Recently I gave an update presentation to the staff of the ARM San Jose Office on Web 2.0 technologies and why they are important to ARM and what we doing to enable them. I also managed to fit in quick overview of what Augmented Reality is from a mobile perspective and how Web 2.0+ARM will totally change the way in which we look at the world around us.
I was delighted how many people showed up, and as I expected with an audience with such a broad range of skills, the questions ranged from the technical details of what we are doing with JITs to concerns regarding the privacy of Social Networking sites. However it wasn’t until a week later that I got a question which completely stumped me.
My colleague in the next cube said simply: “What do you think of Chrome OS? I’ve tried it out and it seems pretty fast even running in VMWare.”
I was somewhat phased.
He went on: “I downloaded it and tried it at the weekend and it’s really quite fast, but seems just to be a cut down version of Linux with the Chrome Browser stuck on top of it.”
“Er… um. You are running Chrome OS!!! on your Mac in VMware?” I was rather shocked, as I really hadn’t been expecting a preview release to occur without much fanfare and excitement from Google itself. Surely this could not be true? However, here I was being told by a very credible source 6ft from me that he had it up and running.
So like any good researcher I started Googling and discovered that there were in fact a plethora of YouTube Videos and preview versions of Google Chrome OS out there on the Internet. The only problem was they were all FAKE!
And no I am not going to give any of them credence by posting links on this blog.
But surely this must be the first time an OS has warranted such fervent speculation, such desire to part of the buzz and such opportunity to get the last laugh, that people actually go to the length of making not just slide shows and YouTube videos but actual Linux binary distros (if that’s not an oxymoron) of something that has yet see the light of day.
Wow!
Monday, September 28, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
Flash 10 on ARM Powered Devices
I thought this was good overview of why Adobe is focusing so much effort with ARM on getting Flash 10 onto ARM Powered Devices.
And Yes the entire Adobe building really is Energy Star Compliant!
And Yes the entire Adobe building really is Energy Star Compliant!
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Firefox 3.5 ships!
Today saw the release of version 3.5 of the Firefox browser from the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox has been the most popular alternative browser to Internet Explorer (IE) for many years and with this release it pulls significantly ahead of IE both in terms of JavaScript performance and support for HTML 5.0 web standards. I’m personally very excited to see this release as it brings all of these new features to ARM-based devices as well as Intel.
Over the past year we’ve been working with the guys at Mozilla in a couple of areas to enhance the performance of Firefox: In the summer of last year Mozilla announced a new high performance JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey that uses a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to compile and execute frequently executed JavaScript sequences in the processors native code rather than interpreting it. TraceMonkey uses a code generator called Tamarin to generate the native code and over the past 12 months the guys at ARM have been working to enhance the code it produces for our latest processors. The project is still ongoing and because it is open source it will benefit not only Firefox but other open source projects that use Tamarin such as Adobe Flash.
The other area we’ve been working on is enhancing the performance of the Cairo 2D graphics library which is used by Firefox and some versions of Webkit. Modern day ARM processors contain a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) processor called NEON that lends itself quite well to pixel manipulation and so we have been recoding parts of Cairo’s Pixel Manipulation Library (Pixman) to make use of NEON and improve the performance of web page rendering and the Firefox user interface.
Firefox 3.5 is a big leap in version numbers from 3.0 and big leap in features too. I’ll post more on the enhanced features later this week.
Over the past year we’ve been working with the guys at Mozilla in a couple of areas to enhance the performance of Firefox: In the summer of last year Mozilla announced a new high performance JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey that uses a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to compile and execute frequently executed JavaScript sequences in the processors native code rather than interpreting it. TraceMonkey uses a code generator called Tamarin to generate the native code and over the past 12 months the guys at ARM have been working to enhance the code it produces for our latest processors. The project is still ongoing and because it is open source it will benefit not only Firefox but other open source projects that use Tamarin such as Adobe Flash.
The other area we’ve been working on is enhancing the performance of the Cairo 2D graphics library which is used by Firefox and some versions of Webkit. Modern day ARM processors contain a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) processor called NEON that lends itself quite well to pixel manipulation and so we have been recoding parts of Cairo’s Pixel Manipulation Library (Pixman) to make use of NEON and improve the performance of web page rendering and the Firefox user interface.
Firefox 3.5 is a big leap in version numbers from 3.0 and big leap in features too. I’ll post more on the enhanced features later this week.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
The future is now- Sekai Camera Demo on Tegra
Following on from my post on Sekai Camera this week I went to the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco and got talking to NVidia and the Khronos Group about some of the emerging standards for graphics and Web 2.0. It is really exciting where this stuff is going.
The interesting thing for me is that combining this with other standards such as the BONDI OMTP initiative that allows access to a mobile devices assets and ambience in Web 2.0 applications will help make the whole Sekia Camera experience a (virtual sic) reality on mobile devices in general, rather than just a specialty application that runs on a couple of smartphones. And after all that is what needs to happen. Like any social networking platform this kind of location based social tagging application needs a critical mass of users to be useful and therefore get a user base who contribute to the critical mass of users who... You get the idea.
At the end of our meeting the NVidia chap said "Oh would you like to see demo."
What he showed me blew me away... and here is the same demo on YouTube. See what you think.
The interesting thing for me is that combining this with other standards such as the BONDI OMTP initiative that allows access to a mobile devices assets and ambience in Web 2.0 applications will help make the whole Sekia Camera experience a (virtual sic) reality on mobile devices in general, rather than just a specialty application that runs on a couple of smartphones. And after all that is what needs to happen. Like any social networking platform this kind of location based social tagging application needs a critical mass of users to be useful and therefore get a user base who contribute to the critical mass of users who... You get the idea.
At the end of our meeting the NVidia chap said "Oh would you like to see demo."
What he showed me blew me away... and here is the same demo on YouTube. See what you think.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
The future is now- Sekai Camera
It was one of those moments where I felt humbled. One of the those moments where I realized once again that while I may well live in Silicon Valley, there are indeed many more technologically advanced places on the planet. The moment in question took place on my recent tour of the Far East- I’d been spending the first week of the tour in Japan talking to various companies about Adobe’s Open Screen Project of which ARM is an active member. All-in-all it was well received and there was a lot of enthusiasm around the concept of applications being no longer PC bound, that could scale across multiple devices and allow collaboration via the Cloud. This was also the first week I had started using my iPhone and I had been enthusiastically geotagging my Tweets to allow recipients to see where I was Twittering along with pictures on Twitpic. (If you want to know where you can drink 20 year old coffee in the Ginza check it out).
As the week drew to a close I sat in the office with my Japanese colleague going over all the collateral I had put together over the past year around Web 2.0 technologies on mobile devices. He listened attentively, asking a lot of good questions and I felt I had new convert to my vision of the future Web; a world which will see the collision of multiple technologies from massively multiplayer “serious” gaming, Web n.0, location-based social networking and ambient computing to provide users with a significantly enhanced view of their surroundings through their mobile device. My captive audience of one sighed politely (as the Japanese do so well) and quietly said “Oh, you mean like Sekai Camera?”
“Like what?”
“I think that is what Sekai Camera is doing here in Japan already. It will tag everything and allow you to hold up your iPhone to buildings, objects and people and see additional attributes of them.”
I was stunned and as I have said humbled by this revelation. The technology of Sekai Camera is definitely headed in exactly the direction I have been thinking about, but I hadn’t realized just how far ahead Japan had gotten. Upon reflection a society of over 100 Million people condensed into a relatively small (in US terms) area is the exactly the place where this kind of project can prove itself. America is simply too big and spread out for a pilot, (although Google is certainly doing a good job with more rudimentary technologies around mapping).
Sekai Camera started out targeting the iPhone exclusively, but last week they announced that it would be available on Android as well.
As the week drew to a close I sat in the office with my Japanese colleague going over all the collateral I had put together over the past year around Web 2.0 technologies on mobile devices. He listened attentively, asking a lot of good questions and I felt I had new convert to my vision of the future Web; a world which will see the collision of multiple technologies from massively multiplayer “serious” gaming, Web n.0, location-based social networking and ambient computing to provide users with a significantly enhanced view of their surroundings through their mobile device. My captive audience of one sighed politely (as the Japanese do so well) and quietly said “Oh, you mean like Sekai Camera?”
“Like what?”
“I think that is what Sekai Camera is doing here in Japan already. It will tag everything and allow you to hold up your iPhone to buildings, objects and people and see additional attributes of them.”
I was stunned and as I have said humbled by this revelation. The technology of Sekai Camera is definitely headed in exactly the direction I have been thinking about, but I hadn’t realized just how far ahead Japan had gotten. Upon reflection a society of over 100 Million people condensed into a relatively small (in US terms) area is the exactly the place where this kind of project can prove itself. America is simply too big and spread out for a pilot, (although Google is certainly doing a good job with more rudimentary technologies around mapping).
Sekai Camera started out targeting the iPhone exclusively, but last week they announced that it would be available on Android as well.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
JeOSing (Juicing) up at MWC
There is definitively nothing like freshly squeezed orange juice and at this years MWC in Barcelona there was certainly no shortage of it. Almost every cafe in the Fira had a machine that pulverized oranges into a fresh glass of juice on the on spot. But this isn't the juice that got me really excited; what really got me going was the amount of JeOS (pronounced Juice) that was there.
JeOS stands for Just enough Operating System and is about the trend to move away from ever more powerful and complex OS to Just enough OS to do a set of your most common tasks. In my case, and I think this is true for a lot of other people, this means just enough OS to run a Web 2.0 capable browser and little else. I am not going to go into a lot of detail about exactly what JeOS is here. There is a rather dry definition of JeOS on Wikipedia but I think a good description of the trend can be found in an article entitled "The incredible shrinking operating system".(BTW w.r.t. this article I don't think Jim Ready is ready to leave Monta Vista in favor or Citrix any time soon- maybe it's another Jim Ready?)
The reason I like the JeOS trend is quite simple: At work I probably spend about 60% of my time in a browser and that's only because I run Outlook as my email client which takes up about another 30+% of my time. If I ran the web client for Outlook then I'd be spending 90% of my time just in the browser. At home I am big fan of Google Docs, GMail etc. and actually almost never leave the browser on my home laptop or handheld device except to chat with someone via Skype. So I am increasingly wondering do I really need a 4Gb RAM, 320Gb Drive, Intel Centrino 2 computing equivalent of a monster truck to keep me in touch and informed?
I think the answer is a resounding "No!" and that's what a lot of other folk are thinking too. There is an excellent article on the NetBook revolution by Clive Thomson in this months Wired explaining that Netbooks running Linux (and that's just enough Linux for a browser and a couple of applications) are a significant Disruptive Technology wave that will change the way we treat personal computing in the future.
Which leads me back to my trip to MWC: At the show Phoenix Technologies showcased HyperSpace running on an ARM NetBook prototype board and I thought this is something I really will be able to use. Phoenix have utilized the powerful skinning and bookmarking features of Mozilla's FireFox browser to create a very user friendly, easy-to-use Web UI that is "Instant On" and will easily run all day without needing to be recharged on future ARM Powered Netbooks.
JeOS stands for Just enough Operating System and is about the trend to move away from ever more powerful and complex OS to Just enough OS to do a set of your most common tasks. In my case, and I think this is true for a lot of other people, this means just enough OS to run a Web 2.0 capable browser and little else. I am not going to go into a lot of detail about exactly what JeOS is here. There is a rather dry definition of JeOS on Wikipedia but I think a good description of the trend can be found in an article entitled "The incredible shrinking operating system".(BTW w.r.t. this article I don't think Jim Ready is ready to leave Monta Vista in favor or Citrix any time soon- maybe it's another Jim Ready?)
The reason I like the JeOS trend is quite simple: At work I probably spend about 60% of my time in a browser and that's only because I run Outlook as my email client which takes up about another 30+% of my time. If I ran the web client for Outlook then I'd be spending 90% of my time just in the browser. At home I am big fan of Google Docs, GMail etc. and actually almost never leave the browser on my home laptop or handheld device except to chat with someone via Skype. So I am increasingly wondering do I really need a 4Gb RAM, 320Gb Drive, Intel Centrino 2 computing equivalent of a monster truck to keep me in touch and informed?
I think the answer is a resounding "No!" and that's what a lot of other folk are thinking too. There is an excellent article on the NetBook revolution by Clive Thomson in this months Wired explaining that Netbooks running Linux (and that's just enough Linux for a browser and a couple of applications) are a significant Disruptive Technology wave that will change the way we treat personal computing in the future.
Which leads me back to my trip to MWC: At the show Phoenix Technologies showcased HyperSpace running on an ARM NetBook prototype board and I thought this is something I really will be able to use. Phoenix have utilized the powerful skinning and bookmarking features of Mozilla's FireFox browser to create a very user friendly, easy-to-use Web UI that is "Instant On" and will easily run all day without needing to be recharged on future ARM Powered Netbooks.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Demo of ARM Cortex-A8 processor-based Netbook from Freescale and Pegatron
I didn't make it to CES, but seeing this video where Steve is publicly putting the new ARM Cortex-A8 processor-based i.Mx51 Netbook and Nettop prototypes through their paces was the next best thing.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
The Web 2.0 Pensieve
I have a lot of stuff to do. That is the nature of my life and if I didn’t I’d be very bored. However I found that in common with most of the people around me I have too much stuff to do. Too much, oh far too much and I have to remember it all and prioritize and keep re- prioritizing against other stuff, as circumstances change and I get even more stuff I need to do. Oh woe is me! And I think woe is large chunk of the population.
In recent years I have felt totally overwhelmed with stuff to do and sought solutions to my problem.
“You Sir are a candidate for a time management course!”
This statement rang in my ears 2 years ago and having read books, devised personal methodologies and tried every gadget known to mankind I decided religion was the only answer. I use the term flippantly because I’ve met previous converts to “Time Management” who have waved their leather bound organizers at me and proclaimed. “People ask me what my life is about. This is my life!” Still desperate times (unmanaged) called for desperate measures so I signed up to a course.
Unfortunately for me it turned out I could not convert to be a born-again Time Manager because I already practiced almost all the disciplines that particular church taught. For me there was no baptism of fire, just resignation to a feeling of time management existentialism.
So I went back to basics again and tried to figure what was important to me personally. What would make my life better? The most important thing for me about the stuff I had to do was worrying that I was going to forget to do it or do it too late- Birthday cards to far away relatives, Green Card renewals, draft papers for conferences, meeting preps. I was going nuts trying to keep them all in my head. The solution was obvious: Make a List!
Creating a list of stuff to do is really like putting your stuff to do into a Pensieve. This magic bowl is described in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series as a kind backing store where you can offload thoughts you don’t want cluttering up your mind when have too much stuff whirling around it. The notion of getting stuff out of my brain to somewhere where it was reliably stored, so I didn’t have to worry about remembering it, really appealed. I knew it would de-stress me so I started making lists, lots of lists. I started my week (and I still do) making a list of stuff to do. I look at it every day and update it as my day progresses. I have lists based on locale- work, home, shopping, packing to go to another country, packing to go another state. All-in-all this sort of works for me, but for one thing: Where is the right list when I remember something I forgot to put on this list? This was my big problem. It’s easy to make time to review lists, but making them is a much more random experience: I found that even if I sat down on Friday night and thought about what I had to do at the weekend or sat down on a Monday morning and thought about what I had to do during the week I’d miss something .Well in fact I’d miss several things because my brain doesn’t work that way.
My brain has a habit of remembering things to do at the oddest of times: in the bath, at the ballgame, in a completely unrelated meeting where nothing relevant is going on, watching TV, at 3:00am in bed in a cold sweat… thoughts come to me; more stuff I haven’t put down on a list and I start to get stressed. I get stressed because I might forget them by the time I get back to my list.
I spent a long time thinking about this and concluded that this was now my biggest stress point- I had to be able to offload stuff to do into the Pensieve when it came to me and then forget about it. If I could do this, I would really be less stressed.
I spent a lot time thinking about things I could carry with me that would store my lists. As a geeky kind of guy the notion of a notebook and pen really didn’t appeal, so I sought out PDA’s phones, laptops anything cool on which I could store my lists. However I soon realized wherever I put my lists I was going to end up somewhere without that particular device and therefore without my lists- The stress started again.
It was at this point that I had the Web 2.0 epiphany and realized that the last place I wanted my lists were on a particular device. I wanted my lists everywhere and nowhere in particular in the Internet Cloud, accessible from anything with a screen and an IP connection. I certainly had plenty of those things in my life. So long as I could get to an IP connection I would be able to update my lists. In fact with modern day Web 2.0 technology like Gears I could add to my lists even when I didn’t have an IP connection and sync to the Cloud later.
After a quick trawl of the Net I found an application which fit the bill- Remember the Milk It is so simple and so easy to use: It’s just a collection of lists that you can name, add to, prioritize, schedule and even share. I fell in love with it right off the bat and started using it. There are 5 PC’s in our house running a collection of different OS and at any given point in time there is usually one near me where if I remember something I need to do I can add it to “Remember the Milk” through a web browser. I also have full web access to “Remember the Milk” from my trusty Nokia N810 Internet Tablet which I turn on Friday night, slip in my pocket and let run for the weekend. It just follows me around in my pocket and means my wife doesn’t get grumpy ‘cause I’m carting my laptop around with me and plugging it in just to try and stay in touch with the world outside.
“Remember the Milk” also has a Twitter interface that I can access from my mobile phone via txt messaging, so even if I’m in the car (wife driving of course) and I suddenly remember I need to by milk later I can add it to my list as we go along. [There are also iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile applications that you can use if you sign up to the Pro version of Remember the Milk.]
Sure enough there are times when even I forget my pocket connection to the Net, as happened a couple of weeks ago… One Saturday while having lunch out with my family I suddenly remembered something really important I had to do next week and found I had left my N810 and my phone at home. I started getting stressed- would I remember to add this to my list by the time I got home? Lunch was starting going badly when the solution came to me: I excused myself, nipped next door to the Apple Store and logged onto "Remember the Milk" on a MacBook . I added the item to my list. After that lunch tasted a lot better.
In recent years I have felt totally overwhelmed with stuff to do and sought solutions to my problem.
“You Sir are a candidate for a time management course!”
This statement rang in my ears 2 years ago and having read books, devised personal methodologies and tried every gadget known to mankind I decided religion was the only answer. I use the term flippantly because I’ve met previous converts to “Time Management” who have waved their leather bound organizers at me and proclaimed. “People ask me what my life is about. This is my life!” Still desperate times (unmanaged) called for desperate measures so I signed up to a course.
Unfortunately for me it turned out I could not convert to be a born-again Time Manager because I already practiced almost all the disciplines that particular church taught. For me there was no baptism of fire, just resignation to a feeling of time management existentialism.
So I went back to basics again and tried to figure what was important to me personally. What would make my life better? The most important thing for me about the stuff I had to do was worrying that I was going to forget to do it or do it too late- Birthday cards to far away relatives, Green Card renewals, draft papers for conferences, meeting preps. I was going nuts trying to keep them all in my head. The solution was obvious: Make a List!
Creating a list of stuff to do is really like putting your stuff to do into a Pensieve. This magic bowl is described in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series as a kind backing store where you can offload thoughts you don’t want cluttering up your mind when have too much stuff whirling around it. The notion of getting stuff out of my brain to somewhere where it was reliably stored, so I didn’t have to worry about remembering it, really appealed. I knew it would de-stress me so I started making lists, lots of lists. I started my week (and I still do) making a list of stuff to do. I look at it every day and update it as my day progresses. I have lists based on locale- work, home, shopping, packing to go to another country, packing to go another state. All-in-all this sort of works for me, but for one thing: Where is the right list when I remember something I forgot to put on this list? This was my big problem. It’s easy to make time to review lists, but making them is a much more random experience: I found that even if I sat down on Friday night and thought about what I had to do at the weekend or sat down on a Monday morning and thought about what I had to do during the week I’d miss something .Well in fact I’d miss several things because my brain doesn’t work that way.
My brain has a habit of remembering things to do at the oddest of times: in the bath, at the ballgame, in a completely unrelated meeting where nothing relevant is going on, watching TV, at 3:00am in bed in a cold sweat… thoughts come to me; more stuff I haven’t put down on a list and I start to get stressed. I get stressed because I might forget them by the time I get back to my list.
I spent a long time thinking about this and concluded that this was now my biggest stress point- I had to be able to offload stuff to do into the Pensieve when it came to me and then forget about it. If I could do this, I would really be less stressed.
I spent a lot time thinking about things I could carry with me that would store my lists. As a geeky kind of guy the notion of a notebook and pen really didn’t appeal, so I sought out PDA’s phones, laptops anything cool on which I could store my lists. However I soon realized wherever I put my lists I was going to end up somewhere without that particular device and therefore without my lists- The stress started again.
It was at this point that I had the Web 2.0 epiphany and realized that the last place I wanted my lists were on a particular device. I wanted my lists everywhere and nowhere in particular in the Internet Cloud, accessible from anything with a screen and an IP connection. I certainly had plenty of those things in my life. So long as I could get to an IP connection I would be able to update my lists. In fact with modern day Web 2.0 technology like Gears I could add to my lists even when I didn’t have an IP connection and sync to the Cloud later.
After a quick trawl of the Net I found an application which fit the bill- Remember the Milk It is so simple and so easy to use: It’s just a collection of lists that you can name, add to, prioritize, schedule and even share. I fell in love with it right off the bat and started using it. There are 5 PC’s in our house running a collection of different OS and at any given point in time there is usually one near me where if I remember something I need to do I can add it to “Remember the Milk” through a web browser. I also have full web access to “Remember the Milk” from my trusty Nokia N810 Internet Tablet which I turn on Friday night, slip in my pocket and let run for the weekend. It just follows me around in my pocket and means my wife doesn’t get grumpy ‘cause I’m carting my laptop around with me and plugging it in just to try and stay in touch with the world outside.
“Remember the Milk” also has a Twitter interface that I can access from my mobile phone via txt messaging, so even if I’m in the car (wife driving of course) and I suddenly remember I need to by milk later I can add it to my list as we go along. [There are also iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile applications that you can use if you sign up to the Pro version of Remember the Milk.]
Sure enough there are times when even I forget my pocket connection to the Net, as happened a couple of weeks ago… One Saturday while having lunch out with my family I suddenly remembered something really important I had to do next week and found I had left my N810 and my phone at home. I started getting stressed- would I remember to add this to my list by the time I got home? Lunch was starting going badly when the solution came to me: I excused myself, nipped next door to the Apple Store and logged onto "Remember the Milk" on a MacBook . I added the item to my list. After that lunch tasted a lot better.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Palm Web OS looking good
Today Palm unveiled it's new Web OS amid much fanfare at CES in Las Vegas. My friend Andrew and I watched the proceedings from afar over a coffee. He was in Seattle and I was in Los Gatos and we caught it all via a live blog feed from Joshua Topolsky on the engadget site .
IMHO Joshua did an outstanding job.
There is doubtless going to be a lot blogged and tweeted about the Pre and its OS in the next 6 months so some might wonder why I should bother commenting on it at all. However the one thing that really excites me about this new OS is its underlying paradigm... Over the past year or so we have seen a lot about mashups and how they are changing the way you can consume data. However a lot of the time, the notion of providing a mashable stream has been second fiddle to some primary application be it desktop or webtop. Palm Web OS (it appears) puts the notion of mashing data streams front and center- It is the primary raison d'être of the OS, mashing together the users data streams of interest under its web based applications and presenting them together as a unified experience. A contact card made up of a persons picture from Facebook, their email address from Gmail and their phone number from Outlook. All pulled together and delivered to you by via the phone but never static, always dynamic. It's a very powerful idea that I think will really change our expectations of how computers should relate and relay our information to us. Soon we will be asking "My phone can do this, why can't the computer on my desk?" Of course, given that the applications layer of the OS is actually web based all of this stuff is portable and there is no real reason why it should just be bound to a phone!
IMHO Joshua did an outstanding job.
There is doubtless going to be a lot blogged and tweeted about the Pre and its OS in the next 6 months so some might wonder why I should bother commenting on it at all. However the one thing that really excites me about this new OS is its underlying paradigm... Over the past year or so we have seen a lot about mashups and how they are changing the way you can consume data. However a lot of the time, the notion of providing a mashable stream has been second fiddle to some primary application be it desktop or webtop. Palm Web OS (it appears) puts the notion of mashing data streams front and center- It is the primary raison d'être of the OS, mashing together the users data streams of interest under its web based applications and presenting them together as a unified experience. A contact card made up of a persons picture from Facebook, their email address from Gmail and their phone number from Outlook. All pulled together and delivered to you by via the phone but never static, always dynamic. It's a very powerful idea that I think will really change our expectations of how computers should relate and relay our information to us. Soon we will be asking "My phone can do this, why can't the computer on my desk?" Of course, given that the applications layer of the OS is actually web based all of this stuff is portable and there is no real reason why it should just be bound to a phone!
Friday, January 2, 2009
In my beginning...
I guess I should explain that I have been a strong protagonist of the mobile lifestyle for nearly 20 years. In 1990 I worked for a company called the Active Book Company in Cambridge UK. They were building one of the first tablet computers which had the form factor of a laptop but had a pen as its primary interface. It one of the first ARM based processors in it and ran the innovative Smalltalk-80 software system making it an exceptionally flexible software platform and very very sloooooowwww. In 1991 Active Book became part of EO. This was AT&T's attempt at a "Personal Communicator" a combination of email, note taker, fax machine and cellphone that you could carry anywhere along with several additional battery packs to make it last more than an hour.
I loved this machine and traveled all over Europe demonstrating it and actually using it as part of my mobile lifestyle. I never could quite understand why ordinary people couldn't master the 140+ gestures the device had for text editing and page turning or why people weren't prepared to radically alter their handwriting for the device to understand what they were writing.
AT&T had great plans for the device and ran adds on major TV networks in the USA showing a girl on a beach using it. "One day you will be able to fax from a beach." was the ads tagline. However, though I've been to a lot of beaches up and down the California coastline I must say that I never felt the urge send a fax from any of them.
One other problem with the EO was it was expensive not just to buy but also to run: simply emailing a handwritten note scribbled on the EO's screen such as "Honey, please put the dinner on. I'll be home in 20 minutes." would cost more than actually stopping off on the way home to buy a 3 course takeout meal due to AT&T's per byte model of email.
Haven't we come a long way! In almost 20 years things have predictably become smaller, cheaper, faster but moreover our access to information has changed radically and with it our expectations...
I loved this machine and traveled all over Europe demonstrating it and actually using it as part of my mobile lifestyle. I never could quite understand why ordinary people couldn't master the 140+ gestures the device had for text editing and page turning or why people weren't prepared to radically alter their handwriting for the device to understand what they were writing.
AT&T had great plans for the device and ran adds on major TV networks in the USA showing a girl on a beach using it. "One day you will be able to fax from a beach." was the ads tagline. However, though I've been to a lot of beaches up and down the California coastline I must say that I never felt the urge send a fax from any of them.
One other problem with the EO was it was expensive not just to buy but also to run: simply emailing a handwritten note scribbled on the EO's screen such as "Honey, please put the dinner on. I'll be home in 20 minutes." would cost more than actually stopping off on the way home to buy a 3 course takeout meal due to AT&T's per byte model of email.
Haven't we come a long way! In almost 20 years things have predictably become smaller, cheaper, faster but moreover our access to information has changed radically and with it our expectations...
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Disclaimer
The statements, opinions and conclusions outlined on this blog and associated website are those of the author- Rod Crawford. They in no way represent those of my employer or anyone else. They are based on my own studies, research and personal experience. This blog has been developed for the purposes of informing, educating and me having fun. It is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to software development or even necessarily correct! Further, no person should rely on any content on this website/blog or on the opinions or conclusions outlined on this website/blog without first obtaining advice from a suitably qualified professional person. The author expressly disclaims all and any liability and responsibility to any person or corporation, in respect of anything and the consequences of anything, done or omitted to be done by any such person or corporation in reliance, whether wholly or partially, upon the whole or any part of the contents of any of this blog and associated website or any other website referred to on this blog or website.
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