Web Design Ireland

posted by Robert on Mar 21

Earlier today (March 19, 2008) Adobe released comments outlining their plan to release Adobe Flash player to the iPhone via the application store. The folks at Adobe recently got their hands on the iPhones Software Development Kit, and are beginning development of an iPhone based flash player (to be distributed directly to the iPhone via the application store).“Adobe Systems Inc. has begun work to create a media player destined for Apple Inc.’s iPhone, Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen said Tuesday, thus adding a new wrinkle to a standoff between the two long-term partners” (Narayen, Adobe CEO).

Although Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Inc. stated that it would be very improbable for flash to be compatible with the iPhone (due to the feature restrictions on flash lite), news of an SDK based flash player comes in light of the recent release of the Software Development Kit (somewhat nullifying Job’s previous statement). As of right now the details as to the magnitude and specifics of the project are sketchy, but be sure to check back for frequent updates on this progressing story!

UPDATE: Adobe issued a statement to clarify what Narayen, Adobe CEO, said earlier this week: “Adobe has evaluated the iPhone SDK and can now start to develop a way to bring Flash Player to the iPhone. However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone Web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it.”

Too bad, it looks like unless God himself Steve Jobs says that iPhone will support Flash, it won’t…

[via Macrumors] and [CNet]

posted by Robert on Nov 9

Drivers who are lost will soon be able to turn to Google. The company will begin offering driving directions at 3,500 gasoline pumps across the United States next month.

The pumps manufactured by Greensboro, N.C. based Gilbarco Veeder-Root, will have an Internet connection and will display Google Maps on a small color screen. Drivers will be able to search through a number of categories to locate hotels, restaurants, landmarks and hospitals chosen by the gas station’s owner.

When a motorist decides on a destination the gas pump will print out directions. Gilbarco Veeder-Root wants to eventually allow drivers to type in any address and receive directions. “We think the service will create more customer loyalty for retailers,” Gilbarco Veeder-Root spokeswoman Lucy Sackett told the AP.

The mapping service will not feature ads but retailers will be able to earn revenue from merchants that offer coupons on the service. Google principal business development manager, Karen Roter Davis said the company wanted to make its services available when people needed them the most. She called the mapping service, “sort of a Googley, more stealthy way of getting directions.”

Source: http://www.webpronews.com

posted by Robert on Aug 21

When I first read the headline, I was shocked. I thought, “Wow! Skype runs on Windows servers???”

But no. Skype blamed its outage over the weekend on a different kind of Windows problem. It turns out that when you have millions of Windows machines restarting at the same time (getting their weekly doses of patches because, um, the system is rock solid), it can cause all sorts of problems for others.

Like Skype:

The latest security update from Microsoft required a system reboot. The effect of so many machines rebooting and subsequently trying to log onto the Skype VoIP network triggered system instability and a prolonged outage of almost two days starting on Thursday. Services have now being restored.

The necessity for system reboots after Microsoft patches happens almost every month. Skype said the problems it experienced were down to a failure in its system recovery functions due to a previously unidentified software bug.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m a malicious hacker, I’m viewing all sorts of opportunity in this monthly opportunity to slip into Microsoft’s mainstream patch-a-thon. If a common patch process applied across millions of machines simultaneously can cause so many problems, surely there’s a way to capitalize on this. Skype’s travails only make this opportunity more pronounced.

I’m liking my Mac even more right now. I just wish my Mac-based usage of Skype didn’t have to be screwed up by so many lemmings patching their Windows machines. All together. At the same time. Every month. Like clockwork.

Source: http://news.com.com

posted by Robert on Aug 21

Adobe Systems has embraced open-source software for some products, but its core Creative Suite line looks like it’ll remain proprietary.

In a blog posting Sunday, Adobe’s top creative products executive, John Loiacono, made unflattering remarks about open-source alternatives whose free cost is offset by the time that creative pros have to spend fiddling. “Time is money,” he opines, not without merit, and links to a blog posting by Eric Vreeland, who observed, “Debugging recent installs of certain open-source software has wasted immense amounts of my spare time; charged at my hourly rate these hours represent a pile of cash bigger than that which full list price versions of comparable commercial software would require for purchase.” Vreeland opted for the $2,500 Creative Suite Master Collection, which bundles 12 Adobe products, such as Photoshop, Premiere and Illustrator.

Loiacono legitimately points to his open-source credentials as the top Sun Microsystems software executive who oversaw much of that company’s work releasing its Solaris operating system as open-source software. But his logic is a little wonky in this case.

“Obviously, I have thought about whether open source has a place in Adobe’s creative products strategy. But what designers need is tightly-integrated workflows and high reliability right out of the box, so the really important question to ask is what’s the impact to the user,” he said, then concludes, “Open-source software can be a perfect solution. It’s just not right for everything. Or for everyone–like many creative professionals who are on deadline and prefer to innovate vs. integrate.”

It’s well and good to look at things from the user’s perspective, but in this case it leads to a false dichotomy. Loiacono appears to be considering only outside open-source alternatives such as Inkscape or the Gimp.

There’s nothing technological stopping Adobe from releasing software that’s both open-source as well as integrated and easy to use. But it’s misleading to point to the shortcomings of others’ open-source software as a reason why Adobe shouldn’t open-source its own.

Of course, Adobe would face no shortage of business and legal obstacles–free Photoshop no doubt would appeal to a lot of people who today pay hundreds of dollars for it–and that would be an issue I’d like on which I’d like to hear Johnny L’s thoughts.

Source: http://news.com.com

posted by Robert on Aug 21

Patch Tuesday became a Friday the 13th for Skype this month, as a Windows Update devastated Skype’s authentication network.

Skype Brought Down By Microsoft Update

Skype has blamed the routine installation of updates from Microsoft for a massive outage in August. The company’s Villu Arak has been blogging about the issue since its beginning, and recently provided an update on the cause of the Skype outage:

The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly.

Skype’s members were without service for a couple of days until the cause of the problem became clear, and engineers could address it.

Some speculated that the outage had been the work of an attack against Skype’s assets. Arak stated as he has previously that “no malicious activities were attributed or that our users’ security was not, at any point, at risk.”

Source: http://www.webpronews.com

posted by Robert on Aug 10

Nokia on Tuesday unveiled two new phones–the 7500 and the 7900–that target style-conscious consumers. Shown here is the 7500, a GSM phone that is expected to sell for about $285, before subsidies and taxes.

Credit: Nokia

Source: http://news.com.com

posted by Robert on Aug 10

Hitachi jumped to the front of the Blu-ray camcorder race this morning, announcing two camcorders that can record video at up to 1920×1080-pixel resolution on 8-centimeter Blu-ray discs. Both models, the DZ-BD7H and the DZ-BD70, include 5.3-megapixel CMOS sensors developed by AltaSens of Thousand Oaks, California.

Hitachi’s new DZ-BD7H will record 1920×1080 video to either Blu-ray discs or its built-in 30GB hard drive.

(Credit: Hitachi)

When recording video, the camcorders will use up to 2.07 megapixels (or 1920×1080), but will use up to 4.32-megapixels when capturing 4:3 still images. Both models will also sport 10X optical zoom lenses, 2.7-inch LCDs, and will be able to fit about one hour of 1920×1080 footage, or two hours of 1440×1080 video, on single-sided, single-layer BD-R/-RE discs, according to Hitachi.

In a nod to the rising popularity of hard-drive-based camcorders, the DZ-BD7H will include a 30GB hard disk drive, which Hitachi says will hold up to four hours of 1920×1080 video, or eight hours of 1440×1080 footage. The model’s dubbing feature will allow in-camera copying of HD video from the hard drive to a Blu-ray disc at up to 2X speed. The DZ-BD7H will also be able to convert high definition video stored on the hard drive into standard definition, and record it onto DVD-R/-RW/-RAM discs using the same drive it uses for Blu-ray recording.

The camcorders will include two LSI chips–one HD signal processing LSI and a second H.264 LSI–for recording MPEG 4 AVC/H.264 video. HDMI outputs will let you send video directly from the camcorder to a TV set or monitor.

The DZ-BD7H and DZ-BD70 will both start selling in Japan on August 30, but won’t hit U.S. shelves until October; they’re expected to sell for about $1,500 and $1,300, respectively. More info, images, and video about Hitachi’s new camcorders can be found on the company’s Web site.

posted by Robert on Aug 10

Looks like Microsoft is hell-bent on making it impossible to tell what’s a real image and what’s been doctored, and is intent on making it so anybody with a digital camera can do so.

And that’s good news, really, for digital photographers, graphic designers, animation artists, web developers, and anybody that works with imaging.

It’s still in the research stage, so don’t expect the software in the immediate future. Right now it’s being shown off in San Diego to industry academic types.

What is it? It’s a few things, based on several papers presented in conjunction with several universities, including The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Carnegie Mellon.

One technology, presented in a paper called Image Deblurring with Blurred/Noisy Image Pairs, allows two blurred or noisy images of the same object to be transposed onto each other to form a detailed, clearer image. This comes in handy for not only transforming substandard photos into usable ones.

Another, described in Photo Clip Art, lets designers get around building graphics or animation from the ground up by allowing real images to be inserted in a real, 3D kind of way.

The last one, called “Soft Scissors” allows for more precise cutting of difficult images involving fur or curly hair, which make it difficult to determine which is background and which is foreground.

All of the research will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2007 in San Diego this week.

The Image Deblurring research promises to make it easier, with off-the-shelf, hand-held cameras, reconstruct photos taken in challenging environments. Eventually, Microsoft will produce the software for this and the others.

“In this research, we presented an image deblurring approach to produce a high quality image by combining a blurred and noisy pair of images,” says Jian Sun, Microsoft Research Asia. “The result is that the reconstructed image is sharper than the blurred image, and clearer than the noisy one. Using a blurred/noisy image pair for input, we are able to obtain incredible image deblurring results that were hardly imaginable before.”

The technology discussed in Photo Clip Art, is being touted as one useful to animators and architects looking to make their work extra realistic.

“Our goal was to solve the grand challenge of computer graphics by creating realistic images for user-defined scenes,” says Carsten Rother, Microsoft Research Cambridge. “In contrast to graphics, which creates a three-dimensional world from scratch, we turned the problem upside-down by combining real images in such a way that we never break the realness of them.

“Instead of trying to manipulate the object to change factors such as its orientation and color distribution, we simply retrieve an object of a specified class that has all the required properties from our large object library.”

And what’s probably a pretty neat development for designers that have had to cut images involving hair or fur, “Soft Scissors” aims to alleviate the inherent difficulties.

“In the past there were ways to move objects, but it required the user to draw a line around the object as if they were using a pair of scissors and then cut the objects out,” said Microsoft’s Michael Cohen. “That’s hard to do if the fuzzy boundary of the subject is a mix of background and foreground.

“The system looks ahead of the user’s actions to see how fuzzy the subject is and adjusts how soft the scissors are to come up with a much clearer image. It just does the right thing automatically. Users can select the new background ahead of time and then, as they’re brushing, see the edge of a dog for example going into a new background. Soft Scissors draws a soft line, a line that gradually and softly separates the foreground and background.”

And for anybody dealing with digital imagery, that sounds like a few nice developments.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com

posted by Robert on Aug 3

The tech world is buzzing with rumors about a Google phone. The Wall Street Journal ran an article today, quoted at SearchEngineLand, that provides some details of the development process. Apparently, Google is taking a two-pronged approach: developing their own handset, but at the same time opening up the specifications to allow other manufacturers to offer compatible phones. And, unlike Apple’s iPhone, the Google Phone (GPhone?) should be available from multiple wireless companies.

[Google] is drafting specifications for phones that can display all of Google’s mobile applications at their best, and it is developing new software to run on them. The company is conducting much of the development work at a facility in Boston, and is working on a sophisticated new Web browser for cellphones, people familiar with the plans say…

Google is hoping that multiple operators will offer its phone. And Google is ready to relinquish some control over design, allowing manufacturers to create devices based on a common set of specifications. Google has approached several wireless operators in the U.S. and Europe in recent months, including AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC, people familiar with the situation say. T-Mobile USA, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, appears to be the furthest along in considering it, these people say. Andy Rubin, who helped design T-Mobile’s popular Sidekick phone, now works at Google and is involved in its handset project. [From the WSJ via SearchEngineLand]

The overriding goal seems to be not slugging it out in the intensely competitive cell phone hardware market, but rather creating a new platform for Google advertising. Free, ad-supported phone service isn’t out of the question. One thing that Google has discovered in the past is that “free” is a very attractive price point. They have taken costly web analytics software and offered it free to users, who can better manage their paid Google Adwords campaigns. In addition, Google vacuums up even more data for its insatiable effort to better understand Web users and site traffic patterns.

Wireless Market Disruption. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Google could cause some major restructuring in the stodgy U.S. cell phone market. The big carriers that dominate wireless service in this country also dominate cell phone hardware distribution - greatly to the detriment of U.S. wireless users. Hardware choices are limited compared available those in Europe and Asia, and U.S. carriers sometimes even cripple hardware features to boost service revenue. Apple did nothing to break these oligopolistic practices when they introduced their iPhone - rather, they released it through a single carrier. It’s likely that Google will find it easier to cooperate with the U.S. wireless giants too, but they may shake up the market by offering new hardware at dramatically lower ad-supported hardware pricing.

Google Smart Phone. What would I love to see? A Google-designed smart phone. I’ve been patiently waiting for the Verizon XV6800 to release (OK, maybe not patiently), and even though I want this phone I’m sure I’ll find it has important limitations and compromises. With Google’s demonstrated creativity, I think they could probably shake up the smart phone market, too. Every employee would have one, and by the time Smart GPhone 2.0 came out, I’m sure it would rock.

posted by Robert on Aug 1

The chairman of Microsoft isn’t impressed with reports that Google will develop a cellphone that can compete with others in the market, like ones running Windows Mobile.

Bill Gates Yawns At Google Phone

Gates will involve himself fully with his philanthropic efforts after he steps away (mostly) from Microsoft next year. It’s our loss in the tech media world, because we won’t have stinging quotes from him after he departs.

In recent times, Gates has directed some of his famed invective at Google, a company he once described as the most similar competitor to Microsoft he’d ever seen. That trend continued in a New York Times interview with him.

For one thing, don’t expect Gates to pick up a Google Phone if it ever comes to market:

“How many products, of all the Google products that have been introduced, how many of them are profit-making products?” he asked. “They’ve introduced about 30 different products; they have one profit-making product. So, you’re now making a prediction without ever seeing the software that they’re going to have the world’s best phone and it’s going to be free?”

Of course, that one profit-making product happens to be search advertising, an offshoot of Google’s dominance in the search engine market. It’s been a steamroller to the competition, including Microsoft and its adCenter service.

The minor quibble we have with Gates’ comments is that he may be missing what people see as the real appeal of a possible Google Phone. It isn’t so much the software, which will have to be effective, but the potential for a Google Phone to be the razor sharp edge of a blade that cuts into the cellphone industry.

We have high hopes that a Google Phone would be backed by a Google Network, with its services available for a far lower cost than what the wireless industry charges customers today. That’s the real point of difference that has people interested in Google’s efforts.