Here are the latest insights in to what's hot in the
technology sector as reviewed by MSM's R&D expert Jon Stace.
iPhone 4
Unless you've been living in a cave for the past couple of
months, you can't have missed the announcement from Apple of the
iPhone 4. Gosh, doesn't it make your current 3GS look ugly and
slow?! Hope you're not stuck in the middle of a two year contract,
that's a long time to wait before you can upgrade…
Obviously, there's plenty of coverage on the internet of the new
features and how Apple consider this new version 'Changes
Everything. Again'. Does it really? Is it really such a game
changer as the original iPhone? I'm not convinced. Better
certainly, assuming you hold it correctly (!), but hardly
revolutionary.
Adobe, meanwhile, have been whinging quite a lot over the
exclusion of Flash from Apple's devices. They've got a lot of valid
arguments and I agree with a lot of what they say. I even feel
slightly sorry for them that they are being marginalised, but then
I remember how truly terrible the Flash plugin actually is in terms
of performance, security and privacy. Come on Adobe, if you really
feel that Flash is a valid part of the web, then at least produce a
version of your plugin that isn't awful.
HTML 5 and VP8
All this talk of how Flash is rubbish and web standards are all
that are needed to make rich user interface for web applications is
focused on the next version of the HTML standard, version 5. Now,
HTML5 isn't even a standard yet but browser makers are already
implementing the new features that the new standard will cover.
This is great for web developers as they can produce such rich
interfaces without the need for reliance on proprietary plugins,
but a complete replacement for the likes of Flash is still a way
off. There's some interesting commentary here, especially in the
comments section:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/05/05/HTML5-and-the-Web
One area of HTML5 that has produced considerable controversy is
the new <video> tag, which allows displaying video within a
web page much like Flash does. There's been a lot of back and forth
over which video codec(s)[1] should be
included in the standard and whether they are open enough for use
in such an important standard such as HTML. Even the web browser
manufacturers were sticking their oars in with competing
manufacturers only supporting competing codecs. So for a while, it
did look like there wouldn't be a proper, cross-browser standard
for the <video> tag.
Google have now upped the ante by releasing their VP8 codec as
an open standard (called WebM) that all browser manufacturers could
support. They claim that they have checked the standard for patents
and believe it to be patent-free. Independent analysis has shown
that it is very similar to the proprietary H.264 standard[2] previous pushed as the standard for video
encoding in HTML5. So, things are still not clear in this area, but
then HTML5 isn't yet a standard as I previously pointed out.
Interestingly, Microsoft have announced that they will support
playback of WebM video in IE9, so things are looking up for
standard, Flash-free video on the web.
IE6 - 9 Year Old Milk
A lot has been covered on the internet in recent years about the
continued use of Internet Explorer 6, especially its use in
corporate environments. Web developers hate having to continue
supporting IE6 when modern web browsers (including newer versions
of IE) have much better support for web standards. Excluding
support for IE6 means that a lot less effort and cost is required
to support access to a web application or site from multiple modern
web browsers. Some major web sites have even started presenting a
warning to users of IE6 when they access those sites, telling them
to upgrade.
Up until recently, Microsoft have stated that they continue to
support IE6. They still support Windows XP, and IE6 came with that
operating system, so why would they not continue to support it?
That is, as I said, until recently. Microsoft (admittedly their
Australia operation, but this is still an official company
announcement) have since compared using IE6 to drink nine year old
milk. Lovely.
http://hothardware.com/News/Microsoft-Likens-Internet-Explorer-6-To-Spoiled-Milk/
Office Web Apps
After a couple of months of product releases to a great fanfare
Microsoft have been relatively quiet in the last month. One
interesting piece of news from Microsoft that happened without all
the noise of, for example, the Visual Studio 2010 release is the
release of Office Live. This service allows you to view, edit and
manage Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint documents through a web
browser.
This does appear to be a reaction to the threat that Google Docs
has on their core Office business, although Microsoft don't tend to
publicly admit that they see Google Docs as serious competitor
rather talking about the rich feature set that Office has and how
so many of those features are missing in Google Docs. It is
interesting to note, however, that the new Office web apps have
very similar online collaboration facilities that Google Docs have,
allow multiple users to edit the same document online.
Details can be found at
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/06/07/office-is-now-live-on-skydrive.aspx
or you can just go to http://office.live.com and log
in with your Windows Live account.
SQL Azure Database Size
I've previously lamented the maximum size of a SQL database
instance on Microsoft's Azure platform and how the transparent
scaling capability promised by cloud computing is not easily
achieved with this service. Microsoft have recently announced that
they are increasing the maximum size of a single SQL Azure instance
to 50GB, up from 15GB[3]. This would certainly
help when migrating some SME-sized applications to Azure, but they
still need to work on making it easier to scale across SQL Azure
instances.
Talking of Azure, I recently came across a free eBook covering
working with Azure:
http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2010/06/23/windows-azure-platform-articles-from-the-trenches-volume-1.aspx
I haven't had the opportunity to review all the content but on
first inspection it does look like it provides some interesting
advice gathered from real-world experience.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec
[2] http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377
[3]
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlazure/archive/2010/06/07/10020947.aspx