This is huge. Google has enabled a Java scripting application across it’s online Apps suite. Previously available only to premier subscribers, the scripting capability is now open to anyone with a standard account as well. This competes directly with Microsoft’s cross-Office VBA, allowing users to build their own applications while using the productivity suite as a front end. It’s a very impressive and bold move to allow it over the web – and further solidifies Google’s “the web is the OS” mantra.
Read more at the official Google Enterprise blog.
With the recent announcements that YouTube and Vimeo are both releasing HTML5-based video players, one has to wonder about the impact of those moves on Adobe. Adobe’s Flash had been (and is) THE standard for delivering multimedia content over the web, capturing something like 99% of internet users. HTML5 allows many Flash-like animations/videos/experiences without the need for a seperate plugin or buffering (that’s right – skip to a different point in that YouTube video without waiting for it to load!).
Adobe doesn’t derive much revenue from Flash – so this isn’t going to crimp their cashflow necessarily – but it is a major part of their broader brand recognition. (For the curious, Flash and other platforms generate about 6% of Adobe’s revenue, but half of that comes from Mobile solutions that likely don’t include Flash. Creative software is the bulk of the revenue stream, forming about 60% of the total.). I’m curious what indirect impact it could have on the rest of the company.
For that matter, Microsoft’s Silverlight — the Flash alternative that powers the excellent Bing Maps — doesn’t have nearly the market share of its competitor. Where does this leave it?
Flash, Silverlight and other proprietary delivery systems are essentially browser replacements. They deliver web experiences which browsers on their own can not. To the extent we can move away from plugin multimedia and incorporate it directly into the web standard, that’s a good thing in my mind. Unfortunately, browser support for HTML5 is minimal – just the latest version of Safari and the nightly Webkit builds (including non-production versions of Chrome). Plugins, by contrast, are widely supported and bring content to potentially any browser. It’s hard for me to imagine why people wouldn’t want the latest, fastest, and most secure web technology available… but then again, I’m constantly surprised by the number of TGR visitors using IE6!
And a special message for those visitors: please click here to download Google Chrome.
Here’s an interesting case study in internet behavior dynamics: when Engadget publishes a story — any story — about 3D TVs, the comments are filled with fans and excited (potential) consumers. When the NYT publishes a story called “Do Consumers Really Want 3-D TV’s?” the comments overflow with doubters and pessimists.
Thanks to the magic of social comments, each sub-population reinforces its own beliefs. The result is that viewing either story in isolation would convince you that it represents the majority opinion. If the NYT story were a little more critical, crossing some invisible line in the virtual sand, then the fanboys would come running to defend their turf. But it isn’t. Engadget’s stories, on the other hand, have a broad enough audience that they do attract a few nay-sayers — but their opinions are quickly drowned out.
For me, the clincher is that the NYT author seems to be worried that he will be forced to watch old shows in 3D:
And what happens when I want to watch shows like “Seinfeld,” or “Everyone Loves Raymond”? Will I really want to experience these in 3-D too?
3D screens do not automatically make everything into 3D. The spatial processing that would require has not been developed on a supercomputing scale, much less a consumer entertainment device. Moreover, they can display 2D content without any problem – in fact, the “3D” content is nothing more than a specially (and spectrally) oriented 2D image which, when viewed through the polarized or shuttered glasses, is rendered differently by your two eyes. The result is the perception of 3D from 2D – and the key point is that there’s nothing preventing the good old 2D images we know and love.
I have seen a 3D TV – there’s one at the Sony store in midtown Manhattan. It is extremely impressive and yes, you’ll own one one day (though they’re going to be expensive at first). Depending on the intersection of technology and regulation, you actually may have to (a la digital and de facto HDTV).
I completely agree that the glasses are impractical and a little annoying. But I’ll limit my critique to that accessory rather than the entire industry. The NYT article actually notes that glasses-free viewing may be “two to three years away” (personally, I’m less optimistic about that timeframe). Indeed, auto stereo TV’s exist (I saw one in Bloomingdales, of all places!) and certainly will be the norm. Will consumers be ready then?
The NYT article concludes:
Maybe the consortiums and manufacturers are right, we’ll see these images popping out of our TVs in our homes and never look back to a 2-D world. But I’m about as geeky as they come, so are most of my friends. We all wait in line for the latest iPhones or video games and we spend an exorbitant amount of time sharing links about the latest digital cameras, video game consoles and the Apple rumors. But I can’t recall a single geeky friend saying anything, with any excitement, about 3-D televisions.
I have to wonder if those “geeky” friends have ever read Engadget.
Clay Shirky sees the internet poised between Invisible High School and Invisible College, the latter of which sounds a lot like an open source society:
What did the Invisible College have that the alchemists didn’t?
They had a culture of sharing. The problem with the alchemists had wasn’t that they failed to turn lead into gold; the problem was that they failed uninformatively. Alchemists were obscurantists, recording their work by hand and rarely showing it to anyone but disciples. In contrast, members of the Invisible College shared their work, describing and disputing their methods and conclusions so that they all might benefit from both successes and failures, and build on each other’s work.
And my favorite point from the essay:
…in the 20th century, the mere fact of owning the apparatus to make something public, whether a printing press or a TV tower, made you a person of considerable importance. Today, though, publishing, in its sense of making things public, is becoming similarly de-professionalized; YouTube is now in the position of having tostop 8 year olds from becoming global publishers of video. The mere fact of being able to publish to a global audience is the new literacy, formerly valuable, now so widely available that you can’t make any money with the basic capability any more.
As you may know, TGR is occasionally syndicated on Seeking Alpha. This weekend, Seeking Alpha underwent a redesign in order to incorporate a number of new features largely focused on enhancing discussion, like nested comments and notifications.
Unfortunately, one issue that has persisted is that Seeking Alpha passwords are displayed in plaintext:
This is quite disconcerting to anyone used to seeing password fields filled with ***’s, but creates a major security concern beyond simple asthetics. Most modern browsers have an autocomplete feature: they remember what you type in text fields so that they can suggest phrases for you the next time you visit that field, thereby saving previous keystrokes and time. The behavior is designed to specifically ignore passwords.
Because the Seeking Alpha password fields are not designated as such, browsers will add anything typed there to their autocomplete repetoire. As a result, I was extremely surprised when, after typing just the first letter of my password, my browser offered me the phrase in its entirety! It’s one thing to see that on my home computer (and it’s actually weird to see passwords in plaintext) – but this could easily have played out on a public machine, in a library, etc.
I got in touch with Seeking Alpha last night and was assured that they are having a look at the issue – and I have to say, I’ve always been impressed by the level of response and support from their contributor relations team. In the meantime, I encourage everyone to be careful with their passwords; I have taken the precautionary measure of changing mine (and yes, the change password field also displays plaintext).
From the “that’s a feature, not a bug” file: I always thought my iPhone’s ability to continue email searches on the server (as opposed to emails stored on the phone) was broken, since it never returned any results even for emails I knew existed. Today, I learned that remote search is explicitly not supported, according to the Google Mobile Sync fine print:
Searching Gmail for messages that have not been synced to your phone is currently not supported.
As a workaround, I’m experimenting with syncing more emails to the phone…
Not long ago, I wrote that Amazon’s sign in link was keeping me up at night because the noun “recommendations,” rather than the verb “sign in,” formed the actual link.
Today I noticed that Amazon has changed the link to reflect what I feel is a more standard approach:
…changing the world, one link at a time.
We all know that you can get some funny/interesting responses by typing the first part of a question into a major search engine’s search box and letting it suggest the remainder. The NYT has gone so far as to investigate those suggestions themselves. I particularly enjoyed their description of search engines as “modern confessionals:”
This labor-saving device — part fortuneteller, part shrink? — has opened a window into our collective soul. With millions of people pouring their hearts into this modern-day confessional, we get a direct, if mysterious, glimpse into the heads of our fellow Web surfers.
And some nice visualizations of the questions people are asking don’t hurt, either:
I’d love to see an interactive tool for creating these diagrams.
Google Chrome for Mac has finally been released (in beta, but who’s complaining?) and I’ve been testing it as my primary browser. It’s already my top choice on Windows (this development making it all the more sweeter) and I have to say – once you use a combined address/search bar, there’s absolutely no going back.
So far, so good:
>
I’m pleased to present the new TGR: now with more green!
I’ve spent some time over the past few weeks learning a little CSS, PHP and Java (and I apologize for being so late to that party). I’ve been experimenting behind the scenes with TGR and tonight I’m excited to make those changes official.
So, what’s new? The most obvious change is the design. All the styling here is done via CSS, so your experience will depend on your browser’s abilities to render that code. Any modern browser should have no problems at all.
But… if you’re using Internet Explorer, TGR ain’t going to look too pretty. In fact, it’ll look pretty boring. Don’t worry, it’ll still work just fine (I spent a lot of time making sure of that!) but in much the same way that a DB9 will “work just fine” if you fill it with regular. IE users, for the sake of all the people doing wonderful things with new web technologies, please do both them and yourselves a favor by upgrading to a modern browser. If you need a suggestion, my preferred browser on my Mac is Apple’s Safari, though Camino is a fine alternative. On Windows, my choice is Google’s Chrome but Mozilla’s Firefox is quite popular as well.
I’ll probably continue to tweak the design over time – so don’t be shocked if a beautiful #009944 hyperlink becomes a similarly stunning shade of, say, #009a4c. There are also some new tabs up top – data, finance, math and risk – corresponding to the major themes I seem to gravitate toward. Those are in response to a number of readers’ requests that I make certain information more accessible, and I’ve got some other tricks planned for the future (pending demand, of course) that will leverage TGR’s new platform.
Which brings us to the most important change of all, one which is largely invisible – TGR now runs on Thesis, an excellent and highly extensible Wordpress framework designed with modularity in mind – and that’s important for someone like me, whose attempts at coding more frequently break the site than enhance it. Thesis has made it possible for me to ease into coding for the web, rather than having to wade through someone else’s indecipherable PHP or start from scratch. I highly recommend it for anyone looking to take control of their Wordpress blog or site.
Speaking of blogs and sites, there isn’t much of a difference between them these days and in the near future I hope to take advantage of TGR’s newfound versatility to host more projects and applications here. More on that when I figure it out myself…
As always, thanks for visiting, don’t be strange and most importantly: don’t panic.
-J