June 11th 2007
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Blogging, Internet, Life, News, Technology
Today Steve Jobs announced the availability of Safari 3 via a public beta. Although this was interesting news, what was more interesting was the announcement that Safari 3 is now also available for Windows! To some, this may be the news they’d been wanting to hear for a long time but to others it may just be another sign of impending world destruction. My personal opinion is that this move is at least one step in the right direction for Apple. It will certainly make my life as a developer much more easier as I won’t have to rely on services such as Dan Vine’s iCapture or annoyingly have to ask friends to screen shot my sites on their Macs.
First Impressions
My first impressions are that this is indeed true beta software. My experience is that it is rather slow and feels rather heavy as an application. As with all Apple software, the user interface is indeed nice. It’s not clogged with buttons and only the bare essentials are shown but it still allows for nearly as much customisation as Firefox, although it’s not quite on par at this stage. The traditional brushed metal theme has only been on my screen for a few minutes and it’s already growing on me. Although it’s default font choice as Times New Roman isn’t to my taste, it doesn’t take anything away from the browser.One thing I will say is the option to resize most text areas is a nice feature.
Get it Now
Go and get the beta from the Apple site, try it out and return here. Mac or PC users can download the beta and I advise that you do. Give it a go and come here and leave a comment! Below are a few screen shots to tickle your fancy.
April 16th 2007
Internet, Programming, Technology
I saw in the news yesterday that Microsoft released its competitor to Adobe’s (formerly Macromedia’s) hugely successful and widely-used Flash presentation software and ActionScript scripting language. Microsoft hopes that its Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere, now Silverlight, will claw some market share from Flash’s monopolistic grip on the web. Employing already established JavaScript and Microsoft’s proprietary XAML language, Silverlight would seem to be something to watch, even at this early stage. Today I decided to take a go at it and see if even I could use it. I’ve had limited experience with ActionScript and XML so I wanted to to compare it to my previous experiences. Here’s how I got on.
Before you read on, to view the things I’ve made, go to the download page and download the cross-browser plugin.
Silverlight Basics
I’m not going to turn this into a tutorial on how to setup everything - it can all be found in the official SDK, also available on the download page - but I will show the XAML and relevant JavaScript files that accompany each of the things I am to show.
The SDK’s quickstart guide was a really simple and easy explanation of the process of creating very simple shapes at first. I was a little confused at first because the XAML files I create utilise the canvas tag and initially I got it mixed up with the HTML tag of the same name. Firstly you create the canvas you’re going to ‘draw’ in. [Nearly] everything else goes inside this. The layers on the canvas, or z-index, are defined by the order the objects are created - those created later on in the script are on the top layers.
My first foray into it was a simple monochrome target which just created several ellipses in each other with the smallest one having a border instead of a fill. Here’s the .xaml file:
You can view the example’s finished product if you have the plugin installed.
Using Images
Next I did a bit of playing around with images. There are several ways you can use images on your canvas which include using them as a filling for an object or importing them on their own. In this example, I’ve created a rectangle and used an image of a pound coin and then overlayed it with 4 rectangles of differing colours with an opacity set. Along side it, I’ve added a gradient overlay to the image.
You can view the example’s finished product if you have the plugin installed.
Adding Multimedia
Adding media like music and video is incredibly easy for beginners to grasp. A single deceleration is used for both music as well as video which is rather handy. Controlling the media object is also incredibly easy and my quick look over the documentation for the MediaElement object showed a lot of options are available for controlling it. Firstly I tried just simply embedding a sound:
Next, I added the parameter to stop it automatically playing when loaded and added the controls for stop, pause and play the file. These controls also work with video media, as shown in the quick start guide provided in the SDK. The code involved this XAML code and the following JavaScript.
And this JavaScript, inserted either in the head of the page or an external JavaScript file:
You can view the example’s finished product if you have the plugin installed. Click the play, pause and stop buttons to test it out.
Lighting up the web?
Obviously I have to take into account the infancy in terms of development of Silverlight but it’s wide array of features is quite appealing. It took me a quarter of the time to stream a video in Silverlight than it did to do it manually in Flash via ActionScript. At the moment, Silverlight isn’t anywhere near Flash in terms of functionality but even at this early stage it does have some advantages over Flash in terms of the time saving it allows.
I’ve quite enjoyed doing some stuff in it and I’m sure that the abilities of Silverlight go far beyond drawing circles and streaming media. One nice example of the capabilities is this page turning program and this interactive WYSIWYG editor. For me it still feels like it’s a glorified version of the HTML canvas element with some JavaScript added. It doesn’t feel smooth like Flash and currently feels slightly buggy and laggy but I hope this will change in future revisions.
I’ve enjoyed using HTML, XAML and JavaScript and I think that it will eventually catch on - if it doesn’t then Microsoft will probably force it on us in some way. At the moment the plugin is available for both Windows and OSX but I hope Microsoft don’t make the mistake Adobe made by not keeping the Linux community up to date. Try it out.
April 14th 2007
Internet, Technology
Yesterday, a friend pointed me to Blogmusik and I’m glad he did. The new look version officially launched on the 9th of April, Blogmusik is a free and on demand music player already with a huge following and even more planned upgrades. Unlike Pandora which provides you with music recommended to you via the types of music you like, Blogmusik is a straight forward search and play service.
Although the functionality of the service is some what limited at the moment, the dream is there with custom playlists, the ability to upload your own songs and even more in the pipeline. If the ability to add songs or albums to playlists is there, I can’t find it and it may be due to the rather unintuitive user interface on some points.
The song database is actually quite varied. From ‘Beautiful World’ by Colin Hay to Counting Crow’s cover of ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. There’s some recent artists such as Mika and Fall Out Boy as well as some golden oldies like Elvis and Lulu.
The site’s legal stance basically allows them to escape any blame if organisations such as the RIAA, BPI or IFPI came a knocking on their door. All the blame is placed on the user - you and me. I’m not going to go into the legality of the service - you can make your own mind up whether or not you want to use it. But, it’s a nice ‘jukebox’ service and helped me dig up some songs I’d long forgotten but wanted to hear again.
January 21st 2007
Internet, Life
Christmas 2006 saw the biggest amount of money ever spent on shopping over the internet than ever before here in the UK. Approximately £7.7bn was spent up to and over the Christmas period last year - an increase of over 50% from 2005. This increase in online activity was covered by most news programmes as well and sparked my interest earlier in the year. Why has online spending increased so much in just a year and what advantages does going online have over going down to your local high street stores?
Internet Adoption
As I said in a previous article, adoption of broadband internet access here in the UK has been increasing rapidly over the last couple years. BT has over 10 million broadband subscribers alone. Soon, broadband adoption here in the UK will surpass that in the US - we’ve gone online crazy. Why have we welcomed broadband access with open arms?
Broadband internet access has become a lot cheaper and a lot faster. Consumers are now being treated to speeds as fast as 24mbps in the home starting from just £14 a month. Speeds like this and costs like this mean more people can afford to get them and so more people now have access to online shops. Prices have come down because 2006 was a year of competition between companies. The year brought news of mergers such as that between NTL and Telewest and also news of new players in the market such as Sky and the Carphone Warehouse. All this activity and competition has lead to reduced prices and more choice for consumers.
Consumer Trust
Last year was also a year where security was a major issue. 2006 was a turning point where banks no longer accepted signatures when processing card transactions and ‘Chip & Pin’ became the standard verification method. This, I believe, also lead to an increase in the security that online shops provided when buying goods. Anyone who’s ever shopped online before knows that the padlock icon is something we trust and look out for. We’re becoming more liberal with our card details online. Another factor has been the increased usage of online banking - I use it myself - and the usage of sites such as PayPal to manage money.
Online Advantages
Besides the increased ability to access the online shops now, there are some major advantages to shopping online. Firstly there’s the fact that normally, goods cost less online. Secondly, you’re restricted to what shops you have near you if you shop in person. Online you have the pick of all the shops you could want which means you can get the best deal and not just settle for what you’ve got.
Usually, goods to cost less online. For example if you went into a PC World store (hypothetically) you’d pad a lot more for some products than if you shopped on their website. This is because they offer ‘web-only’ exclusive prices. Another example is video games. Take the collector’s edition of Lost Planet for the Xbox 360. Down your local shops it would probably cost you between £45 and £50 but online the price could be as low as £37.50 if you search in the right place. Also, loads of places now such as Play will deliver your item for free.
All these incentives add together to provide a cheap method of getting the item you want and quickly.
Final Thoughts
I’d say I do 3/4 of my shopping online. If I need something for school, food, clothes or if I want a DVD then I generally go down my local shopping centre or to one in a nearby city because the price difference isn’t worth worrying about. But items such as electronics, books and music require me to get them online. Online, these goods can be found much cheaper and my personal experience has been that returning goods to online retailers has been much more pleasant than returning them to high street stores.
£7.7bn over two and a bit months. I can’t even imagine that sort of money. The problem is that as we continue to spend more and more money over the ‘tubes’ we’re going to become less cautious and fraud is going to increase a lot. As long as we keep a mix of spending online and down the high street I think we’ll be okay.
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