Or Windows 7, let’s hear it for the hardware; looking forward to WinHEC.

This is the only Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference before Windows 7 ships: unless the next WinHEC returns to its usual May timing that gives Microsoft another year to get it right. I’m expecting to hear positive things from the OEMs who’ve been playing with Windows 7 for much longer than we have; 7 is leaner than Vista and it literally puts devices ‘on stage’ with the Device Stage ‘experience’ (a task-oriented alternative to the AutoPlay dialog). And Ray Ozzie was very careful to frame Microsoft’s cloud play in a way that doesn’t ignore hardware.Google doesn’t give the hardware manufacturers much love, because it doesn’t have to, but for the first time since Paul Maritz left (and he’s now playing ‘who blinks first’ with server manufacturers at VMware over whether virtualisation will sell more servers rather than fewer in the long run) Microsoft has remembered how much the OEMs matter. The lack of drivers when Vista launched and the willingness to ship Linux on netbooks may have refreshed the Microsoft memory here.What’s good about the PC? Copy and paste, as I say whenever anyone asks me why I’m not packing an iPhone. And hardware. “Both Windows and the apps are sitting right next to the hardware, the processor, memory, graphics, and disk.” You can take advantage of a big screen in a browser app, but you’re wasting a lot of the power of the PC by not taking advantage of what Windows can do on the CPU. And storage is still much more efficient in the OS, as Ozzie notes there’s “immense value in the storage on PCs for confidentiality and mobility, for speed of access and local convenience for documents and rich media, photos, videos, music, and more”.  Yes, Google Gears would like to work with USB drives and GPS directly, but as long as the Gears team are saying that “everything in the browser is inherently safe”, I won’t be installing Gears.Cloud, said Ozzie, plays to the strengths of the Internet: remember, this is someone old enough to remember the Internet before the Web and to appreciate the range of services online for communicating with companies and people. Rich Internet Applications? “Yes, the browser as universal run time is cool and it’s really useful” admits Ozzie, “but this is not the core of the Web’s sustainable uniqueness. The Web’s unique value is in its ability to assemble the world’s people, the world’s organizations, its public information, its services and devices, enabling us to connect, to communicate, to transact, and to share. ” And the phone is somewhere in between, says Ozzie. Yes, you can write software that uses the hardware on the phone - in fact, with the slower processor and limited storage you have to.  But what the phone really gives you is context - something Microsoft is trying to add to the PC with the sensor framework in Windows 7 but is unlikely to match. “The truly unique advantage of a phone-based app is that it’s always with you and it’s ready for your spontaneous action. The phone knows where you are, what time it is, so it can tag your location on something. With its camera, you can snap a picture in the context of what you’re doing. You can record a quick idea or use text or ink to jot down a note. There’s no better way than a phone for you to immediately comprehend that something that you care about is suddenly in need of your attention.”We use Microsoft’s Live Mesh service to share documents peer-to-peer on the road. It’s very effective - in fact it’s changed the way we work. It’s handy to have it available through a browser but we’ve never used that because where we need the files is on the PC (or often two, three or four PCs between use) that we’re working on. Live Mesh has just come out for Windows Mobile and the Mac (for a limited number of users while Microsoft ramps up the service). We probably won’t look at many PC files from a phone, but if we need to it’s going to be much more convenient than hauling out a laptop at the hotel front desk or in the rental car agency. And all those to-do lists I jot down on the phone; they’d be a  lot more useful if they showed up on my desktop when I could do something about them.  That’s almost exactly the three scenarios Ozzie defined last week, and they need the balance of hardware and software to work. Last week we saw the new software that’s on the way; this week it’s what the hardware brings to the party and whether the manufacturers are as positive as Microsoft has predicted.  -Mary

The other day I finally bit the bullet, and traded in my old Blackberry Pearl for a shiny iPhone. I’d been using one to write some tutorials for IT Pro, and had finally got used to its touch keyboard - and had become used to the large screen and the high quality web browsing experience. I’d also started playing with the AppStore, and had found applications like Evernote, which promised to bring web, phone and desktop together. My memory is pretty bad most of the time, and a tool that could help me remember the things I’d seen seemed to be a rather good idea.

There was just one problem - the iPhone’s camera. I’m not complaining about its 2Mpx resolution,  or even the lack of a video feed. They’re all par for the course with a cameraphone (unless you plump for those phones that are more camera than phone), and the iPhone’s is actually a pretty decent camera - most of the time. Where it falls down is its focal length. It’s great for portraits, for landscapes, as it’s a fixed focus camera that can keep most things in focus - as long as they’re more than about three feet away.

Using Evernote I found I was wanting to take phtographs of pieces of text: the backs of business cards, notes scrawled on napkins,  whiteboards. Evernote has a good online OCR service, putting OCR in the cloud and not on the phone, but it couldn’t cope with the iPhone’s blurry out of focus images.

Last week I got an email from the PR for Griffin, best known as one of the original iPod accessory companies.  They’d just announced a new “business” case for the iPhone 3G, one that included what could be the solution to my iPhone text photography problem.

What was it?

A macro lens.

A couple of years ago Mary and I looked at a barcode recognition service that Microsoft Research was trying out. Like me, they’d found that phone cameras couldn’t cope with  close-ups. They’d chosen to have stick on macro lenses manufactured, and for some time my tubby HTC Titan had a strange extra lens on the back.

Griffin’s Clarifi case is less obtrusive, with a little extra lens that slides over the camera slot in the case. It’s a workable solution, and it’s easy to quickly put the lens in place when you want to take a close-up photograph.

The million dollar question is, of course, “does it work?”. The answer is a qualified yes. It’s not perfect (but then plastic lenses rarely are), but it is a considerable improvement over Apple’s standalone fixed-focus implementation.

Here’s the before:

And here’s the after:

It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well!

One more step along the road to finding my ideal portable device.

If you run Vista and you’ve allowed Java to update itself recently, you’ll be getting an infuriating dialog box every time you open a new browser window, including a new tab or a popup window, saying that unsigned code wants to run and that it can’t run in protected mode (the low-rights mode that Internet Explorer uses). The SSVAGENT.EXE referred to is Java’s update agent, which runs every time the browser runs - and Sun apparently can’t tell the difference between a new Internet Explorer process and a new tab running in the existing process.

If you actually use any Java applets, you may also get an error telling you there are several Java Virtual Machines running. 

It’s bad enough that Sun has, for at least the second time, put out software without a digital signature proving where it comes from, the most basic security check on code for the end user. It’s equally annoying that the suggestion from Sun is that you just click ‘Allow’ every time until the bug gets fixed in Java 6 Update 10 (’officially released later this summer’) and that Internet Explorer doesn’t let me say ‘Don’t ever allow this to run’.

But how about an update agent that runs every time you run your browser? That’s not very respectful of my resources, or my bandwidth. Other applications have periodic checks for updates and they only run when I’m not buys doing other things (Vista has an API for this, so even if you have umpteen different notification systems running, they can all find out when you’ve stopped to think or turned away to pick up the phone and do their updates, checks and maintenance without slowing you down). Why does Java need to check for updates so obsessively?

The Java control panel doesn’t think it needs to check that often; the default setting appears to be check monthly. So why does it hook into Internet Explorer to run the update agent all the time? Personally, I’m turning off the updater altogether, although that’s not a decision you’ll want all your users to take.

I can’t tell you exactly where the Java control panel hides itself; I couldn’t find anything in the All Programs list so I typed ‘Java’ into the search bar on the Vista Start menu and it offered me the Java control panel without having to dig for it. On the Update tab clear the check box for ‘Check for updates automatically’ and stick to your decision when Java asks if you won’t reconsider and click ‘Check Monthly’ instead because that’s the setting you started with. You may have to quit and restart Internet Explorer to prise Java’s hook out of the code and then you can go back to having browser windows open without a security warning that you train yourself to ignore.

That’s the problem with dialog boxes where it’s OK to just click yes, and one of the interface issues with Vista’s User Account Control. Any time there’s a dialog that’s in your way, the temptation is to click Yes just to get rid of it. Ask users if they want to do this unsafe thing, if they really want to, if they really really really want to and they’ll click Yes with less and less hesitation. Years of popups and confirmation dialogs have trained the user like a monkey in an experiment; click here and get what you want.

But you have to have confirmation for some things (Format C:? Record Battlefield Earth? Delete your wedding photos? Install an application just because you clicked on a URL?).

The real problem is that the PC has no idea of context or common sense; I navigated to the home page for the Kevtris game by typing in the URL, so when I click the download link and then click Run I really do want to install the game, but if I clicked an ad link in my email and it goes straight to installing a Trojan I really don’t want to. The PC has to leave intelligent decisions up to the user, and that means dialog boxes and confirmations when there’s anything that could be suspicious. Not remembering to sign the code for your application? That’s either suspicious, downright penny-pinching ($25 for a certificate) or shows you don’t have a good sign-off process for your developers. Either way, yes, I do want my browser to warn me about you.
-Mary

For years, we’ve been saying that Google would be mad to build its own operating system. It should leave the thankless task to Microsoft and Apple and Linux distributions; you can debate how good a job they do, turn and turn about, but the scale of what a desktop OS needs to do and the range of devices it needs to support is far broader than what you need to do in a browser or on a smartphone. I still don’t think Google has any plans to create its own OS, but it’s pushing beyond the browser as a development platform with Gears and App Engine and the like. Microsoft has a whole range of platforms in the browser, out of the browser and around the browser, from Windows and WPF to Silverlight to SharePoint to Office to SQL Server – to name just a few of the platforms Bill Gates touched on in his last ever keynote at Microsoft TechEd this morning.

Silverlight is a lot of things, from Microsoft’s answer to Flash to Microsoft’s answer to Web based applications. Leave aside the video plugin side of it; the fact that Silverlight 2 (beta 2 due at the end of this week) runs .NET and programs written in dynamic languages on Mac and Linux as well as Windows is the most interesting part. And it’s not just for consumer Web apps; Facebook and Hotmail users aren’t happy with line of business apps in dreary basic grey when they get to work, and Silverlight is an easy way to spruce those up without slaving over a hot CSS schema for hours.

Adobe’s Air tackles much the same problem; how do you make powerful applications for the Web that work online and off, that look good and that work without installing anything (once you have the initial plugin or runtime). Air builds on Flex, so if you’re already writing Flash, you’ve got a head start. But there are a lot more .NET developers writing business apps, so although Microsoft demos consumer apps like the Crossfader social video sharing tool it talked about today, most Silverlight apps might show up at work, using Workflow Foundation and making data from SQL Server look good.

Silverlight is a subset of .NET and Windows Presentation Foundation, so developers are using familiar skills and Visual Studio plus Expression Blend for designers, who get to work on the live project, not in Photoshop mockups.  The visual development tools also appeal to disenfranchised Visual Basic developers who’ve been wondering what Microsoft has done for them lately….  Microsoft VP Soma Somasegar said Crossfader is being built by six developers and two designers in three months, which is more like Internet time than standard Microsoft time scales.

If Silverlight’s so good, why would anyone be creating Windows applications at all? Bill Gates finished his Q&A trying to balance that question. “Yes, you’ll be able to do amazing things in Silverlight, but there will always be things that you can do in Windows Presentation Framework that you can’t do in Silverlight. Why is that so? Well, it’s so because with WPF we get to assume we have the full power of the PC; we’re not just running in a browser environment. So, take things like 3D type things, virtual world type things, take things like ink recognition or playing video back at arbitrary speeds. WPF will, because it can connect in to all of Windows, expose those services and let people do new things.

“We need to keep the Silverlight download to be fairly modest. So, if you think of what that will be versus the entire Windows environment, we have a much bigger runtime to call on. So, we’re not saying that those get absolutely merged, but we will have exactly the right relationship. And even as you’re in Visual Studio or in the Expression tools, you’ll be able to say I want to author for the Silverlight piece and to let you know that if you’re sticking to the things that work in that world.

“Silverlight will probably have almost everything WPF has today, but WPF will keep getting richer and richer as we go forward.”

That’s the Microsoft dream and it’s one direction things could go. Google is pushing in completely the other direction. Last week at Google IO, Chris Prince and Aaron Boodman (better known as the designer of the Greasemonkey Firefox extension) were explaining why they don’t want you to think of Gears as taking Google applications offline. Yes it does that, but actually Google wants it to give Web apps to have access to all the capabilities of your PC the way desktop apps do. Why shouldn’t the browser get the power of your 2GHz processor and your 300GB hard drive? Why shouldn’t they be able to send you notifications in another window or show a progress bar? Why can’t you access USB drives from inside Gears or use a GPS to tell the Web app where you are?

Google filed its name off Gears so that it has more chance of becoming a standard, either as part of HTML 5 or by becoming ubiquitous as a plugin in its own right. Personally, I’m not going to be installing it on any machine I use.

It’s not just because it has no way to limit the amount of disk space it’s going to take for its local database (used by MySpace to give you search across the whole site without having to take up space on their data centre for those pesky index files). It’s only partly because it’s going to be able to use your GPS or other tools to get your location and there is currently nothing to warn the user and no options for choosing if and when Gears can get your location. Google seems committed to harmonizing with whatever standards HTML 5 includes for the things that Gears does, and I’m not the one who will have to detail with duplicate APIs from Gears and HTML 5 to do the same thing – that’s a problem for Web developers to juggle. And the fact that Web sites like YouSendIt already have real progress bars without needing me to download a plugin is a quibble rather than a complaint.

Mainly, I won’t use it at this point because of how Chris Prince explains why he thinks Web apps are so good in the first place. “Everything in the browser is inherently safe,” he said at Google IO. “There is no cost to install a Web app, you’re not afraid to click a link, and you can navigate away with no fear it will take over your machine.” Compared to the near-paranoia that’s is Microsoft’s attitude to the Web, from the phishing filter to the way IE doesn’t get the same privileges as a desktop app to the security-first attitude that permeates the company, calling the browser ‘inherently safe’ seems a little laissez faire to me.

Adding binary data files to JavaScript will certainly make for more powerful apps. Some of them might be Trojans; if Gears gets everything Google talked about that would be able to scrape files off a USB stick, record you talking with the audio APIs, add in your physical location and do whatever you can think of with it all, good or bad. If I’m not too busy playing with whatever features the Web app disguising the Trojan has I can navigate away from it – but if it’s using Gears to run offline, has it gone away?

The browser sandbox limits the features on my system that Web apps have access to. That’s a pain when you want to build a better app in the browser – but it’s a security measure if you want to build a better way of attacking my system. I asked Chris Wilson of the Internet Explorer dev team if I was being paranoid – he was the one who’d raised the issue about privacy with the GPS location in Gears at the end of the session. Maybe, he suggested - but with the number of security issues it raises, Gears isn’t going to be installed by default with IE any time soon…

One of the highlights of the Future in Review conference is the chance to go to the supercomputing visualization lab at the University of California in San Diego, CalIT2. It’s run by Larry Smarr, who used to run the National Computing Supercomputing Applications where told one of his graduate students, Marc Andreessen,  to write a visual browser for the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee was working on over at CERN. When they showed NCSA Mosaic off, “everybody told us nobody needed it”, he says.

Given how wrong, that turned out to be, it’s worth keeping an eye on what Smarr thinks is important – bandwidth and pixels. Not content with the bandwidth of Internet2, he’s been putting together a multigigabit network connecting universities around the world for sharing data and collaborating over video conferencing. And making video real enough to suspend your disbelief means a lot of pixels; the 60-foot screen in the CalIT2 lecture theatre has four times the resolution of HD, the standard digital cinema will use when the movie theatres work out how to make money from it. To kick off the evening, Smarr invites Microsoft’s Curtis Wong to show off the 12 terabytes of images in the new World Wide Telescope, a map of the sky that zooms from star fields to galaxies to the solar systems coalescing inside them out of dust, fading into infra-red and wavelengths that show more structures.

The 30″ screens on most desks around the lab are dwarfed by the 200 megapixel video wall - eleven rows of five 30″ Dell screens crammed side by side to make one giant display with 100 times the resolution of HD. There are displays that wrap around the edges of a small room, stretching over your head and powered by eight HD projectors, that show us the surface of Mars in 50 million pixels rather than the 2 million pixels from the Word Wide Telescope.
 
It’s not size to prove screens can keep getting bigger; Larry Smarr thinks we need the bigger view. “We’ve artificially limited our brain by this stupid million pixels on a screen and we’ve unblocked that.” So how much more can we see; is there a limit? “Reality! You don’t see everything you think you see - it’s not as simple as pixels. There’s a limit to what you can resolve spatially, above 24 frames per second you don’t really see more. But the brain is capable of absorbing about 1gigabit per second, 24 bits deep 16 million colours. ”

From medical images to satellite maps, there are plenty of images to enjoy at that size. You can see the intricate details inside cancer cells or watch winter spread over the world. You can stand inside a building that exists only as a CAD diagram and walk through lifesize doors to see if the layout works. You can step forward to see the hidden sketch under a Leonardo painting, revealed by infrastructure-red photography and displayed so you can see every line. Or you can watch life-size opera live from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, or the opening ceremony of the Nobel prize from Japan and fill like you’re almost there. Every candle flame, every reflection, the brocade patterns on every kimono, the expression on every face.

These are the technologies that are coming to office video conferencing if you have the network bandwidth. Smarr advised HP on developing the Halo system and he’s putting in a Cisco TelePresence room at CalIT2 for academics to use for collaborations. The commodity hardware and open source software that powers the high-resolution screens isn’t as expensive as those. Each screen of what Larry Smarr calls the optiputer - systems connected by optical fibre that make up a worldwide computer system - costs about $2,000. But of course the bandwidth is what really raises the price tag.  Cisco TelePresence needs about 10Gbps; the big screen system is over ten times more.

There’s a proliferation of online document editing services. At Web 2.0 Expo every man (and his dog) seemed to be demonstrating another cloud-based document service. Now Google’s applications have been bundled with Salesforce.com’s online business services. Are desktop applications doomed?

From where I’m standing the answer has to be no.

Microsoft’s Office file formats were often described as how it locked customers into a never-ending cycle of upgrades. New version, new file format. That changed with the arrival of tools that decoded Microsoft’s files and provided compatibility. Open Office and the like had effective file converters that meant you weren’t locked in, and Microsoft’s new XML formats mean you can get at your text no matter what…

Online the story’s different. Create a document in Google Docs and it goes straight into their database. Yes you can save it locally, but that’s not the point of cloud services - you want to be able to get at that file wherever you are. So it stays on Google’s hard drives with no SLA, and no guarantee that you’ll be able to get your files if the service is ever withdrawn - and no idea if you’ll even get notice of a service’s imminent demise. It’s the same for Zoho or for Buzzword or any of a myriad other services. The cloud may be big, but there isn’t enough market out there (especially at $5 a month a user) for all the services to survive. When one goes down, and one will, sooner than later, how will you get your documents?

It’s the ultimate lock in, far worse than anything Office ever did. Unless, of course, you explicitly remember to save documents locally (and it’s not surprising that you have to click an export button to do just that). The convenience of online access to files isn’t enough to give up the freedom to store files where and how you want.

That’s enough to make me stay away. Things get even worse when you actually try to use them for what they’re apparently best at: collaboration.

If two people are trying to work together on a document, it’s good to be able to share edits and to quickly change focus. Try to use Google Docs, and things get a little tricky. Is the current section of the document locked or not? It’s impossible to tell - and if it is, it’s also hard to find out when the lock times out. The locks vary from application to application, and vendor to vendor. It’s not difficult to lock on a per word or per cell basis, and Excel has been offering per cell locking for network collaboration since the mid 1990s. Flickr developer Kellan Elliot-Mcrea put it last week, talking about online tools, “Good model for lightweight collaboration. It’s great up to a point - for most people that point is when you leave your office.”

Then there’s the time warp effect, when you’re taken back to the heady days of Word 6.1 and suddenly all the functions you’ve come to rely on suddenly vanish.

It’s time to make a stand. If you want me to use your online applications then let me have easy access to local copies, give me an effective collaboration platform, and throw in a decade or so’s worth of UI and functional improvements. Until then I’ll stick with Office and I’ll just move my files around with Live Mesh or .Mac or whatever synchronisation tool works best for me.

–Simon

Well, Tim O’Reilly has an idea, because he came up with the term. And the new O’Reilly Web 2.0 consulting practice ought to know. In fact one of the reasons the company set up the consultancy arm is to get everyone to agree on a definition, because we can’t have a good conversation about the  benefits Web 2.0 can bring business if we mean something different.

Some people think of Web 2.0 as just about social networks or about sharing user-generated content. By other definitions, anything built with Ajax is Web 2.0, but that would make Outlook Web Access the first ever Web 2.0 service. Is it just having a blog? That doesn’t make Dell a Web 2.0 success. O’Reilly’s original definition was coined before Facebook or YouTube and before blogs were popular and it doesn’t depend on a particular programming language or style. He wanted to explain why Amazon was so successful, why eBay dominated online auctions, how Google was beating everyone else at search. His answer was that they were mining what users thought about the books they were buying, the people they were buying from and the Web pages they linked to and turning that into information for other users.

Web 2.0 is a combination of collective intelligence and network effect, taking user-generated content and metadata and using it to add value, creating applications that get better the more people use them. “Every true Web 2.0 company,” says O’Reilly, “is building a database that grows better with the number of participants.”

Social networks and blogs and interactivity on the Web site are all part of that, but the heart of it is much more structured data. So far, the big Web 2.0 success stories have mostly been companies that started online. If Web 2.0 is really that significant it should help companies who’ve been around for decades as well; how does a blog help if you make shoes or run a phone company? Mostly by letting you turning your customers into unpaid consultants.

The O’Reilly consultants have a fund of amusing mistakes by companies that didn’t get the point, from AT&T saying they wanted to reach out to unhappy customers who were ready to move to another provider - but didn’t want to create a community just to listen to people complaining - to a large consulting firm that was horrified at the idea of letting customers talk to each other.

There was the watch company that cancelled plans to send out images of a new watch to key bloggers because they didn’t want to spoil the effect of their million-dollar launch party and had to watch a grainy picture from a cameraphone go round the blogs instead - making the watch look cheap and nasty. One large retailer declares confidently that ‘none of our employees use Facebook’; that means they’re not in the ‘I hate working here” group trying to find out what’s wrong with the company. Another retailer is spending $2 million on research about shoppers that it won’t see for 13 months, when it will be completely out of date.

A blog won’t fix a company that makes bad products or has terrible customer service; but having a way to hear what customers are saying and respond to it can - if the company is actually able to change. “Going Web 2.0″ for the sake of looking up to date is pointless; using technology to build a relationship with customers is valuable. 

Is any of that the same as Web 2.0 for online services? Not really. And the O’Reilly folks actually admit that. When they talk to a company, they use the term ’social Web’ because Web 2.0 is ‘distracting’.

With Firefox 3 around the corner, and IE 8 in beta, perhaps its time to call this round of browser wars over before they’ve begun. Adobe’s put a line in the sand today with the beta of Photoshop Express, and there’s no way a pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript browser can ever cross it - no matter how much of ACID3 it can render.

Why?

Microsoft and Adobe are pushing innovative web application development outside the browser into cross-platform runtimes that deliver everything that Java promised. HTML is obsolete, and all we really need is the <object> tag.

One of the big announcements at Microsoft’s web development conference Mix08 was the public beta of Silverlight 2. It’s another salvo in the developing rivalry between Microsoft and Adobe. Both companies are treading on the same path as they struggle to find direction in the developing software as a service world. Adobe’s made its latest step today, with a Flash-based in-browser version of Photoshop built using its Flex platform. Both companies are targeting developers with their rich internet applications strategies, offering platforms for next generation web applications that go beyond the limitations of HTML and web browsers.

Silverlight 2 is Microsoft’s first cut at a high-performance in-browser rich internet application platform. Flash may well perform well if you’re using the Flash 9 player, but noit everyone writes well-architected Flex applications, and the Flash/Flex designer/developer dichotomy is a tricky one to deal with. Not everyone can write an application like Photoshop Express, and the capabilities of Flash are being lost in a morass of advertising animations that mean a lot of influential users block Flash from their browsers completely…

Microsoft is watching Adobe carefully, and it’s trying not to make the same mistakes. While Silverlight is designed to be used by advertisers (and comes with plug-ins suitable for most analytics platforms), it’s also developer friendly. Install Silverlight 2 and the Silverlight 2 SDK and you’ve suddenly got a tool that lets you write C# code that runs at desktop speeds inside a browser - and on Macs as well as Windows boxes. There’s no point in codeing for a host of incompatible browsers if you can target a plug-in that’ll work across a sizeable set of your target userbase.

You’re going to need to write code if you’re planning on using Silverlight in anger. Deep Zoom, one of the Mix 08 Silverlight announcments, may only take a line of code to implement in your XAML - but you’ll need a lot more in the associated code to actually work with browser, mouse and keyboard to actually handle the zooming… Microsoft is a developer-focused business, and even though its attempting to redress this with its Expression family of tools, you’re going to need Visual Studio to get the most out of Silverlight.

Photoshop Express is a good idea - and a powerful tool. Could you build it in Silverlight as well as Flash/Flex? The answer’s quite simple: Yes. It’d probably run faster too, as Silverlight has a threading model that’s not there in the current generation of the Flash player. This time next year, well, who’s to say. Flash 10 will have probably changed the game yet again. One things certain: you couldn’t build it in HTML.

There’s something for everyone in the competing RIA platforms. That’s a good thing, as it’ll mean better user experiences for everyone - and a step back from the current round of browser wars. Meanwhile Microsoft and Adobe wil take competition outside the browser and into the development platform. The next step, well that’s most likely to happen where it’s needed most - server side.

–Simon

Steve Ballmer was kidding around with former Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki at the MIX 08 conference here in Las Vegas, but there was an edge to a lot of the banter. Kawasaki had a MacBook Air hidden amongst his papers and he flourished it, asking if Ballmer wouldn’t like a machine that light and thin. Ballmer hefted the machine and bellowed that his notebook was lighter and a real machine to boot, complete with an Ethernet port. “That thing is missing half the features of a PC. Where is your DVD drive, let me look for that. I’ll have a bake-off with my Tosh versus that thing backstage…”

It’s halfway between good theatre and Ballmer’s enthusiasm, but there’s always a shrewd side to it. When one attendee persuaded him to stand up and do the “Web developers, Web developers, Web developers…” dance, Ballmer followed it up by saying if it was a bet, he wanted half the winnings. And there’s more to his PC than the weight.

If it’s ligher than a MacBook Air and it has a DVD drive, Ballmer’s machine must be the Toshiba Portégé R500, a notebook that’s so light I’ve seen it hanging from a helium balloon. The publicity might cheer Toshiba up after the HD DVD debacle, but it’s also a good way to look at what Silverlight and IE 8 really mean to Microsoft.

Today, most users need a DVD drive - for installing software or watching films on a long flight. In five years time, Ballmer said, “it may not make a bit of difference”. In five years, online applications and services may take over from desktop apps as well (although ubiquitous connectivity is years away - the only decent 3G speed we’ve ever had was in San Diego, home of Qualcomm, whereas travelling in Arizona you can’t get voice let alone data, because Cellular One has no international roaming agreements).

If they do, Microsoft will be ready because Silverlight is designed for applications: Silverlight 1 is video, Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform development platform that you can write for in a range of languages. AOL’s Silverlight mail app will look the same everywhere and be the same code everywhere. Even though it runs on a Mac or a Linux box (with Novell’s Moonlight plug-in), it’s not leaving behind the Windows heritage because Silverlight is a substantial proportion of the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Silverlight runs in the browser, WPF apps run on the desktop (and because Moonlight is based on the .NET clone Mono, WPF apps could come out of the browser on Linux but not on the Mac). Aston Martin showed a Silverlight app in Ray Ozzie’s keynote that lets you look at a car in great detail and pick the colours and finishes that you like, then make an appointment with a dealer; they showed the companion WPF app for the dealer to show you that custom car in true 3D, on a large screen controlled by a UMPC (the 3D model isn’t running on the UMPC, it’s on a high-end gaming PC with an NVIDIA card that the Aston team bought at the local PC shop in Vegas).

Same APIs, same programming model, same graphic files, same controls, same XAML markup. Cirque du Soleil’s recruitment app runs on tablet PCs today and they copy files by hand to review in an intranet application; they showed a prototype of a WPF app to use on the road for assessing performer auditions and a Silverlight intranet app that the Mac users in the office can use to review the auditions that are automatically synchronized.

Internet Explorer 8 gets synchronization too, with local storage for Web sites; so if you’re halfway through a document and you have to leave the office and get on a plane, the Web app you’re writing it in can switch to offline mode and let you save the file. To start with this will be like a big cookie in a simple text file, but the IE team plans to implement a local database for future versions, which will let developers write more powerful Web apps that work offline and on. Making the back button work on Ajax sites - so you can zoom in to a map and click Back to zoom out again - is great for users; the address bar will update as well, so when you get to the right place on the map you’ll be able to copy the URL to send to a friend. But that’s also good news for Ajax Web apps; the app could save your state locally and put you back to where you were last time you visited. A lot of IE is playing catchup, but the team is looking at the bigger picture too.

Silverlight takes Microsoft beyond Windows and beyond PCs. Silverlight for mobile starts with Silverlight 1 and video, so we have to wait longer for the cross-platform apps to go mobile. But Nokia is putting Silverlight on S60 phones - and Moonlight will run on Linux phones. There’s no reason why you couldn’t have a version of Silverlight for Xbox - and at this point you should think of the Mesh service for syncing PCs and devices that Ray Ozzie hinted at in his keynote. Today you need the PC with the DVD drive and the Ethernet port and the full operating system and the full applications. In five years time you might be mixing and matching an app on your phone with an ultralight notebook for longer trips and a full PC back at base - and using Silverlight and WPF on all of them.

In “The Graduate” Robert De Niro was given one word of career advice: Plastics.

After this year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference I’ve got one word for all of you out there: Visualisation.

We’re being faced with more and more complex data sources that we need to turn into something useful. There’s a huge amount of raw data out there, in company reports, in scientific data and in the millions of words that fill the Internet (and our hard disks). The question is, how can we avoid drowning in this information?

The answer is simple - providing tools that can be used to give easy access to the information that’s there, and along with managing that data and mining it, and then making it easy to display the information graphically. Presenter after presenter at ETech showed off various graphs and visualisations that helped make sense of the information they were working with.

One example came from the team at design company Stamen. Working with the folk at MySociety they’d produced a map of London that mixed and mashed transport times with house prices. All you needed to do was move the sliders to find an area that met your budget and the time you want to get up. Their demo also showed how housing prices flowed across the San Francisco Bay area, and how they bubbled up and down in Texas sub-divisions.

Another presentation, from Saul Griffith, used visualisation to put his personal carbon footprint in perspective - and how it matched to his personal energy budget. The graphs and diagrams he’d produced meant that it was easy for him to decide where he needed to cut back - and how the cut backs could be linked to changes he was meaning to make in his life anyway.

Paul Torrens is using visualisation techniques to model the behaviouir of crowds. With 3D models and animations he’s able to show how people exit a building in an emergency, and how a demonstration becomes a riot. Using the information from his simulations architects can design safer buildings, along with cities that can reduce the risks of a peaceful demonstration becoming something else - and protecting the peaceful majority that are just trying to avoid being caught up in clashes between police and people just along for the fight.

These folk are the “alpha geeks”. They may have more of a grasp of what they’re looking for in the data than most of us, but they’re using the tools we already have. Data analysed in Excel can become a web 2.0 mashup or a set of well designed PowerPoint slides. We can use these techniques to visualise data ourselves, building dashboards of the information that we need or want.

There is one danger here: it’s very easy to trust the visualisations that someone else has made. Are they manipulating the data to give the results they want? The only answer is to learn how to visualise complex data ourselves, becoming adept at manipulating and merging information in our chosen tools. Tools like Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services are key to this, as is getting to grips with Excel’s Business Intelligence features.

It’s a brave new world. Let’s take advantage of it.

–Simon