larry Dignan on ZDNet:

Apple just ensured that the other tablets are dead on arrival.

James Kendrick on ZDNet:

Here’s all you need to know about the iPad 2: it’s thinner, lighter, faster, got cameras and is more capable than the iPad, for the same price. Apple had dominated the tablet wars with the original iPad, and with the iPad 2 it is game over … Apple will continue to maintain or grow its market share in the tablet space, and the competition will release tablets that are not as good and cost lots more than the iPad/iPad 2. Rarely does one company in the technology sector dominate a product category so totally as Apple does the tablet space.

I am still mulling this over. There is a lot to like about the iPad – convenience, design, long battery life – but there are also annoyances; and while Dignan and Kendrick may be right, I would like to think there will be healthy competition and that at least some of the interesting devices on show at Mobile World Congress earlier this month will find a market.

Another question is how the appearance of ever more powerful smartphones will influence the tablet market. It is hard to believe that the average person will carry three devices: smartphone, tablet, laptop. Personally I would like to get it down to one, which is why I find the Motorola Atrix an interesting concept: it plugs into a laptop-like external keyboard and screen when required.

Apple’s advantage though is its focus on quality and design, rather than features. Few other manufacturers have learned this lesson. There is always something not quite right; and rather than fix it, a new model six months later with something else not quite right.

There was something else interesting about today’s event. iMovie for iPad 2, priced at $4.99. What is happening to the price of software, and what are the implications for developers? Something I will explore in another post shortly.

Spare a thought for Microsoft. Remember Bill Gates, telling us that one day tablets would dominate portable computing? Fumbling tablet computing may have been Microsoft’s biggest mistake.

design, development, php, professional, software development, web authoring

JetBrains WebStorm 2.0 and PHPStorm 2.0 First Look

March 2, 2011 onlyconnect 1 Comment

I respect JetBrains, an IDE company which survives despite intense competition from free tools such as Eclipse and NetBeans. It does so because developers like the products, especially the IntelliJ IDEA Java IDE. The tools are focused on coding; there are few visual designers but lots of coding help, such as code completion, refactoring, find usages, and fast navigation. The tools are also relatively lightweight, so start up quickly, and generally run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

The latest from JetBrains is two related web development IDEs. WebStorm 2.0 is for general HTML/CSS/JavaScript work, and PHPStorm 2.0 is a superset of WebStorm which adds PHP editing and debugging. There is also some support for Adobe’s Flex and ActionScript code.

New in PHPStorm is PHP 5.3 support, Zend Debugger support, improved SQL editing, support for the Mercurial source code management system, and updates for HTML 5 and EcmaScript 5.

I am interested in these tools since HTML development is increasingly important. Browsers are getting increasingly powerful, with HTML 5 and fast JavaScript engines challenging plugins as rich application runtimes, and PHP is less well served by IDEs than you would expect considering its popularity.

My first impressions though are mixed. I noticed a lot to like, in particular the work JetBrains has done on supporting mixed languages: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, SQL,XML and so on. One of its features is that code completion works even within quotes. For example, if your PHP is outputting HTML to the browser, code completion still works. Most editors treat anything within quotes as plain text rather than as code.

The IDE is highly configurable and also supports plugins. Live templates let you expand abbreviations to code fragments. There is support for generating documentation with JSDoc, ASDoc and PHPDoc. Testing with PHPUnit is integrated. These are products that will appeal to developers who are code-oriented – are there any others? – and who like the ability to fine-tune their tools to improve productivity.

That said, I did not find it easy to get started with PHPStorm. The main challenge is configuring your PHP environment to support debugging. I have not yet succeeded, though I have not spent all that long on it. Difficulty getting PHP debugging working seems to be the biggest single topic on the support forums currently.

I know this is tricky and it took me a while to get it working with Eclipse. It is important though, and anything the tools vendors can do to make this easier to setup would be welcome. There is a case for simply installing a dedicated LAMP or WAMP server with the product so that developers get immediate and reliable support for PHP debugging, with the option to configure for their own PHP server later.

Another thing I found annoying was the over-zealous spell checker, which seems inclined to check variable names as well as being unaware of PHP extensions like mysqli:

I expect there is a way to fix both issues by configuring the product.

In general JetBrains does not seem to suffer from the “not invented here” syndrome and uses open source libraries and tools; in fact it depends on Firefox for JavaScript debugging, and automatically installs its own plugin to improve integration.

However I picked up a note of disapproval in the description on the Zen Coding site about the way JetBrains has chosen to implement Zen Coding abbreviations:

These plugins are developed by third-party and has their own ZC engine implementation, which leads to different feature set and abbreviation syntax. Zen Coding team has no relation to this projects

WebStorm is modestly priced at £54.00 for individual developers or £115 per concurrent user for organisations. PHPStorm is £77 or £154 on the same basis. Free licenses are available for education or for open source projects, on application.

Competing products include the free Eclipse PDT and NetBeans, the commercial Zend Studio, and for a more designer-friendly approach to PHP, Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.

software development

NVIDIA CUDA 4.0 simplifies GPU programming, aims for mainstream

February 28, 2011 onlyconnect 3 Comments

NVIDIA has announced CUDA 4.0, a major update to its C++ toolkit for general programming on the GPU. The idea is to take advantage of the many cores of NVIDIA’s GPUs for speeding up tasks that may not be graphic-related.

There are three key features:

Unified Virtual Addressing provides a single address space for the main system RAM and the GPU RAM, or even RAM across multiple GPUs if available. This significantly simplifies programming.

GPUDIRECT 2.0 is NVIDIA’s name for peer-to-peer communication between multiple GPUs on the same computer. Instead of copying objects from one GPU, to main memory, and to a second GPU, the data can go directly.

Thrust C++ template libraries Thrust is a CUDA library which is similar to the parallel algorithms in the C++ Standard Template Library (STL). NVIDIA claims that typical Thrust routines are 5 to 100 times faster than with STL or Intel’s Threading Building Blocks. Thrust is not really new but is getting pushed to the mainstream of CUDA programming.

Other new features include debugging (cuda-gdb) support on Mac OS X, support for new/delete and virtual functions in C++, and improvement to multi-threading.

The common theme of these features is to make it easier for mortals to move from general C/C++ programming to CUDA programming, and to port existing code. This is how NVIDIA sees CUDA progress:

Certainly I see increasing interest in GPU programming, and not just among super-computer researchers.

A weakness is that CUDA only works on NVIDIA GPUs. You can use OpenCL for generic GPU programming but it is less advanced.

CUDA 4.0 release candidate will be available from March 4 if you sign up for the CUDA Registered Developer Program.

cloud computing, google, sharepoint

Hands on with Google Cloud Connect: Microsoft docs in Google’s cloud

February 24, 2011 onlyconnect 6 Comments

Google has released Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, and I gave it a quick try.

Cloud Connect is a plug-in for Microsoft Office which installs a toolbar into Word, Excel and PowerPoint. There is no way that I can see to hide the toolbar. Every time you work in Office you will see Google’s logo.

From the toolbar, you sign into a Google Docs account, for which you must sign up if you have not done so already. The sign-in involves passing a rather bewildering dialog granting permission to Cloud Connect on your computer to access Google Docs and contacts on your behalf.

The Cloud Connect settings synchronise your document with Google Docs every time you save, or whenever the document is updated on Google’s servers.

Once a document is synched, the Cloud Connect toolbar shows an URL to the document:

You get simultaneous editing if more than one person is working on the document. Google Docs will also keep a revision history.

You can easily share a document by clicking the Share button in the toolbar:

I found it interesting that Google stores your document in its original Microsoft format, not as a Google document. If you go to Google Docs in a web browser, they are marked by Microsoft Office icons.

If you click on them in Google Docs online, they appear in a read-only viewer.

That said, in the case of Word and Excel documents the online viewer has an option to Edit Online.

This is where it gets messy. If you choose Edit online, Google docs converts your Office document to a Google doc, which possible loss of formatting. Worse still, if you make changes these are not synched back to Microsoft Office because you are actually working on a second copy:

Note that I now have two versions of the same Excel document, distinguished only by the icon and that the title has been forced to lower case. One is a Google spreadsheet, the other an Excel spreadsheet.

Google says this is like SharePoint, but better.

Google Cloud Connect vastly improves Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010, so companies can start using web-enabled teamwork tools without upgrading Microsoft Office or implementing SharePoint 2010.

Google makes the point that Office 2010 lacks web-based collaboration unless you have SharePoint, and says its $50 per user Google Apps for Business is more affordable. I am sure that is less than typical SharePoint rollouts – though SharePoint has other features. The best current comparison would be with Business Productivity Online Standard Suite at $10 per user per month, which is more than Google but still relatively inexpensive. BPOS is out of date though and an even better comparison will be Office 365 including SharePoint 2010 online, though this is still in beta.

Like Google, Microsoft has a free offering, SkyDrive, which also lets you upload and share Office documents.

Microsoft’s Office Web Apps have an advantage over Cloud Connect, in that they allow in-browser editing without conversion to a different format, though the editing features on offer are very limited compared with what you can do in the desktop applications.

Despite a few reservations, I am impressed with Cloud Connect. Google has made setup and usage simple. Your document is always available offline, which is a significant benefit over SharePoint – and one day I intend to post on how poorly Microsoft’s SharePoint Workspace 2010 performs both in features and usability. Sharing a document with others is as easy as with other types of Google documents.

The main issue is the disconnect between Office documents and Google documents, and I can see this causing confusion.

Update: I uninstalled Cloud Connect after a couple of days. Two reasons. First, the chunky toolbar is annoying and takes valuable working space. Second, I had performance issues when working with documents opened from SharePoint. I guess the two do not get on well together.

Microsoft has its own unsurprisingly negative take on the product here. Apparently Cloud Connect uses the Track Changes feature under the covers, hence breaking this feature for any other purpose. If so, I would like to have been warned about this. On the other hand, I still like the usability of Cloud Connect. Microsoft is right to observe that auto-sync could result in inadvertent document sharing; but the simple and prominent sharing dialog is easier to use than SharePoint permissions.

Tim Anderson's IT Writing