There is no doubt some awesome stuff come out of Microsoft’s Research and Development department but when it comes to handling data and organisation Microsoft falls short against Google and Apple. But as we can see from the video below their new data organisation engine looks like it could be a real game changer. This sort of technology is great at finding what information you want and cross referencing it with other information, I can see this being a real game changer for Wikipedia. This sort of application is very dynamic and could be incorporated as a web app allowing live information to be accessed anywhere in the world with automatic cross referencing. You can download the application today on Windows here.
[Hit The More Link For The TED Talk]
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Flash has received some well deserved criticism over the last year in regards to its performance. I have found that its image in the web design community has become damaged for many reasons that are not relevant to today’s player. Adobe and developers of the platform have made some mass yet unappreciated improvements to the player over the last few.
Search Engine Optimization today is not such of an issue if you build the site well and also deep link it. Even accessibility isn’t a huge issue with great tools available to make your content text to speech friendly. But what Flash is really getting criticized for is performance.
Fortunately Adobe was quick on the ball to resolve the problems, but in turn they expect device manufactures to play ball and work with them in the process. Google have recently brought out the Nexus One which is a Flash Player 10.1 capable phone. Google worked closely with Adobe to ensure that the player ran great on the system and from what I have seen so far it looks awesome. Flash Player 10.1 brings huge advancements in performance especially on the mobile platform and in delivering HD content, such a huge progress should warrant it its very own version number ‘Flash Player 11′. Adobe has proved time and time again since Adobe Max 2009 that Flash is ready for the mobile platform and have added Flash support to many awesome powerful phones supporting full Flash Player with accelerometer and multi-touch support. This I call progress.
So why no Flash love for the iPhone?
Apple are greedy, and they want revenue, if you could jump onto hulu to watch a video why would you buy video from iTunes. I agree this is just business sense but with the iPad people really thought that they can’t use the same old excuse again that it runs too slowly, but Jobs pulled out that card again. The people want Flash and Apple have received some serious bad press from the lack of it.
People say that Flash Player is inaccessible, but I ask you which is more inaccessible the 99.9% of internet enabled computers with Flash Player or the percent of people with HTML5 capable browsers.
Flash isn’t the processer hungry application it used to be, both Adobe and developers of the Flash platform are learning that keeping their code optimized will go a long way into keeping the platform alive.
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Another key note another Apple device! Today’s keynote featured the iPad, Jobs latest and greatest creation… well at least latest! Disappointingly the iPad will not run Flash Player all we can do is hope Adobe do some tweaking here and there to get Native apps running on this baby! But what have they done?
The Device
The device has an awesome 9.7 inch IPS screen at 1024×768. It comes in 16, 32 and 64 GB flavours and has the option of 3G. It sports an accelerometer, 1GHZ Apple A4 processor and 802.11n wi-fi allong with all the other stuff like compass and bluetooth. Ohh yeah and it has a 10 hour (real use) battery life.
The Software
As expected it runs a variation of iPhone OS. What this means is it supports all iPhone apps out the box. The SDK will allow people to develop for the iPad specifically so we can see some really awesome apps come onto the app store when this gets released. It also has iWork which takes the full iWork sweet and has re-interfaced it to the iPad and to be honest looks pretty sweet!
What else?
Something I was happy to see was the new dock keyboard which holds the iPad in place as well as charges it. It also has video out for presenting iWork on projectors and will come unlocked to any network anywhere.
When?
iPad ships with Wi-fi only in 60 days and with Wi-fi+3G in 90 days internationally. 3G plans will take longer to arrange outside of the US.
I guess I’ll get this… when it gets jailbroke!
[Hit The Gallery Here]
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The Apple Tablet, rumoured to be called the iSlate, is rumoured to be announced January 27th. Yes I know I said rumoured twice in that last sentence but let’s face it we all know its coming! But what we don’t know is whether it will run a variation of iPhone OS or full on OSX. Odds our in my opinion it will run iPhone OS as it’s the best money maker thanks to the app store and this device will not be designed as a replacement for your computer. Fortunately for us however, it doesn’t matter whether is iPhone OS or OSX.
Flash Cs5 will publish to the iPhone platform and with a few tweaks here and there I’m sure that adobe will fix it up to do the tablet. If they leave this until the release of CS6 I may just go on an adobe hunting killing spree! On the other hand though, if it’s running full on OSX then we have AIR 2.0 or Flash. Regardless of the OS it will undoubtedly feature multi-touch and accelerometer which we will be able to access through the new AS3 extensions that Flash CS5 will bring us.
How will this be different from both the iPhone and Mac’s then?
This will come from how the user adopts the system, with the intermittent release of Flash CS5 a range of developers and designers will surely be publishing for these platforms, and the great thing is you can publish to all of them at the same time by making your stage object positions and scale dynamic to the resolution of the screen and platform that you are using.
But what about Safari?
I think that Apple will be heavily scrutinised if they don’t feature Flash Player into Safari on the tablet as it will be a powerful device with a reasonably large screen and will no doubt be capable of it. Apple have kind of got away with it with the iPhone due to it being a phone, but with many phone OS’s featuring Flash Player in the browser they can’t hide for long. If apple to feature Flash Player into the tablet and it runs a variation of iPhone OS then I believe it will be inevitable that they will be forced to feature it in iPhone OS 4.0, which may have a announcement and release on the same day!
Also Flash CS5 developing will be great for iPhone developing, but for more complex designs you’re better off going with Objective-C, the reason for this is that although Native Flash Apps for the iPhone will be great, they will lack in performance as proved by the existing apps on the App Store. Undoubtedly the tablet will feature a much higher performance graphics chip and processer than the iPhone therefore quality Flash published games could be a possibility for the tablet.
Regardless of what happens next week it will be important to us all.
[Don't forget to follow Engadget and Gizmodo for the release on January 27th 10AM Pacific!]
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If you want to blog you’ve got an array of tools you can use including WordPress and Blogger. If you want a forum your best bet is PHPBB and if you want a Virtual Learning Environment you have a strong selection of powerful services including Moodle. But what if you need to create a website fast due to a budget or time limitations. I know you can create Pages in WordPress but you can’t create the site without a Blog.
Why are there no successful control panel based PHP Publishing Applications? Think about it… you could create your site fast with custom themes and plugins and your clients can just jump in and make changes as when and often they need them, now I know what you’re thinking it would kill the Web Design industry surely? I don’t think so, people will still need themes and plugins and anyone who wants a website with a little innovativity will have to pay up and have it built in the old fashioned way.
Let me know what you think or if I’ve overlooked a service in the comments!
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I went to London a few days back and tracked down a few interactive shop fronts, only one is worth showing though. The shop front to Phones4U on Oxford Street features an interactive phone, it wasn’t bad if anything limited in functionality but fun and easy to use and great use of advertising and multi-touch.
[Video After The Break]
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With the upcoming release of 1080p video on YouTube I couldn’t be happier to have a new GPU accelerated Flash Player! Flash Player 10.1 gives some significant improvement upon the previous builds. No mobile release as of yet but you can rock HD on your even on your Nvidia ION. If you kitted out for it you even now have native-multi-touch support! Although the player is in pre-release I would still highly recommend it as I have found it to be nothing but stable. Besides in this day in age of Web 2.0 doesn’t everything have a BETA label on it? Get it here!
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The image you see above is a genarative diagram map of the internet, crated as part of the opte project. The internet is a huge part of all of our lives, especialy us web developers and in the UK we have a very poor network.
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The Kick Ass engine designed to build games such as Lego StarWars as of today is free of charge to independent developers. This will no doubt bring people over to the platform to make it more popular, potentially this will be the primary 3D engine of the web, look out PaperVision3D!
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This demos how to make a Multi-Touch pad with no rear projection, perfect for trying it out if your looking into building a table but want to try it out first. Based on my experience it may be worth spending just a little money on getting a IR flood light and place it inside your box facing up at the glass. The software I tend to use for this is ReactiVision which is capable of inputting data to Flash via OSC.
[Video After The Break]
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