Uncategorized on SWiK

Death to JavaScript Rock Stars!

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:55:29 -0700

We’ve been listening to your feedback today, about the new jQuery site redesign and one thing has become clear:

Death to JavaScript Rock Stars!

Poor dude didn’t even last 24 hours. We wanted to have some fun with the home page, but this bordered on a little too “extreme” for most tastes.

We plan on bringing some further revisions to the homepage in the future, but in the meantime here’s a quick overhaul, put together by the always-excellent Scott Jehl, that’ll help tide everyone over:

As a token of our appreciation for sticking with the “JavaScript Rock Star” for a day we’ve included a little Easter Egg in the new site. It would be useful if you knew the Konami Code.

Naturally, the whole redesign still has many tweaks that’ll be made over the next couple weeks, especially to individual page fonts, font sizes, and colors.

I want to, once again, thank Scott Jehl for all the hard work that he’s been putting in to the site design - and the excellent Varick Rosete (of nGenWorks and Happy Webbies) for the great illustration that he drew for us.

Here’s to many happy days of rockin’ out with jQuery!

Thanks To Our GigaNET Sponsors

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:00:15 -0700

We’d like to say thanks to this month’s GigaNET sponsors:

Brightcove: “The 2008 SEO Video Playbook” (free download)
Accenture: “The Innovation Dilemma: How to Achieve High Performance through Superior Research & Development” (free download)
Peer 1: ValuePro Managed Hosting Plan, $299 per month
Interop: Register for a free expo pass — New York, Sept. 15 - 19.
Server Beach: By geeks, for geeks
Volo Media: Dynamic advertising for downloadable audio and video
Ki Work: Take control of your online business
Brain Keeper: Collaboration that works
Rackspace Hosting: Experience fanatical support
Acquia: Commercially supported Drupal
Sun Microsystems: Incredible discounts with Sun Startup Essentials
GoGrid Systems: Scalable load-balanced Windows and Linux cloud-server hosting
The Economist Debate Series: The “Global Energy Crisis” debate is on now.

Microsoft Sets Sights on Europe With Shopping Site Buy

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:01:03 -0700

Greenfield Online, the parent company of Munich-based comparison shopping site Ciao, said this morning that Microsoft would spend $486 million to acquire it, derailing an earlier offer from a private equity firm to buy the company. The Ciao sites operate in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

For Microsoft, the hope is that the deal will help boost its search business overseas. After the failed bid for Yahoo, Microsoft has been reeling around like a spurned lover trying desperately to fill the gap — with cash-back rebates for search engine users — while strategically looking for markets where it has a real chance at gaining share in search.

But Europe might not be that market. According to the most recently available comScore data, Google had almost 80 percent of the European search market in March while Microsoft had close to 2 percent. However, Google’s own comparison shopping engine, Google Product Search, is currently an English-only service. With Ciao, Microsoft could take advantage of Google’s relative absence in certain languages. As of January, Ciao was the top comparison shopping engine in Europe with 30 percent of the market, while Google was 18th, with 2.5 percent. It’s an opening, but it appears to be a small one.

image courtesy of Ciao

Allright

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 03:59:10 -0700

Over the past few months, many of us trolls have had the pleasure of meeting groups of enthusiastic Nokians. Everybody is excited about Qt. It feels a bit overwhealming sometimes, different people have different expectations as to what a small group of people can do. Excitement, expectations, concerns. Enthusiasm! But the whole progress is easier when you get to meet peers that are, yeah, quite allright people. That’s what makes the whole job worth it for me. Set aside technical trouble and new procedures (which quite frankly aren’t as scary as I first thought!). Who’s doing what now and how will this work? Then someone comes over and shows you a layout they wrote. How they used scripting, widgets. Wrote plugins. Can you do this? Can you do that? Yeah, you know, you usually can.

So walking to work today, I found myself fumbling in my pocket, pulling out the Nokia-badge that we now all wear, and putting it on right when I went out of the subway station. It felt allright.

jQuery.com Site Redesign

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:55:14 -0700

We’ve just pushed out a brand new site redesign (for jQuery.com and all its sub-sites). This has been a long time coming and it feels great to get it out the door.

New Homepage

Easily the most contentious part of the redesign - but absolutely the most eye-catching.

jQuery has long been driven by rock, even looking back to its original release which was heavily inspired by the always-excellent Devo. We shot for a catchy design that helped to bring JavaScript out of the cold doldrums that it frequently inhabits - giving it a serious jolt of fun.

New Site Layout

The entirety of the site has a new layout. With drastically improved multi-layer navigation and a standardized sidebar it should become much easier to navigate the individual portions of the site.

You should probably wear a hard hat while exploring the interior pages - font sizes, spacing, and colors are all in need of tweaking, which will be handled over the upcoming week (it’s fun working against Trac, Wordpress, Drupal, and Mediawiki simultaneously).

New Logo

The original jQuery logo was a variation of the Devo hat - we’ve taken that concept, turned it on its ear, and made it something that we can call our own - while still being inspired by the original contours of the Devo Energy Dome.

Thanks

Site and Logo Design: Scott Jehl - he put a fantastic amount of work into this redesign, bringing it all the way from conception to final implementation.

Rockin’ Illustration: Varick Rosete from nGenWorks also of Happy Webbies fame.

Initial Logo Prototyping: Bradley Sepos.

Also want to thank Media Temple for our hosting. They’ve been helping us a lot this past week migrating our sites to some new servers - expect some speed improvements for the sub-domains very soon.

The Purpose and the Meaning of our life

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:15:03 -0700

Humans always wondered through history about the purpose of our life and the meaning that it holds for each one of us. Life that is embodied by humans actions is a system that is made to protect humans and make them live [...]

Free getting started tutorial and ‘Creating podcasts with Fabrik’

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:14:24 -0700

Hugh Messenger has been a busy in training for the USA’s London Olympic’s “DA MAN” team

This week he has released a free, introductory Fabrik video tutorial.

He has also been tweaking Fabrik 1.0.6’s RSS feed creation code to allow for the embedding of mp3’s as podcasts. Read more about how to create podcasts with Fabrik

WiiWare Finally Gets Some Rhythm!

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:11:50 -0700

It’s about time. Last Spring, Nintendo launched WiiWare, a downloadable game service on the Wii, but I haven’t been all that impressed by the scant titles they’ve made available since then. This week’s offering is different: Helix, from indie developer Ghostfire Games. In my view it’s the first WiiWare title to truly capitalize on the game console’s unique functionality and diverse audience. More crucial, it’s WiiWare’s first music/rhythm game, an entry in the seemingly unstoppable genre which accounts for 32 percent of the industry’s growth so far this year.

Plus, it’s pretty freaking fun.

Think Dance Dance Revolution, but for the upper body. Holding two Wii remotes in either hand, you imitate an on-screen robot in a fast routine of arm swinging, swaying, and waving your hands in the air like you just don’t care. As with DDR and all the many games it’s spawned, you need to time your movements to synch up with the glowing symbols that fly across the screen.

All this is accompanied by fairly decent electronica dance music, though Helix is too frenetic and choppy to feel like dancing. Still, it’s a good workout. For the Wii’s future outlook, that’s another important plus — it’ll easily appeal to the 6 million+ who bought WiiFit, and prime them to look for more downloadable content on WiiWare.

Image credit: www.ghostfiregames.com

Zoho Projects : Create Project templates, Bulk upload documents and more

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:07:04 -0700

Today’s Zoho Projects update brings in a few more goodies.

Project Templates : Zoho Projects has had Tasklist Templates for quite some time now. This has now been enhanced to include defining whole projects as templates. In addtion to defining tasklists, you can now have Milestones (consisting of various tasklists), documents, forum posts & users added to a template. And whenever a new project is created, you needn’t start from scratch but make a copy of a suitable project template (whereever applicable).

Bulk Upload Documents : Typically, when a new project gets started, you upload various documents like requirement docs, drawings, design plans, test procedures etc related to that project. What better way than to choose once and upload all of them in one go? Zoho Projects now offers multiple file uploads.

Log time : Logging time has now been made easier. A clock icon comes on moving your mouse over the days in the calendar view. You can click on it and log the time for your tasks in that project.

You can also log time, edit the logged time in the List View under the Timesheet tab now.

Do try the latest features in Zoho Projects.

India retains World Youth Chess Olympiad title

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:07:04 -0700

I know the Olympics just ended. But I am not going to talk about it, because India was, like 50th in the medal tally. Did you know no Indian had ever won an individual gold medal before, until this Olympics. If you said “Indians suck at sports”, I would say you are being too polite.

So we prefer to celebrate the wins we do get, like this one from The Hindu:

India, which crushed Russia 3.5-0.5 in the second round but almost lost its way in the second half of the 10-round competition, caught up with the top seed at 28.5 points and took the honours due to superior tie-break score.

What is particularly thrilling to us is we at AdventNet had a small hand in it. About a year ago, the Hindu carried an article that said a gifted chess player in our state was looking for help acquiring a laptop, so he could polish his game. We gifted him one. He is one of the players in the team that won the World Youth Chess Olympiad. Congratulations, Priyadarshan, you make us proud!

I want to emphasize that our role in this is small and incidental, but we are really happy it made a difference. There is plenty of talent where he comes from. One of the most satisfying things we do at AdventNet is to help surface such talent - in the field of software. But there is a lot more than software talent in India, that is waiting to be discovered.

Facebook on “Scaling Out”

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:06:11 -0700

Jason Sobel has an interesting post, “Scaling Out” on Facebook’s BCP work and the move to being multi-colo.

Interesting to me was noting that:

they just got around to this 8 months ago, and they’re fscking Facebook (which means you can wait)
they’re still doing all writes to a single datacenter
they’re hacking an object-level mark/sweep into the MySQL replication stream suggesting a certain parable of a hammer and nails.

via PaulH

4Barrel is open

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:06:11 -0700

I hear 4Barrel is open. Congrats to Jeremy and the crew!

This photo is from a morning when MSG, Blaine, and I wandered over to find the back door closed, and so peaked our head. Jeremy took a break from painting and sanding to pull some shots, and show us around the bones of the store. Excited to see the finished product, but I think I’ll be nostalgic for how it looked that morning.

New article on MySQL 6.0 backup

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:05:48 -0700

I just finished some testing of the latest MySQL alpha (6.0.6) and focused on the additions put into the new backup/restore utility that will be in 6.0. If you’re not familiar with it, I’d encourage you to check out a new article that I wrote that will take you through what the new backup is all about. The thing people are most excited about is being able to do online backups for MyISAM databases (where online = non-blocking for DML operations; you can also do non-blocking backups for transaction engines that support consistent snapshot). But I also saw faster backups with the new utility as well as much faster restores, and I’m interested to know if those of you testing 6.0 are seeing the same things?

If you haven’t downloaded and given the new backup a test drive, I’d encourage you to do so - you can find the lastest build here.

Java2Script Desktop

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:04:16 -0700

You may already know Web OS, like eyeOS. In fact, those web OSs are web desktop + web services. And there are lots of web desktop styles. And here we introduce Java2Script Desktop, basing on Java2Script SWT technology:

There are four elements on the above screen shot: Tray Bar (left upper corner), Task Bar (left side), Quick Shortcut Bar (bottom), Window.

This is a prototype design for Java2Script Desktop. Please check it out at http://izuz.net/gtalk/ . Hope to hear your feedback.

MAME 0.127u1

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:00:58 -0700

Now available over at the Source Updates page.

MAME 0.127

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:14:52 -0700

After a large amount of internal changes and restructuring, release day is finally here. Grab the final MAME 0.127 release from our Latest Release page.

This release marks a new “first” in MAME history: the first officially supported laserdisc game, Cube Quest, is now up and running. This was definitely one of the more obscure and challenging games to emulate, so special kudos to Philip Bennett, Joe Magiera, and Warren Ondras for figuring it all out!

Why We Compete with Google

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:05:06 -0700

How do you plan to compete with Google or why do you compete with Google? That is a question we get asked very often. It is better to ask why Google is interested in the business software market. Let me explain with a spreadsheet.

Focus on the revenue per employee and profit per employee metrics. I have grouped together the business software industry and the consumer internet industry separately. Notice how very successful companies with mature business models like Oracle or Intuit don’t even pull down half the revenue per employee of Google, and perhaps surprisingly, they pale in comparison with the supposedly struggling Yahoo. Ebay also towers over every software company except Microsoft. Finally, even Microsoft falls short of Google’s revenue/profit per employee metrics - and Google isn’t even milking a mature monopoly.

Salesforce.com is very instructive. Though it likes to pass itself off as an internet giant, its revenue per employee is only in the range of its business software peers, and is a fraction of the real internet giants - I know an internet giant when I see one, and you ain’t no internet giant, Salesforce ! This, I must add, despite their out-of-this-world pricing for their CRM subscriptions. They pull in almost $1 billion in revenue on the backs of - those are some really overloaded backs - a little over 1 million users, leading to almost $1000/user/year.

Now it is clear why we compete with Google. Google is perhaps the most stunning technology success story ever, but we simply don’t believe Google has the rational business incentive to get too deep into the business/IT software category. The lower revenue and profit per employee figures would be tolerable if there were huge growth opportunities there, but when very successful companies like Adobe and Intuit pull in revenues well shy of a Yahoo, when even the enterprise software leader SAP is smaller, and slower growing than Google (Google makes nearly as much in profit per employee as SAP or Oracle Salesforce make in revenue per employee), it is fairly clear this market is not going to make a material contribution to Google’s growth and profitability objectives. So what is Google’s plan here? It is fairly obvious they are in it to put Microsoft on the defensive on its home turf, so that Microsoft’s offensive capability in the internet is diminished. It is also perfectly clear why Microsoft wants to be an internet player - as Google has shown, it is a higher margin business even than its monopoly-profit core business.

So why is business software so much less profitable than the internet? I can think of two reasons: a) purchasing departments that know a thing or two about supplier margins and specialize in putting the squeeze b) sales and support costs, particularly support costs. When you sell software to businesses, they have all kinds of support expectations, which adds to headcount. A search engine or a news portal isn’t expected provide any customer support.

Another conclusion that leaps out is that within business software, companies that sell to small and mid-sized businesses, such as Adobe & Intuit (Microsoft is also very strong in SMBs), have higher revenue per employee than companies that focus on large enterprises, such as Oracle or SAP. This is likely due to SMB-focused channel strategies leading to “outsourced” selling.

When push comes to shove - and there is a lot of very messy push and shove in the business software market - Google’s resources are going to flow into figuring out how to monetize the humongous traffic of YouTube or compete in online auctions, rather than figure out a way to squeeze a bit more margin compared to Oracle or Adobe or Salesforce. That may explain why Google has been silent on CRM, Project Management, Invoicing or HR type of tools, because those markets don’t offer the profit potential they already enjoy.

(Update: Dan Farber’s take here)

CAPTCHA’s Can Be Useful, Don’tcha Know

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:06:03 -0700

To some, a web site like Craigslist asking you to verify that you are indeed a human by retyping distorted, nonsensical words is irritating. But the next time you do it, you could be helping to fill in some historical blanks.

NPR ran a story yesterday on Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the guys who helped develop the CAPTCHA technology. The short version: Efforts to digitize (really) old books and newspapers were being hampered by faded ink that confounded OCR software. The solution von Ahn came up with was to use the words that the software couldn’t recognize and insert them into these so-called reCAPTCHAs and use the power of human brains to decipher them. CAPTCHAs serve up two words, one is the security word, the other goes toward the book digitization effort. It sounded interesting, so I called von Ahn to find out more.

Here’s how it works. The New York Times is working to digitize all of its issues starting way back in 1851. It starts by scanning every single page as an image. That’s where reCAPTCHA comes in. It runs two optical character recognition (OCR) programs to turn all of those images of pages into text. Different OCR programs tend to make different mistakes. When the two programs disagree on a word, that word is plucked out and distributed among CAPTCHA security programs spread out across 45,000 web sites like Craigslist and TicketMaster.

Human beings then look at the words as part of the CAPTCHA security measure and do the deciphering by retyping what they think the mangled word is. Depending on the word, as little as two or three people agreeing on what it is is enough to figure it out. The word is then sent back to the New York Times to be reinserted into the text version of the image.

Initially, this project was part of Carnegie Mellon, but von Ahn said that they are spinning out reCAPTCHA as its own company. While The New York Times is paying to use the service, reCAPTCHA is also doing work free of charge for the Internet Archive’s project to digitize every book published before 1980.

But von Ahn is looking beyond just re-typing words as security measures. He says that his team has tried using images and having people type what they see. The problem, von Ahn says, is that people don’t spell very well, so even though the image is of a “cat” people could spell “kat” and not answer the question correctly. ReCAPTCHA is also expanding into audio, and using the audio version of CAPTCHAs to have people listen to and decipher words from garbled old recordings or closed captioning transcriptions.

The idea of taking a necessary evil like spam prevention and turning it into something useful is a good one. Who knew selling my old digital camera on Craigslist was actually an act of historical preservation?

MAME 0.126u5

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:06:56 -0700

On the Source Updates page. The dev cycle for 0.126 is winding down, so please get your bug reports in to MAMETesters as soon as you can!

Can Nvidia Play with the Big Boys?

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:05:55 -0700

Despite reporting a second-quarter loss last night, due in part to costs associated with the faulty packaging on some of its chips placed in thousands of laptops, Nvidia still has a plan for semiconductor domination through the GPU. But if it wants to execute, it needs to accept the realities that come with stepping into a competitive market. The earnings call shows Nvidia still has a lot to learn.

In yesterday evening’s call, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang admitted to a $196 million charge because of problems with its GPUs in some laptops. He also talked about some pricing mishaps that occurred as AMD pushed out a highly competitive product with a lower price. Nvidia is learning, but there are two bright spots in the call, related to its Tegra chipset for mobile Internet devices and smartphones and bringing high-level parallel processing to the consumer.

Huang said Tegra wouldn’t be shipping in products until next year (something he told us earlier this year in an interview), but growth from CUDA on laptops and desktops should have an impact over the second half of this year (which will be the second half of fiscal 2009 for the firm). CUDA is a programming tool that allows software coded in C languages to run on the multiple cores in a GPU. It helped the company make inroads in the scientific computing community, and thanks to software from startups such as Elemental Technologies, the goal is to bring that level of parallel processing to consumers.

“We can’t just keep selling chips that make graphics run faster and cheaper. I mean, that’s all very nice and it’s all good but we need to advance the visual computing field in some remarkable and important way, and parallel computing is one of the most important investments that we are making,” Huang said on the call.

Such a shift, if well executed, will bring a level of power to computers that has been reserved for research institutions and mainframes. The next laptop you purchase could very well be able to analyze real-time trading data and spit out investment decisions. The key will be building software that’s designed to take advantage of it.

image courtesy of Nvidia

Drizzle translations progress

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:13:15 -0700

First of all, that’s to everyone who’s pitched in so far. There are more messages to translate coming… So far we have contributions in 15 different languages. Quite impressive. Check it out:

A slight engineering puzzle is coming up. As you can see from the german output, “Unknown database ‘lskfs’” wasn’t translated. This is because that error message is actually stiched together on the server and sent back over the wire, so it’s not executing in the context of the locale the client is connecting as. That’s fine for messages without parameters, but for ones with parameters, which would be the main reason to build on server and send over the wire, running gettext() on the client gets us no where. Not sure what the right answer to this is yet…

RoofRay Launches the Zillow of Solar

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:06:03 -0700

What do you get when you cross Zillow and Lending Tree? Online solar clearinghouse RoofRay. The site, created by entrepreneur Chris Bura, launched this morning; it offers users satellite imagery and drawing tools based on Google maps to help solar fans find and buy the best solar rooftop solutions. Cause you know you don’t want to buy a house that’s got poor solar potential. Read the full story over at Earth2Tech.com.

Space for a real website around iTunes app store

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:06:45 -0700

I haven’t poured hours into it, but I have looked around a bit trying to find good iPhone apps, and I find the conversation frustrating and fractured — echoing and empty. And I think Apple’s its-a-webiste-but-not-really iTunes store is the problem. It is definitely a 2nd class web citizen, and one that has rather aggressively not learned the lessons of Web 2.0.

I’d love to see someone do a full on iPhone-apps-as-social-objects site as a translation layer on top of the iTunes store. It would be easy, and it would be awesome. And if Apple weren’t Apple (say if they were Amazon) you could earn a nice affiliate income stream. As it is you’d probably wake up every morning and check your inbox for a C&D, but still it would be great. You should build it.

Photo from Paul Hammond

Thanks to Our GigaNET Sponsors

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:11:51 -0700

We’d like to say thanks to this month’s GigaNET sponsors:

Brightcove: “The 2008 SEO Video Playbook” (free download)
Accenture: “The Innovation Dilemma: How to Achieve High Performance through Superior Research & Development” (free download)
Volo Media: Dynamic advertising for downloadable audio and video
Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo: Helping businesses harness the power of virtual worlds
Ki Work: Take control of your online business
Brain Keeper: Collaboration that works
Rackspace Hosting: Experience fanatical support
Acquia: Commercially supported Drupal
Sun Microsystems: Incredible discounts with Sun Startup Essentials
GoGrid Systems: Scalable load-balanced Windows and Linux cloud-server hosting

Faster Web Pages Makes Users Happy

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:11:30 -0700

I can’t believe that in this age of Twitter, 24-hour news cycles and always-on access, anyone needs to point out that slow web sites alienate customers, but just in case, there’s an interview at Royal Pingdom with Steve Souders, who works at Google on web site performance and is the creator of YSlow software, which measures web site performance. It’s a nice reminder that there are many links in the chain that create a user’s web experience, and it focuses on what developers and site designers can do to make pages load faster.

Adium in The Wall Street Journal

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:07:03 -0700

The Wall Street Journal is running an article entitled “Making IM Services Play Well Together” that features a review of Adium and other applications that allow you to use multiple IM accounts simultaneously.

Adium, www.adiumx.com, wins points for cuteness. The downloaded program is represented by a goofy, green duck, which plops itself in the Mac operating system dock and closes its eyes when not in use. When new messages are received via Adium, this duck flaps its wings until you open the message. The Adium user interface incorporates sleek visuals, such as status windows that gracefully float above user names whenever a cursor moves over these names.

Thanks, Katherine!

MAME 0.126u4

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:05:50 -0700

Get it while it’s hot over on the Source Updates page. It’s worth pointing out that the cheat system is re-enabled with this version, but it is in read-only mode (that is, it can read new-format cheats but has no tools to generate new ones yet). Until there is a converted database, the code is still very much in the early test phase, so don’t get too excited just yet. With luck, we’ll have cheats working again in an update or two.

HP Keeps Pushing Touch

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:19:07 -0700

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that within 18 months HP plans to have multiple touchscreen products, including a laptop, “that use the same type of finger-tapping interface popularized by Apple Inc.’s iPhone.” If HP does use the same type of touch screen as that of the iPhone, it will represent a significant breakthrough for larger touch screens as it will help drive down costs and create a market for more applications.

The iPhone has brought touch to the masses, but HP and Microsoft have been pushing the technology for years. Microsoft’s Bill Gates showed off his first tablet in 2000, and in the last two years offered the world the futuristic Surface Table and the Touch Wall. And HP launched its second generation of touch-based personal computers earlier this summer. But the underlying touch technology for smaller devices is very different from that of big ones.

Behind the iPhone, Samsung Instinct, LG Secret and several other mobile phones with touch screens lie capacitive sensors. These are semiconductors that require the human body to make them work. For users, it means that fingernails aren’t enough to dial a number and that the resulting screens are clearer instead of filmy. But the capacitive screens used in phones would be prohibitively expensive if they were put in larger devices. They could also could cause usability problem, especially when used for tabletops, where an errant palm could easily flick photos out of sight or drag windows to the wrong locale.

That’s why HP’s personal computer and Microsoft Surface Table and Touch Wall rely on cameras built into the four corners of the monitors to make their touch screens react. These screens generally use LEDs to shine light across the surface areas. When a finger interrupts that light pattern, the cameras sense where the finger (or fingers) are based upon how the light scatters and react accordingly, all without the need for either a network of chips underneath the screen or pressure-sensitive films.

But between the large-screen touch offerings and the existing capacitive screens on cell phones, notebooks and tablets have languished, with most using resistive screens, which measure touch via pressure applied using a stylus or fingertip. Many tablet and laptop makers have capacitive screens in their product road maps, but in order to really drive adoption, they’ll need to incorporate applications that take advantage of touch.

Last month, Dell showed off the first multi-touch, capacitive touch screen for its 12.1-inch Latitude XT tablet. The Dell machine’s touch screen is provided by N-Trig, a startup with offices in Israel and Austin, Texas. On Monday, N-Trig released a software development kit that will allow programmers to build multi-touch software that can “read” gestures and touch to control applications. HP has its own internal software group that builds touch applications as well. It may only take a couple of years before our fingers will be flying — not over keys, but over screens.

image of first HP touch screen computer circa 1983 courtesy of HP

too much Qt going on!

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:18:55 -0700

A great deal of things are happening for Qt right now. Very exciting news:
Qt frontend for Mozilla engine (or, rather, has finally been dusted off and updated) Now we have two of the best browser backends to choose from. (or three if you want to use that ActiveX thing)

and

Nokia gives out free N810 devices to developers in Akademy 2008. Wow, thats a heap of n810’s to throw around.

Too bad Kate forgot to mention the other talks from Nokia:

Harald - Programming for embedded Linux
Andreas - How Graphics View Works
Simon - QtWebKit! (We are part of Nokia now).

and not to forget about former Trolls

Girish - OpenDocument support in KWord 2
and playboy Zack’s talk on Gallium3D - Graphics Done Right

And if course, I cannot really yet mention all the really powerful great stuff being developed at Qt Sofware/Nokia.. but I really want too! Because its just too cool and will blow your minds.

Zoho: 1 Million Users

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:13:29 -0700

Its been less than 3 years since we launched our first Zoho service (Zoho Writer) and we are excited to announce that @ Zoho, we now are serving Million+ Users. This is an important milestone for us and on this occasion we’d like to thank all our users for supporting and using Zoho.

The path to this milestone is certainly exciting. While we started slow, we picked up momentum adding more applications as we moved along and the applications improved week after week, thanks to our engineering team.

It took us 1 Year to get to the first 100K users. As of last July we were serving 300K users and one year later on Aug 1, when Dean Detton from Prestige Home Automation registered for Zoho CRM, he became our Millionth user.

For those of you who are coming to the Office 2.0 Conference, we are planning a party on Sep 4th in San Francisco (we’ll provide more details on this soon) to celebrate this occasion.

Once again, we’d like to thank you all for using Zoho.

Uncategorized on SWiK

Death to JavaScript Rock Stars!

Death to JavaScript Rock Stars!

Thanks To Our GigaNET Sponsors

Microsoft Sets Sights on Europe With Shopping Site Buy

Allright

jQuery.com Site Redesign

New Homepage

New Site Layout

New Logo

Thanks

The Purpose and the Meaning of our life

Free getting started tutorial and ‘Creating podcasts with Fabrik’

WiiWare Finally Gets Some Rhythm!

Zoho Projects : Create Project templates, Bulk upload documents and more

India retains World Youth Chess Olympiad title

Facebook on “Scaling Out”

4Barrel is open

New article on MySQL 6.0 backup

Java2Script Desktop

MAME 0.127u1

MAME 0.127

Why We Compete with Google

CAPTCHA’s Can Be Useful, Don’tcha Know

MAME 0.126u5

Can Nvidia Play with the Big Boys?

Drizzle translations progress

RoofRay Launches the Zillow of Solar

Space for a *real* website around iTunes app store

Thanks to Our GigaNET Sponsors

Faster Web Pages Makes Users Happy

Adium in The Wall Street Journal

MAME 0.126u4

HP Keeps Pushing Touch

too much Qt going on!

Zoho: 1 Million Users

Space for a real website around iTunes app store