Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Every three years or so I have a handful of incredibly busy days, when I hit strossian word counts, while absorbing and interpreting a fire hose of information. It's some of the hardest work I've done, trying to understand the whys and wherefores and at the same time pushing the boundaries and coming up with what-ifs and ah-has.

That's been my last week, as Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 - both on the desktop and on the server.

Starting with a two and half day closed door briefing up in Redmond, where thirty or so journalists and analysts were introduced to Windows 8 Server, it was followed up with a flight down to LA for another closed door briefing on the Windows 8 Desktop the day before Microsoft publicly unveiled everything at its BUILD conference. At 6 o'clock the night before the conference began, and about 15 hours from the lifting of the first of several hefty non-disclosures I got my hands on a loan tablet PC running the developer preview Windows 8 code.

That left me very little time to write a series of news stories and two in-depth reviews, as well as a long blog post analysing things from a developer point of view. By the time the last piece went live on Wednesday evening I'd written over 12,000 words, including two 5000 word reviews, taken 50 or so photographs and screenshots, editing them in Lightroom and exchanged many emails with editors eight time zones away. Oh, and had about four hours sleep a night. And remember, hotel rooms do not make good studios for device photography.

I did make a couple of personal millestones, with one piece linked on the influential Techmeme site,and another quoted in the San Jose Mercury News. (Oh, and you need to check who favourited my developer blog post on FaceBook!)

Time for a little linkage:

Now we're back in the UK, and recovered from most of the jet-lag, time to post a quick round up of posts written in other places about our trip to that mecca of gadgets, the monstrosity that ate Vegas, CES 2011... That and over 30 miles of hard core trekking around 7 conference halls and several Vegas hotels hunting stands, meeting rooms and press conferences.

Blog posts:

CES - It's a marathon, not a sprint.

So that was CES 2011. We’re finally sat in our hotel room resting our feet, and calculating the number of steps and miles walked. We’ve met with so many companies we’ve lost count – and have filled a large sports bag with press releases (on paper, CD, and memory stick). It’s been six solid days, from before the show opens to when we finally put our PCs away well past midnight…

As we look back on the themes and trends we spotted as we walked the halls and the press events, perhaps it’s a good idea to pass on the tips we’ve learnt over the last few years on just how to survive the monster that is CES.

Read more.

News stories:

CES: Dell unveils 7 and 10-inch Android tablets.

Dell announced a new 7-inch 4G tablet and a prototype of a business-focused 10-inch device at CES 2011 on Thursday.

The Dell Streak 7 is a 4G Android tablet, to be made available initially for T-Mobile in the US. Powered by Nvidia's Tegra 2 dual-core ARM processor, it has a 7-inch HD capacitive touchscreen.

Michael Tatelman, vice president and general manger of North American consumer sales for Dell, stressed the screen's robustness. "It uses Gorilla Glass, which will take the rough treatment that these devices will get," he said at the press conference at the Palms Hotel in Las Vegas.

Read more.

CES: Windows to run on ARM chips, says Microsoft.

Microsoft has demonstrated a future version of Windows running on both ARM and x86 processors, and has announced partnerships with ARM processor vendors Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia.

The software maker's president, Steven Sinofsky, presented the demo at a CES 2011 press conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday. Sinofsky said that neither user interface nor development approaches were being shown.

"We're looking at the hardcore engineering work we've been doing to work on a new class of hardware, where customers are demanding a tighter integration between hardware and software," he said.

Read more.

CES: Asus launches Honeycomb tablets.

Asus has introduced four new tablets, three based on the upcoming Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system and one on Microsoft Windows 7.

The Eee Pad Memo, Eee Pad Transformer, Eee Pad Slider and Eee Slate EP121 were unveiled at CES 2011 on Tuesday. They will take on rivals from Apple and Acer by presenting innovative features in a range of product formats, Asus's chief executive Jonney Shih told journalists at the Las Vegas electronics show.

"We admire Apple, which offers great innovation, but they provide very limited choices for customers," Shih said. "A combination of innovation and choice is a better way to serve customers."

Read more.

Photo stories:

CES: Asus Eee tablets add Android, Windows.

Asus has debuted four tablets at CES 2011, so here's a closer look at the three tablets based on the upcoming Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system — the Eee Pad Transformer, Eee Pad Slider and Eee Pad Memo — and the Eee Slate EP121, powered by Microsoft's Windows 7.

Read more.

Hands-On: Lenovo 10-Inch Win7 Tablet.

While Lenovo’s hybrid U1 Android Slate/Windows 7PC got most of the attention at CES 2011, sitting next to it in the restaurant Lenovo had taken over for the show was a slim 10” slate. This was the prototype of a Windows 7 slate, and we gave it a quick spin. Like most modern tablet PCs it has a dual mode touch screen, with capacitive touch and a Wacom-style pen. It’s a good combination, and the touch screen was very responsive – working well with mouse and pointer optimized Windows user interface. The pen worked well for entering text, using Windows 7’s built-in handwriting recognition tools.

Read more.

Reviews and first looks:

CES: AVerMedia AVerComm.

In these cash-strapped and green days good video conferencing is increasingly important, saving time and money by replacing travel with a meeting in the comfort of your own office. But desktop video conferencing quality isn't reality – and not every business can afford the complexity and the requirements of HP Halo or Cisco Telepresence.

Read more.

CES: Viewsonic Viewpad 10S and Viewpad 4.

Viewsonic's Android tablets haven't particularly impressed so far, offering the usual ODM basic touch features and running a phone OS stretched to fill a larger screen. We spent some time at CES 2011 looking at their next generation of devices.

Read more.

CES: Synaptics "Cervantes" External Trackpad.

Trackpads are ubiquitous on notebooks and the majority of them are made by hardware supplier Synaptics. At CES we saw the Cervantes reference design for an external trackpad designed to use with a desktop PC - or as a controller for home media devices like Google TV.

Read more.

CES: Data Robotics Drobo S.

With Microsoft's next generation Home Server dropping support for its storage fabric technology, Data Robotics' Drobo offers an alternative approach to building large amounts of storage using mis-matched disks. Unlike traditional RAID arrays which require all the disks used to be identical in size, Drobo's BeyondRAID storage array allows you to increase the amount of storage in an array each time you add or replace a pair of larger disks. There's no need to worry about matching disk manufacturers, sizes, or even speeds; the Drobo S handles all that for you.

Read more.

CES: iHealth BP3 Blood Pressure Monitor.

One of the trends we spotted at this year's CES was an explosion in tools for personal health monitoring, from devices that monitor homes for movement patterns to personal brainwave monitors that track just how you sleep. One thing that drew a lot of the devices together was support for cloud services, for sharing information, and the ability to use mobile devices as user interfaces.

iHealth's BPM3 Blood Pressure Monitor caught our attention, as it brought several of these trends together in one device. Looking like a piece of Apple hardware with its smooth white lines, the BP3 is an iPhone/iPad dock with a difference — under the white dome is an automatic blood pressure monitor, with all the control software running on the connected iOS device. That last point is what really makes the difference, as it simplifies what could otherwise be a complex piece of medical equipment.

Read more.

CES: Motion CL900 Tablet PC.

If there's one company you'd expect to deliver a successful, well designed slate format Windows 7 PC, it'd be Motion Computing. Specialising in Tablet PCs since the earliest days of Windows XP Tablet Edition, Motion has consistently delivered powerful and light Windows slates. You probably won't have heard of them, though, as they've been niche devices, selling into vertical industries – especially field service, aviation and health.

It’s that heritage that gives Motion's CL900 an edge over the current crop of Windows slates. It's not going to be the cheapest device out there – but it's likely to be the tablet that gives the best value for money. It's also likely to be the one that gets the most out of Intel's Oak Trail generation of Atom processors. Early Atom slates struggled to perform well, but Oak Trail is not only more powerful, with support for many key slate functions (including hardware accelerated graphics), it's also more power efficient, extending battery life significantly.

Read more.

Here's a snippet of a blog post from ZDNet UK that I put up last night, in which I note that the man who really changed the Real World in Tron was Dillinger. After all, he's the man who gave us the ubiquitous touch screens that replaced keyboards back in the mid-1980s.

Dillinger, the father of ubi-comp:

Tron: Legacy was one of 2010's most anticipated movies, with a year or so's worth of teaser trailers and alternate reality games. We were lucky enough to get to a preview showing a couple of weeks ago, and it's one of those films that leaves you wondering about the technology its designers envisaged. Not the light cycles (as cool as they are, they're clearly fantasy machines!), what we're interested in are the Encom operating system and the touch screen tables used in the Encom offices.

The touch tables used in Tron: Legacy are an obvious descendent of the table Dillinger uses in the original film. In Tron, Dillinger logs onto the Master Control Program through his desk in Encom's offices. It's a desk that as well as having multiple windows (though they don't overlap and the fonts are really really large!) also has speech recognition tools – something we're still only just getting on our desktop PCs. Dillinger's terminal is more like today's Surface or iPad than an early 80s VDU – it's the birth of a ubiquitous computing world. I wouldn't be surprised if the original film's industrial designers had spent some time talking to the folk at Xerox PARC…

Read the rest at ZDNet UK.

We (along with spikeiowa) went to watch the queue at the Palo Alto Apple Store on Friday night, where the cold geeks in their iCamp were outnumbered by the media, in order to cover the iPad queuing experience for an editor back home in the UK.

To be honest, the idea of queuing in the cold for a piece of technology doesn't really work for me, but the queuees were having fun. We wandered over to look at the TV vans, only to see an empty alleyway, with a couple of traffic cones in the cone of light from over a locked back door. It was the back of the Apple Store, its clinical grey hiding the shiny objects of techolust within.

It made a cool photo...



Palo Alto, California
April 2010

Pop along to IT Pro to read the resulting article and photo gallery.

And yes, it did remind us a lot of an Easter vigil, with the faithful waiting for the newly risen Steve to appear. Quite creepy, when you think about it.

It's one of the busiest times of my year: Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference. It's when the folk from Redmond release (or at least announce) lots of new stuff, often at a very low level in their product stack. It's also where they set the public face of their corporate direction, so there's lots of scope for reading between the lines and for making predictions about the future of consumer and enterprise computing.

All in all, exhausting and fascinating and grist to my analytical mills, setting up features and blog posts for the next year. To top that, this year I've also been wearing a slightly unfamiliar hat, that of a news journalist. It's a very different set of skills, and a very different type of writing, and one where i'm grateful for a good editor all those timezones away and for marypcb's speed typing and qute taking skills.

All hard work, under normal circumstances. Of course, this year Microsoft decided to make dozens of announcements, from their cloud and enterprise development side of things, from their browser, and from the world of Silverlight - not to miss out the big Office announcements.

So here are links to my two main news stories:

Day 1

Microsoft announced yesterday that its Azure cloud platform will go live on 4 January, 2010, with billing starting at the beginning of February. The announcement was made by Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, on the first day of the company's 2009 Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

Integration with Visual Studio 2010 will simplify application development and deployment, he said, and there will also be support for automatically locking data into geographic pairs of datacentres, for example keeping European data in Dublin and Amsterdam. Key new features include a new storage type, the X-Drive, which mounts SQL Azure BLOBs as NTFS drives

Ozzie said that Microsoft now offered "a single coherent development platform" for its "three screens plus cloud" strategy of deploying applications across computers, mobile devices, home-entertainment systems and hosted internet services. He said Azure now supported more than the original subset of ASP.NET, including native code in C,  C++ and Java and open web development tools including PHP and MySQL.

Day 2

There will be an Internet Explorer 9, and it will be built on top of an enhanced version of Microsoft's Trident HTML rendering engine, Microsoft Windows Division president Steven Sinofsky announced on the second day of Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

Other key announcements included the beta of Silverlight 4, and the public availability of the Office 2010 beta.

Microsoft is only three weeks into the IE development cycle, Sinofsky said, so any public release is still some time away. However, in a live demonstration of its standards support, Sinofsky showed an early prototype browser scoring 32/100 on the industry standard Acid 3 test. Performance is also improved, with Microsoft claiming IE9 is only slightly slower that recent builds of Firefox and Chrome on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark.

IE9 uses Direct X for page rendering rather than GDI, resulting in smoother text and animations, as well as improved frame rates on scrolling maps. This switch to GPU-based rendering also means CPU load is reduced, Sinofsky noted, saying that "the hardware you run on should shine through in the browser".

Read the rest at ZDnet.co.uk.

We've been ferreting through Microsoft's job adverts, looking for hints about just what might be behind the viel of secrecy that has risen over Redmond since they started work on the Windows 8 series of operating systems. One came up with something very interesting, that fitted in with conversations we've been having with other IT journalists for some time:

What’s the future of the web?

On one side there’s Flash and Silverlight and the rich internet applications world, which is working on ways of taking the web outside the browser and onto the desktop, where it “lights up” applications and plugs them into a connected world of APIs and services. On the other is the HTML5 working group, and their vision of a browser that can do, well, pretty much anything. With HTML 5 there won’t be any need for applications – it’ll all be web pages running on super-speedy JavaScript engines and with CSS for look and feel.

Here comes the difficult bit.

They’re both right. There are things a well written RIA can do that a web page can’t, and there are things that web page can do that are impossible for a traditional application. With traditional code you need to push new applications to every desktop every time there’s a change. Even .NET’s click-once and AIR’s self updaters don’t make much of a difference – you still need the latest version of the code to get the latest features, and that (with a flagship RIA like Morgan Stanley’s Matrix) can be a hefty chunk to download. At least with a web page, one change and then everyone who uses it can get access to the latest version.

It’s all a trade off. Not every web site suits every user, nor does every RIA have a fully engaged audience. That’s why so much work is going into getting those experiences right, whether its online design tools like Mozilla’s Bespin, or Sketchflow in Microsoft’s Expression or the designer developer workflow between Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder. But a web page and an application are outside the operating system, and if web-centric OSes ever become common, they need to have some way of supporting and interacting with the web. That’s why there’s so much interest in Google’s ChromeOS and Microsoft’s Windows 8. They’re going to be the first real operating systems of the modern web.

Read more at 500 Words Into The Future on ZDnet...

I managed to forget to link to another piece at ZDNet, where I gave Office Web Apps a good going over, taking a long look at their collaboration features.

Collaboration has always been a big problem with desktop productivity tools. We've spent the last decade or more emailing documents to colleagues, wasting time as we wait to receive content and edits. In the meantime, workflow and enterprise content management tools were developed to fill the gap. But collaboration is what users want, and it's what they got with the first online productivity tools. Unsurprisingly, Google Docs' co-authoring functionality has been one of the online suite's main selling points. Equally predictable was Microsoft's about-face with the announcement last October that Office 14 (2010's codename) would include an online component.

The first technical preview of the newly christened Office Web Apps has been out for a week, and we've spent some time looking at Microsoft's highest-profile cloud computing application. There will be two versions of the Office Web Apps: one for consumers built around the Live online platform, and one for businesses built on top of SharePoint. The two versions will share features, but there will be significant differences — mainly to meet the security concerns of businesses. The current Technical Preview is a first look at the consumer service, and it's still missing many of the features we've been promised for the final release — among them integration with the Office 2010 desktop applications.

So what do we get in the Office Web Apps Technical Preview? First of all, it's built around Microsoft's SkyDrive online storage service. That means there's 25GB of space for your files, and with a current 50MB limit on file uploads that should be more than enough for most users. If you're on the Technical Preview, all you need to do to get started is log in to SkyDrive and upload an Office file. SkyDrive is likely to be a key piece of the next wave of Microsoft's Live applications, and is expected to be an end point for the next release of Microsoft's Mesh synchronisation service, Live Devices.

Read more at ZDNet.

You'll also find a nice big screenshot gallery.

Yes, that is an export from my LibraryThing! I needed a nice big data set for Excel...

I've been playing with, and writing about, Google Wave this week.

You can see the results of that deep dive up on ZDnet:

Google Wave arrived back in May with a blast of publicity — including a keynote of its own at Google's I/O conference. The initial story from the Google team was impressive, with Wave touted as a revolution in collaboration from star developers the Rasmussen brothers (the team behind the first iteration of Google Maps).

Wave certainly builds on the company's strengths, running in the browser and hosted in the cloud. Lars Rasmussen has a lot of ambition for Wave, wanting it to replace email. At I/O, he put it like this: "While email is an incredibly successful protocol, we can use computing advances to do better. Wave is our answer".

The Wave team has thought hard about the structure of a conversation, and how this can be replicated online. Each wave is a collaborative space comprising groups of 'wavelets', which are themselves built up of 'blips'. A blip is the basic unit of conversation in a wave, hosting an XML document. Blips don't need to be human readable — they can contain files or even executable code. Developers can build on these by using what Google calls 'robots' to interact with wavelets and blips. For example, at I/O Google demonstrated a robot that could handle real-time translations.

Read the rest.

Oh, and take a look at the gallery of screenshots too...

Folk in Australia can read my Office 2010 review without having to cross those long Indian Ocean fibres, as it's now on ZDNet Australia.

Here's another snippet from the piece, where I raise an issue that I've not seen anyone else considering yet, that Microsoft's focus on SharePoint 2010 as Offfice's integration hub looks set to put them on yet another collision course with anti-trust regulators:

Microsoft has done a lot in Office 2010 to integrate the various Office applications with the Microsoft stack. However, this does mean that you need to have the full Microsoft stack to get the most from Office 2010. You won't get Outlook's MailTips without Exchange 2010, and you won't be able to use any of the co-working features in Word and PowerPoint without SharePoint 2010 or Microsoft's online Office service. If you want to talk to collaborators, Office 2010's presence features require Office Communications Server and Office Communicator. It'll be interesting to see how anti-trust organisations around the world react to this level of integration — especially in light of the European Union Competition Commission's recent decisions.

Australian readers will also be able to see just what applications you get in which version.