Open Web

Speaking at Gov 2.0 Expo this week, Kemp said it takes one to two minutes to launch a virtual server on Nebula. That compares to as long as nine months to order and install a server using standard processes. At Gov 2.0 Expo, Kemp demonstrated a forthcoming Web application, developed in partnership with Microsoft and called Worldwide Telescope, that will make high-res imagery of Mars available to the public. Worldwide Telescope will be hosted on Nebula. Cureton said that NASA is assessing its cloud computing strategy in parallel with an analysis of its data center requirements. In February, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra announced a government-wide data center consolidation initiative. In response to that, NASA is taking an inventory if its data center resources as a first step toward consolidation. The advantages of cloud computing are "compelling," Cureton said during a Web 2.0 Expo keynote presentation. She outlined five primary advantages of the cloud model: ....... reduced IT costs, ....... faster deployment of IT resources, ....... organizational flexibility, ....... computing resource efficiency, and ....... the ability to provide high-quality services to users and departments.

In this interview with Microsoft's Chris Capossela, he admits that OOXML is not an interoperable format - that using OOXML will result in a loss of productivity.   excerpt: "The collaboration experience end users are going to have with Office 2010 and the Web applications in the browser and Office on the phone is far superior to anything out there, whether it's from Google or anybody else. And the increase in costs to do what they're suggesting and the decrease in productivity that's going to result is something that customers will see, and then they'll choose Microsoft. The best example of that is just sharing a document. Just taking an Office document that was built in the rich client that has a piece of smart art and a watermark or a header or a footer, and then when I share that with you and you open it in the Office Web app, it looks absolutely identical to what I created. When you make edits to it and save it and I open it back up, I see exactly the edits you made and all the stuff I had in there originally. If you do that exact same thing with Google or Zoho or OpenOffice, you lose stuff. And that means loss of productivity."

Return to the bad old days Many of Apple's demos rely on "experimental" CSS3 properties to work. The exact implementation of these properties has yet to be hammered out, so browser vendors must use their best guess to determine how they should be rendered onscreen. Because of the ambiguity this introduces, it is the custom for browser vendors to attach a vendor-specific prefix to the CSS property names. Firefox uses "moz," while Safari uses "webkit," named for the browser's WebKit rendering engine. This means Web developers who want to use a specific experimental CSS feature must include the vendor-specific properties for each browser they want to support in their style sheets. It's a less than ideal situation, but the actual coding required is trivial. Apple chose not to bother for its HTML5 demo site. That would be bad enough. But Apple's demos don't work on Google's Chrome browser, either -- and Chrome also uses the "webkit" prefix for its experimental CSS3 properties (because it's also based on the WebKit rendering engine). Rather than detecting browser capabilities and degrading the user experience gracefully where features aren't supported -- as is the accepted best practice on modern browsers -- Apple chose to deliberately screen out any browser that doesn't self-identify as Safari. That's right: By forcing my browser's user agent string to identify as Safari 5, I was able to view many of the demos just fine in Firefox 3.6 on Windows. Seriously, Apple? I thought we left elaborate browser-detection scripts behind in the bad old days of the 1990s. I can't imagine anyone would want to start up the practice again, let alone one of the leading companies in the development of next-generation Web standards.

Use Backboard to collect feedback on your projects, and facilitate communication and collaboration in your company. Use embedit.in to embed any file into your website or blog. Uses Adobe Air/Flash runtime.  Excellent feedback and comment interface.  Documents are uploaded and "viewed" through custom viewers.  Backboard can gather feedback on documents (Word (DOC/DOCX), Excel (XLS/XLSX), PowerPoint (PPT/PPTX), WPD, ODT, ODP, ODS, RTF, PDF, TXT, HTML, SQL and JS), images (GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP and PSD), vector graphics (AI, EPS, PS), web pages or other URLs, and free-form text. Backboard also works with iWork documents (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers) by using the Backboard Plug-in for iWork '09. I liked the viewing/comment interface, but have not tested the various documents for fidelity!  No direct interaction or collaborative editing of documents!!!!!!  Just a view and feedback.

Memeo Connect, which my colleague David Worthington tried and liked a few weeks ago, is an app that lets Google Apps users sync their documents and other files to a PC or Mac so they can get access to them even when they're offline. And as of today, it's available in a beta of version 2.0, which lets you get at synced files not only in Memeo's app but in Windows Explorer or the OS X finder, as well as in file open/save dialog boxes. The sync is two-way, so anything you drag or save into this repository gets moved back to Google Apps' storage once you're back online. And as before, Connect can handle files of all sorts and do conversions between Google Docs files and PDF and Microsoft Office formats. This virtual drive shows up in Explorer or Finder labeled as "GDrive"-a playful reference to a Google product that people have been expecting to arrive any day now for at least half a decade. (Don't tell anyone, but I've seen something called Google Web Drive in use at Google's offices; I assume it's undergoing internal testing and will get rolled out to the rest of us someday.) All in all, the new Connect competes more closely with Box.net (which launched its own syncing feature recently) and sync-focused services such as SugarSync. Memeo Connect 2.0′s other major feature is full-text search of the files in your Google Docs collection: Previous versions could only search file names. The Memeo Connect 2.0 beta is free, but the final version will cost $9 per user per year. It requires a $50/year Google Apps Premier account. (I think plenty of users of Google Apps' free version would pay for it, but Google only lets third-party apps and services that access the Apps API work with the paid edition.)

Ext JS, said Mullany, includes numerous UI elements and handlers that are built entirely from CSS 3, HTML5 and JavaScript. As a result, the applications built with Ext JS can be run on any WebKit-based browser. Both Android and the iPhone use WebKit-based browsers, and RIM should soon offer one as well for BlackBerry users. Mullany said each interface element is built on top of CSS, and can therefore be skinned and modified by designers after creation. He also said this limits the size of the code that must be embedded in each page with Ext JS elements. Ext JS is available for free under the GPL. For commercial users, the software will cost US$1,000 per developer per year.

Excellent chart comparing the iPhone 4 to current Android 2.1 releases for Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.  Evo 4G wins big.  Check TipB.com for future comparisons. it always helps to have a datasheet on each phone and network's devices.  Luckily, TiPb.com has already put a comprehensive list together of the smartphones and their features:

Chrome runs as close as any browser can to the bleeding edge of Web standards. Though it uses the same open source WebKit rendering engine as Safari, it doesn't reliably support the controversial, proprietary CSS3 transformation and animation tricks that Apple's built into Safari. However, like every browser I tested, it earned a perfect score in a compatibility test for CSS3 selectors, and it joined Safari and Opera with a flawless score of 100 in the Acid3 web standards benchmark. Chrome 5 also supports both Apple's H.264 codec and Mozilla's preferred open source Ogg Theora technology for plugin-free HTML5 video, and it beautifully played back HTML5 demo videos from YouTube and Brightcove. In XHTML and CSS tests, Chrome was surprisingly slower than Safari, despite their shared rendering engine -- but the race was close. Safari rendered a local XHTML test page in 0.58 seconds to Chrome's 0.78 seconds, and a local CSS test page in 33 milliseconds to Chrome's 51 milliseconds. Note that Chrome still rendered XHTML more than twice as fast as Opera (1.67 seconds) and left Firefox (12.42 seconds--no, that's not a typo) eating its dust. In CSS, it also beat the pants off Opera (193 milliseconds) and Firefox (342 milliseconds). But Chrome shines brightest when handling JavaScript. Its V8 engine zipped through the SunSpider Javascript benchmark in 448.6 milliseconds, narrowly beating Opera's 485.8 milliseconds, and absolutely plastering Firefox's 1,161.4 milliseconds. However, Safari 5's time of 376.3 miliseconds in the SunSpider test beat Chrome 5 handily.

Salesforce offers five separate editions of its Sales Cloud 2 product. Contact Manager Edition costs $5 per user per month, and somewhat resembles a cloud-based ACT. It tracks contacts, customer interactions, tasks, and hooks into Outlook and Google Apps, while also offering document sharing and mobile access. Group Edition costs $25 per user per month. It tracks sales opportunities, offers pre-built dashboards and basic reporting, adds the ability to capture leads from your Web site, and tracks Google AdWords performance within Salesforce.com. Group Edition is a good starting point for many SMBs, but Professional Edition is even better. It costs $65 per user per month, and it's is the real SMB sweet spot. It offers full reporting and analytics, custom dashboards, e-mail marketing, sales forecasts, granular permissions, real-time data sharing, and basic customer service tools.

Jailbreaking vs. Unlocking Jailbreaking and unlocking the iPhone are two different hacks which allow you to take control of your mobile device in different ways. Jailbreaking is a type of hack that lets you install unapproved third-party applications on your iPhone or iPod Touch from searchable repositories provided by apps like Cydia and Icy. Unlocking, on the other hand, is a hack that lets you use your iPhone on another cellular network. Here in the U.S., that means you can use the iPhone on T-Mobile instead of AT&T. You have to first jailbreak your phone before you can unlock it, but you don't have to unlock a phone in order to jailbreak it. How to Jailbreak the 4.0 Software for the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch Second Generation The "Redsn0w" jailbreak software has been updated to support iOS 4.0 on both Mac and Windows and works for iPhone 3G and the iPod Touch, second generation. This jailbreak is especially helpful for for iPhone 3G owners as the new OS won't offer the much sought-after multitasking feature on their devices. A jailbreak application called multifl0w will, however, provide an alternative. Another jailbreak app called WinterBoard offers a way to customize the iPhone's background even though that too is disabled for 3G owners running the latest OS 4.0 update. This jailbreak guide assumes you've already downloaded and updated your phone or iPod Touch to the latest software, iOS 4.0, and have backed up your device. If you are looking to unlock your phone in order to run it on a network belonging to another carrier, this is not the guide for you.

The World Wide Web Consortium's return to HTML standardization after years of absence has produced tensions with the more informal Web Hypertext Application Working Group (WHATWG) that shouldered the HTML burden during that absence. Some examples of language that's cropped up this month on the W3C's HTML Working Group mailing list: "childish," "intolerable," "ridiculous," "shenanigans." And there's a concrete manifestation of the divisiveness: The WHATWG and W3C versions of the HTML5 specification, though both stemming from the same source material, have diverged in some areas. Some of the differences are relatively minor, and there are strong incentives to converge the two drafts of the HTML5 specification so that browser makers and Web developers aren't faced with the prospect of incompatibilities. In the meantime, though, the overseers of the Web are clashing during a time when their important new standard is just arriving in the spotlight.

HTML 5 is a very hyped technology, but with good reason. It promises to be a technological tipping point for bringing desktop application capabilities to the browser. As promising as it is for traditional browsers, it has even more potential for mobile browsers. Even better, the most popular mobile browsers have already adopted and implemented many significant parts of the HTML 5 specification. In this five-part series, you will take a closer look at several of those new technologies that are part of HTML 5, that can have a huge impact on mobile Web application development. In each part of this series you will develop a working mobile Web application showcasing an HTML 5 feature that can be used on modern mobile Web browsers, like the ones found on the iPhone and Android-based devices