Book Review: 12 Reasons Why Not To Love Windows 7

May 1, 2010

Windows 7 is more of the same, but don't expect Windows Magazine to say so!

It was just too difficult.

This Saturday morning, I received a review copy of the book Windows 7: The best of the Official Magazine, published by Microsoft Press and distributed (I guess) by O’Reilly Media.

This nicely done Windows 7 book was written by the only official Microsoft Windows magazine, so don't expect an unbias point of view!

First, just to set the stage, despite being a Mac user for over 20-years, I extensively used (against my will I might add :) Windows since I joined PC World magazine’s french edition, 17-years ago!

Believe it or not, but I’m sure you will, Vista was the first Windows version I haven’t spent much time with; despite having it installed on my Mac!

Now that Windows 7 has been out for over 6-months, I decided to have another look at Microsoft’s latest operating system. And to start, I took on O’Reilly Media’s offer to review their Windows 7 book, a way to get myself a bit more acquainted with the software.

Windows 7: more of the same

But I just couldn’t force myself to read beyond Chapter 1: Introducing… “Wow: 12 reasons why you’ll love Windows 7″

Why? Because most of these 12 “amazing” reasons look so much like the ones touted in past releases of Windows or that are already in my Mac, for that matter!

Amazing user interface, foolproof set up, speed, remote access, Windows Media Center (since XP!), parental controls, gaming, desktop gadgets, search, networking, power saving (Windows Mobility Center!) and, the only real new new thing, Windows 7 Touch. Which is actually only available if you have one of those still rare touchscreen PCs.

So I decided to close the book on Windows 7 and enjoy the rest of the torrid Silicon Valley weekend!

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Videos: Best Of Ignite At Where 2.0

March 29, 2010

Ignite is a fun and high-energy evening of “speed presentations”. At Where 2.0, the theme was geolocalisation

The sixth annual Where 2.0 Conference kicked off this morning in downtown San Jose, Calif., with tutorials (on mapping, geolocalisation…) and the infamous “Ignite” presentations.

As always, Ignite Where 2010 was a fun and high-energy evening of “speed presentations” where attendees where given five minutes on stage to pitch their project using a slides (20 maximum) that rotates automatically after 15 seconds!

Follows are my favourite presentations and the associated videos:

  1. App Store is For Suckers by Jonathan Stark (Jonathan Stark Consulting)
    Submitting (pun intended) to the App Store is for suckers. The cheapest, easiest, fastest way for developers to get in on the mobile gold rush is to build killer web apps. Web apps can now – today – access location data, utilize client-side SQL databases, and even run offline. Web apps run on more than 100 mobile handsets with zero modification. We’ve moved on. Don’t get suckered. Read the rest of this entry »

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Google Confirms News Site Redesign; To Flip Like Magazine Pages

June 24, 2009
Google is planning to launch a redesign of Google News that will flip like pages in a magazine

Flipper is Google's upcoming experimental News site, that will flip like pages in a magazine

Google will soon launch a redesign of its Google News web site, code named Flipper.

The news was confirmed today to TechPulse 360 by no less than Marissa Mayer in a conversation after Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience keynote at the O’Reilly’s Velocity conference earlier today.

“It’s an image that behaves like a Web page,” said Mayer, giving Flipper a much more visual appeal.

For Google’s top designer, the current incarnation of Google News is quite a “monster” of a page – taking 8 seconds to load, although it feels faster than that – with 27 images on it, all dynamically changing, as well as the headlines; “weighting” a whopping 80K!

Google “Flipper” News to appear in Google Labs

However, the reason why Google News seems a lot faster today is because the search engine chops the information into pieces and displays it as fast as it comes; versus waiting for all the content to arrive in the browser, what Mayer describes as “Flash rendering.”

The result is a much faster rendering of the information, albeit some formating imperfections that only a trained eye will actually care.

With Flipper, Google is taking the user experience a step further.

Flipper will behave much like the pages of a magazine that you will flip through. It’s also going to be faster than the current version. “It’s smart enough to know to start caching the information when the user is on a particular area of the image,” adds Mayer.

The Flipper version of Google News will appear in the search engine’s Lab section sometimes soon. However, Mayer refused to confirm the release date.

“Our goal is trying to make browsing the Web as fast as browsing a magazine,” said Mayer.

Here’s a video excerpt of Marissa Mayer explaining how Google speeds up the rendering of Google News:

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Google Search And The Billion Dollar HTML Tag

June 24, 2009


During her keynote at the O’Reilly’s Velocity conference, Google’s search goddess Marissa Mayer revealed that a simple HTML tag helped Google generate over a billion dollars in advertising!

Mayer recalled the story when, in about 2000, Larry and Sergey came to her to help run ads on the right hand-side of Google’s search page without using a huge table, that would slow loading the entire page.

“If you look at all our competition, everyone is running a table through the whole page, does this terrible Flash-rendering at the end [which makes page loading slow],” said Mayer.

And sure enough, after looking through the HTML specifications, Mayer found the billion dollars HTML tag, which represents the amount that these ads on the right hand-side of the search page generate today.

For the more techie audience, Google used two HTML tables, one aligned right and one aligned left, instead of a single table with two columns, enabling Google to display the ads before the entire page finishes to load.

“It’s a tiny little thing in HTML. It’s not anything groundbreaking but it’s really amazing in terms of what opened up in terms of us being able to keep the page fast while opening up many more spots for advertisements and allowed more competition in our auction,” added Mayer.

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Google Shares Secrets To Speed The Web, Unveils New Speed Site

June 24, 2009
Under her designer jacket, Marissa Mayer unveiled Googles latest geeky t-shirt: HTML wants to be square!

Under Marissa Mayer's designer jacket was Google's latest geeky t-shirt: HTML wants to be square!

What if Web browsing was as fast as flipping through a magazine?

Well that’s the dream that Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer shared this morning with the attendees of O’Reilly’s Velocity conference.

And how Google plans to achieve that?

First, says Mayer, is by working on several front simultaneously: the browser, the back-end servers and the Web page design.

More specifically, on the Web page design side, Mayer gave a few useful tips:

  1. HTML wants to be square. “I love rounding corners [with CSS for example] as the next person does but if it actually costs usage and ultimately costs revenue then it can often be changed, tweaked and refined,” said Mayer;
  2. Images 101. Smaller is better and compression is your “friend”!
  3. Tables are purely evil. Mayer compares HTML table rendering to Flash rendering, which loads the entire content before rendering the page.

Mayer also pointed to Google’s new site Speed where you can see “tech talks” and set of tools used internally at Google to make its pages load faster.

“Our goal really is to try and make browsing the Web as fast as browsing a magazine. What would it feel like if all the content on the page you are about to click through to was already loaded… We think people will use the Web a lot more… And do more search,” explains Mayer.

Here’s a video excerpt of Mayer going through the design tricks:

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[Web 2.0 Expo] Silicon Valley Beware, Microsoft “Is” The Empire

April 2, 2009

The truth is finally out.

Microsoft is not only the “evil” empire. It’s THE EMPIRE, joked yesterday the President of Microsoft Business Division Stephen Elop.

Microsoft is more than dangerous than thought. They really think they can have it all for themselves

Microsoft is more than dangerous than thought. They really think they can have it all for themselves

“When I was coming up on stage here, there’s more than one person here who said “here comes the evil empire”… And I get that, because I spend a lot of time here,” said Elop.

Elop then presented Tim O’Reilly with a t-shirt that is “all the rage on campus at Microsoft” and which says: I am the Empire !

After the keynote, I’ve met with O’Reilly and he indeed wear the t-shirt, tossing the Wall Street Journal D6 conference shirt he wore earlier.

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[Web 2.0 Expo] Sensors Will Drive The Next Web Revolution, O’Reilly Reflects

April 2, 2009

The Web 2.0 was about harnessing the collective intelligence of users. Web 3.0 will about taking advantage of sensor data, Tim OReilly predicts

The Web 2.0 was about harnessing the collective intelligence of users. The next Web will about taking advantage of sensor data, Tim O'Reilly predicts

In his keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo conference, Tim O’Reilly – who helped coined the term “Web 2.0″ – reflected on where the Web industry is going next.

But before that, he reminded his audience of the origins of Web 2.0.

“Web 2.0 was never intended to be a version number. It was really a reflection of what happened after the dotcom bust. There were some companies, some projects that seemed to survive when others were flatten. Why was it?” O’Reilly pondered.

For O’Reilly, the companies that survived the Internet bubble learned how to use the web as a platform. “And in particular they understood that the heart of that was to harness the collective intelligence, that is to get their users to add value to what they were doing.”

So what’s next? What is Web 3.0? The semantic Web, virtual reality, the social Web, the mobile Web?
“I think it’s all of these things,” responds O’Reilly. “But it’s more than that. If you think of the Web as a newborn baby, and in particular of Web 2.0 as a maturation of that baby, we have to ask ourselves, is the Web getting any smarter?”

O’Reilly talked of “information shadows”, “electronic sensors coordination”, and statically extracting the “meaning” hidden in all the data that is being collected, gathered.

In a nutshell, for this Internet visionary, Web applications are going to be more and more driven by sensors and not by people typing on keyboards. A major shift from Web 2.0 applications today that heavily rely on user inputs.

There is power in less

Another of O’Reilly’s theme was how to apply Moore’s Law to the world’s hard problems.

“In the technology industry, we take for granted that we get more each year for less. But it doesn’t work that way in the world. The whole basis of our economy is that more will be spent, that things will be bigger, and cost more, and economy will grow.”

Part of the power that we have, is to take these techniques that we’ve developed in the consumer Internet and start to apply them to big hard problems, added O’Reilly.

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Is Web 2.0 Meets Green, Web 3.0?

November 7, 2008

 

Most of the Web 2.0 buzz happened outside the conference room

Most of the Web 2.0 buzz happened outside the conference room

Just like a year ago, most of the buzz at the Web 2.0 Summit happened out in the halls and corridors of the Palace Hotel, during the breaks and luncheons and at the off-site parties (Microsoft, MySpace…).

Although the interest of some of the panel discussion was uneven, the speakers and attendees at the conference were just top notch.

And inspite the fact that you could watch much of the conference on a delayed video broadcast or read most of what have been said throughout the conference on news sites or blogs like TechPulse360, the interaction with those key players in their respective industries is just invaluable.

After Web 2.0 meets world, green might be the next killer app!

But at the end of the day, this year’s theme “Web Meets World” gave me the impression that the Web 2.0 phenomena was on its last leg. So what’s next?

For Tim O’Reilly who helped coined the term Web 2.0, there will no Web 3.0. So over the next year, we’ll probably see more of the same like the convergence of traditional and online media and social networking everywhere.

But if the last day of the Web 2.0 Summit is an indicator of what could be coming next, I’d say that Web Meets Green might well be the theme for next year’s event that will be hosted at the Westin hotel (formerly the Argent hotel) in San Francisco. 

So “chapeau” again to hosts John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly for such a high quality roster and for pulling out another brilliant Web 2.0 Summit conference.

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iPhone Developers Are Hard to Find; Can Cost Up To $200/hr

October 14, 2008

To build momentum for it’s first iPhone developer event, O’Reilly Media organised today a live webcast to give a preview of the iPhoneLive conference to be held next month in San Jose, Calif.

With Apple’s decision to drop its non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software, the upcoming conference will finally let iPhone developers and entrepreneurs alike share their experiences in creating applications for Apple’s smartphone. In early September there were more than 3,000 applications available in the iPhone App Store, which opened last July. With 10,000+ soon to come, the iPhone could potentially become Apple’s primary computing platform.

With that in mind, the evident lack of iPhone developers – an issue that was raised during the webcast – is a boon for anyone who can develop for the iPhone.

“I’ve seen prices ranging from $125 to $200 an hour [for an iPhone developer]… right now, the sky is the limit, read the blog, grab a book [about developing on the iPhone and preferably an O'Reilly one!]“, said Raven Zachary, the iPhoneLive co-chair and a an iPhone developer.

Another issue covered during the webcast was the time in takes to develop an application for the iPhone and its monetisation. Depending on the complexity of the app of course, on average you should count 6 to 8 weeks for the development phase and 4 to 8 weeks to “polish it” (QA).

In regards of making money out of an iPhone app, mileage varies. Apple said last September that out of more than 3,000 apps, over 90 percent were priced at less than $10 and more than 600 were offered for free. So don’t expect to live out of that, at least not in the first 2 to 3 months. Advertising seems to be route of choice for a lot of developers, according to Zachary. But you should also consider that a free app will let you build a huge user base quickly and position you for a nice “exit”, like an acquisition for example.

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