Technology Bites

Google Chrome OS: Scheduled to release in late 2010

Ram — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:34:27 +0000

Google announced Google Chrome OS in July, at that time it was just an announcement, no screenshots and working demos. Today they finally gave more details on the project and how it works and when it will be available widely. Google Chrome operating system is cloud based as previously thought, it is simple to use, faster. Don’t get excited as it won’t be available immediately, it will take atleast an year to be released to the public.

Important part of the today’s brief about the OS is that the code is available as open source project and is open for contributions from the developer community. Source code download details.

What is Google Chrome OS

Google Chrome OS will run on both X86 and ARM chips and primarly aimed at netbooks users. The OS is useful for the people who use web apps a lot and those who rely on web applications, as most of the user experience takes inside the web browser. Google Chrome OS is a chrome browser “running within a windowing machine on top of a Linux Kernel”.

Everything runs on the browsers, using web applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar etc. Whatever you want to store you can store on the cloud using the browser. You don’t need to install any applications. The OS itself updates daily to keep up to date with the code changes.

You can use USB sticks and things like that, for example you can plug a camera and watch videos using a web based media player or copy those files to a cloud based storage.

Security

Google says Google Chrome is designed keeping security in mind. Either user or OS detects if the system is compromised and an update can be initiated to the OS and after a reboot the system goes back to the recent known good state. More on the security here.

Chrome OS Screenshots

Videos

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Google Chrome OS: Scheduled to release in late 2010

Originally published at Technology Bites by Ram

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 First Details

Ram — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:32:54 +0000

Microsoft spilled some details on the upcoming Internet Explorer version 9 at the PDC 2009 (Professional Developers Conference 2009). Microsoft started working on IE 9 from past three weeks, so there is nothing much you can expect at this point of time but the goal is now to improve the rendering engine performance and to speed up the browsing experience for the users. IE9 is not available immediately for people to download and test but at least Microsoft is working on to improve the IE as a standards compliant browser.

According to the IE Blog, the Javascript rendering is faster than the its predecessor Internet Explorer 8, IE8 rendering engine performance is poor compared to the other browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Safari. But the early build of IE9 is faster than IE8 and close to other browsers performance tested with Webkit SunSpider test.

As we know already IE8 doesn’t pass the Acid 3 test, it scores 24/100, the new IE9 build managed to score 32/100 which is not good but it shows an improvement. Since this is a very early build things may improve in the future.

The most interesting feature they are working on in IE9 is the graphics acceleration, IE9 can use the graphics card for the rendering graphics and text using DirectX technology installed on windows systems.

Bringing the power of PC hardware and Windows to web developers in the browser. The PC platform and ecosystem around Windows deliver amazing hardware innovation. The browser should be a place where the benefits of that hardware innovation shine through for web developers.

We’re changing IE to use the DirectX family of Windows APIs to enable many advances for web developers. The starting point is moving all graphics and text rendering from the CPU to the graphics card using Direct2D and DirectWrite. Graphics hardware acceleration means that rich, graphically intensive sites can render faster while using less CPU.

The support for some HTML5 elements in IE9 is still in the discussion stages, HTML5 is still in draft stage. Nevertheless it will support HTML5 elements and CSS3 selectors.

Channel 9 has posted some videos related to IE9, i have embedded them below. These videos are silverlight based, you need silverlight installed to view them.

IE 9: Standards and Interoperability

IE 9: Surfing on the GPU with D2D

IE 9: First look at the new JS Engine

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Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 First Details

Originally published at Technology Bites by Ram

SPDY: Google Looking to Speed Up the Web with New Protocol

Ram — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:15:09 +0000

Google just announced a new protocol, “SPDY” pronounced “SPeeDY” on Chromium blog. According to Google the new protocol will speed up the web. The protocol is not a replacement to the current protocol HTTP, but it will augment HTTP.

The protocol is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression. We started working on SPDY while exploring ways to optimize the way browsers and servers communicate. We want to continue building on the web’s tradition of experimentation and optimization, to further support the evolution of websites and browsers. So over the last few months, a few of us here at Google have been experimenting with new ways for web browsers and servers to speak to each other, resulting in a prototype web server and Google Chrome client with SPDY support.

So how does it perform?. In Google’s testing page loading is improved 55% faster. They downloaded the top 25 websites over simulated network connections. These are internal tests and now Google wants the participation of the community so that they can get feedback and assistance from the web community.

If this announcement excites you here is the documentation, and current code can be seen here.

Google’s own browser Chrome is already a faster browser compared to other browsers, and SPDY gives the 55% improvement they claim it will be useful for the end user and also to Google, so that it’s cloud based apps like Google Docs and Picasa will run faster.

Photo Credit

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SPDY: Google Looking to Speed Up the Web with New Protocol

Originally published at Technology Bites by Ram

Happy Birthday, Firefox

Ram — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:23:47 +0000

Firefox over the years has garnered millions of fans around the world and has a thriving developer community. Firefox is celebrating five years of success today, part of the success of the browser can also be attributed to the developers who developed thousands of add-ons for the browser.

On November 9, 2004 Firefox was released, and with in first four days of launch 1 million people downloaded the browser. Melissa Shapiro says Firefox 1.0 is released “with belief that, as the most significant social and technological development of our time, the Internet is a public resource that must remain open and accessible to all.”

Firefox has now 300 million users worldwide, Firefox still lags behind IE but it is the preferred browser for many of us.

Firefox 3.0 is released in June 2008 and hit 8.3 million downloads in 24 hours. Firefox 3.5 released this June came with some new features like Private browsing and geo location features.

Firefox has completed successful Five years and what about the next five years?. Christopher Blizzard at mozilla hacks talks about the future of Firefox.

Over the next five years everyone can expect that the browser should take part in a few new areas – to act as the user agent it should be. Issues around data, privacy and identity loom large. You will see the values of Mozilla’s public benefit mission reflected in our product choices in these areas to make users safer and help them understand what it means to share data with web sites.

Expect to see big changes in the video space. HTML5-based video and open video codecs are starting to appear on the web as web developers make individual choices to support a standards-based, royalty-free approach. Expect to see changes in the expectations around the licensing of codecs.

And over the next five years mobile will play an increasingly important role in our lives, and in the future of the web. The decisions of users, carriers, governments and the people who build phones will have far-reaching effects on this new extension to the Internet and how people will access information for decades to come.

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Happy Birthday, Firefox

Originally published at Technology Bites by Ram

Google Wave inspired Gmail interface screenshots

Ram — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:48:50 +0000

Google is probably tweaking all Google Apps interfaces to have an unified interface inspired from the Google wave’s interface. Google Apps interfaces are not pretty, the recently hyped and still in invite only beta does look better and many users liked that. According to Engadget Google apps will have interface similar to Google Wave.

The screenshots came from an anonymous tipster to Engadget, so for the moment this is not confirmed and it is just a rumor.

Specifically, we’re told that “the goal is to provide a consistent experience throughout all Google Apps and blur the line between the browser and the website (e.g. drag and drop, right-click, etc.).” (Via Engadget)

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Google Wave inspired Gmail interface screenshots

Originally published at Technology Bites by Ram

Flickr App Garden: Developer Showcase

Ram — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:52:10 +0000

Flickr, the popular photo sharing site has an open API that allowed developers to build applications on top of Flickr. Some of the featured applications are earlier included in Flickr API Services page as a list. Now Flickr has created an application showcase called App Garden.

The app garden shows the list of application built for various Flickr functions like uploading, retrieving photos. You can explore the apps using the tags or search for apps using the search box. Each app has its own page where users can comment and add them to their favorites.

Now you can find out which application your friends are using for uploading the photos. Each photo pages shows Uploaded using “appname”, this is available only of the application is added to the app garden.

App Garden: Flickr Application Showcase

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Flickr App Garden: Developer Showcase

Originally published at Technology Bites by Ram

MSN launches new home page

Ram — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:35:50 +0000

Microsoft today announced a redesign for its popular portal MSN, the most significant redesign came after a decade Microsoft says. The new home page looks clean, uncluttered and with lot of white space around. MSN is visited by 600 million people worldwide and 100 million people in US every month.

Along with the refreshing look MSN also redesigned its logo. The design is not yet live for everyone, they will rollout to users in next few weeks, and becomes widely available in the US early next year. The redesigned home page can be viewed at preview.msn.com.

The new redesign brings some new features like deeper Bing integration, Facebook and Twitter access through the home page among other things. To remove the clutter Microsoft reduced the number of links in the home page 50%.

The new home page also incorporates local information. MSN local edition provides latest information on local weather, news, sports, entertainment and other things grouped by ZIP code.

MSN new home page

MSN current home page

Microsoft Press Release

Features:

Innovative search technology from Bing: Deeper Bing integration on the new home page helps people make faster and more informed decisions and easily find the information they want from anywhere on the Web. Bing is deeply integrated as the core search service throughout the home page via key areas such as shopping, travel and local, and as a way of highlighting hot topics, trends or people.

Information and news people care about: The new home page delivers against the No. 1 customer request — simplicity and ease of use — through its fresh design and smart categorization. In-line high-quality, top news and hot entertainment from trustworthy sources such as MSNBC, FOX Sports, Hulu and Hearst, and comprehensive local information provide a compelling one-stop shop for people to use as their home base online. More in-depth local information is offered on the new MSN Local Edition, which is the only local online source that smartly combines media with Bing search and provides access to real-time community news that is grouped by ZIP code.

Convenient ways to communicate: Simplicity drove the clean integration of popular social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live “What’s New,” which aggregates up to 50 Web activities, including Yelp, Flickr, Pandora and more, onto the MSN home page. People no longer have to jump from site to site to update their status, tweets or see what their friends are up to; the new home page makes it easy to view and update in-line.

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MSN launches new home page

Originally published at Technology Bites by Ram

Access Windows Live SkyDrive from your Desktop

Ram — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:26:19 +0000

Windows Live SkyDrive is a free online storage service from Microsoft, it offers 25GB of storage space for users. 25GB of space comes in handy for uploading pictures, documents etc but if you want to use it as a backup space you need to upload files one by one. The better solution is to mount the SkyDrive as virtual drive in windows explorer, in this way you can add files to the drive quite easily.

SkyDrive Explorer is a freeware that allows you to add SkyDrive as a virtual folder in Windows Explorer. Download the application and install it on your system. After installing you will see “SkyDrive Explorer” icon in My Computer along with other drives. Click on that it will ask you to authenticate to Windows Live using your Windows Live ID.

Once you installed and authenticated to SkyDrive you can manage all the files stored in SkyDrive, you can edit, delete and add files and folders to the SkyDrive.

Features

View the structure and contents of folders in SkyDrive
View files information (type, size, creation date in GMT format);
Create new root folders and subfolders;
Copy files into the storage;
Delete files and folders;
Copy files from the storage to the computer;
Copy folders and subfolders from the storage to the computer keeping their structure;
Use Drag & Drop for files operations;
Rename files and folders;
Create links to SkyDrive folders on your computer.

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Access Windows Live SkyDrive from your Desktop

Originally published at Technology Bites by Ram

Google Voice Search for Nokia S60 Phones

Ram — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:15:31 +0000

Google Search by voice feature on mobiles allows users to search on Google through voice instead of typing keywords. Google voice search is already available for iPhone, Blackberry and Andriod phones, today Google announced the voice search for Symbian (S60) phones.

If you have a N series and E series Nokia phones you can use this feature by downloading the Google Mobile App from m.google.com. The software works with S60 version 3 for now, S60 version 5, that is touchscreen phones are not yet supported.

See the videos embedded below to see how it works

Via Google Blog

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Google Voice Search for Nokia S60 Phones

Originally published at Technology Bites by Ram

Listorious: Discover the Best Twitter Lists

Srikanth AD — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:27:40 +0000

Listorious is a web service which makes it easy for you to find the best Twitter lists on any given topic. Its a directory of Twitter lists enabling you to find the most interesting ones. It aggregates the Twitter lists into categories – media, finance, marketing, food, humor etc. Listorious allows you to search for a list, person or tags in general.

The most popular lists, ranked by how many people follow them and the top tags are showcased on the right-hand side of the page.

You can check out the Twitter lists you have made and the lists you are on. You can even add any list from Twitter to Listorious that you find useful.

Listorious is an intriguing way to discover and follow the best Twitter lists.

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Listorious: Discover the Best Twitter Lists

Originally published at Technology Bites by Ram