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Logiciels (10 non lus)

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XenApp6 de Citrix étoffe son offre vers Apple

Récupéré: mars 12, 2010, 5:57am CET par Jacques Cheminat avec IDG NS

XenApp donne aux utilisateurs un accès à des programmes fonctionnant sur un serveur et transmet les applications vers le client sur plusieurs types de (...)
Brevets abusifs : Jonathan Schwartz, ex-PDG de Sun, se lâche sur son blog

Récupéré: mars 12, 2010, 5:57am CET par Jean-Pierre Blettner

En 2003, après que Jonathan Schwartz eut dévoilé un prototype de Linux pour le poste de travail, Steve Jobs - PDG d'Apple - appela son bureau afin d'indiquer (...)

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In a more complicated gaming world, OpenGL 4.0 gets simpler, smarter

Publié: mars 12, 2010, 12:13am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Despite the fact that game console manufacturers still drive studios toward exclusivity for individual titles, so that a popular Xbox 360 game isn't available for PlayStation 3 and vice versa, developers within those studios are insisting more and more upon cross-platform flexibility and portability. While they may be restricted to one console, they don't want those borders to extend to computers or to handsets.
For this reason, the Khronos Group has become more and more important to developers, and OpenGL is no longer being perceived as some kind of fallback standard, as in the phrase, "Your graphics use only OpenGL. Today, OpenGL is developers' ticket to portability between PCs, consoles, and handsets, and it's the only technology shining a ray of hope for cross-console portability should it ever become politically feasible.
Today at the annual Game Developers' Conference, Khronos (whose principal members include AMD, Nvidia, and Sony) unveiled on schedule the 4.0 version of its OpenGL cross-platform rendering language for 3D virtual environments. To understand the significance of this event, you have to understand a bit more about the challenges that game developers are facing. Specifically, as screen sizes become larger on average, screen resolutions grow finer, and screens by number increase beyond one per system, the types of simplifications that made 3D scenes look "good enough" for older PCs actually look bad on modern systems. More finely-detailed systems make typical "fuzzifications" (my word for it, not Khronos') look more obvious.
It's still too arithmetically costly to expect 3D games and artistic applications to be ray tracers -- they can't assume the shading values for a huge number of traveling photons in space in real-time. We've talked before about how some graphics cards, including the first DirectX 10.1 cards from ATI in late 2007, can track a few photons, and fudge the remaining shader values for the rest.
But applying that type of calculation to OpenGL -- so it can be used with ATI and Nvidia (Intel? Maybe someday) -- requires the application to calculate how much...or more accurately, how little detail it can get away with, for certain points in space. Typically in OpenGL, developers have used lookup functions to determine the level of detail required to map any given area. As screen dynamics change, the number of functions required for a given space may increase, and their efficiency may decrease. As a result, it could take exponentially more time to make a scene look realistic -- to fuzz the focus of areas that are on the sidelines or out of range, or to blur regions that we're supposed to be flying by.
Khronos' engineers tackled this problem by extending the research begun earlier in the last decade (PDF available here) by SGI, the company that originally got the ball rolling for OpenGL. Technically, the whole technique is called "level of detail," but another way to refer to it is shader simplification. Used judiciously, it's a way to make certain elements of a scene seem clearer by selecting which others appear not so clear.
Screenshot of an early build of the Icarus Scene Engine, an OpenGL-based 3D scene editor that is itself rendered in 3D, using the OpenTK toolkit.
As scenes are processed, OpenGL effectively determines the active level of detail for any given shader (the equivalent of what Direct3D calls a "pixel," which isn't always a "pixel" per se). OpenGL 4.0 expedites this process by realizing that levels of detail should be remembered, so that when a function looks it up from the outside, it doesn't have to be recalculated. Thus, top of the list on version 4.0's list of changes is the new textureLOD function set, which will not impact how developers use the API -- it's like a retroactive fix. The new functions recall levels of detail rather than recalculate them.
These new functions are actually necessary for OpenGL to work (properly) on ATI Radeon HD 5xxx series graphics cards, which began shipping last year. Now developers are looking forward to ATI upgrading its 5xxx drivers to enable 4.0, now that 4.0 has enabled them.
The result may be an avoidance of the exponential lags that developers had been seeing as resolution and screen complexity increased. Double-precision floating-point vectors will be supported for the first time, also signifying the new dynamics of 3D rendering. And now, cube map textures can be layered, potentially for more iridescent effects that will substitute for bump mapping. As one contributor to Khronos' OpenGL forum noted this morning, "I just had a look on the extension, it's so much more than whatever I could have expected! I think there is a lot of developer little dreams that just happened here."
The first rollout demonstrations of OpenGL 4.0, along with its WebGL counterpart, were scheduled for late this afternoon, West Coast time. That's probably where we'll see our first screen shots of the final specification at work.
We'll also learn more about just how viable the new edition is for cross-platform development. This afternoon, another forum contributor from Montreal noted the remaining political roadblocks to true cross-platform development: "As a cross-platform developer I would like to use OpenGL exclusively but it's commercially unviable to use it on Windows, due to the fact that OpenGL just doesn't work on most machines by default, which forces me to target my game to both DirectX and OpenGL. The OpenGL shortcomings on Windows aren't a big deal for hardcore games where the users are gonna have good drivers (although they are a cause of too many support calls which makes it inviable anyway) but it's a show-stopper for casual games...Until OpenGL isn't expected to just work in any Windows box, it is dead in the Windows platform. Do something about this please."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Android vs. iPhone vs. BlackBerry vs. OS X vs. Windows, brought to you by Namco

Publié: mars 11, 2010, 10:37pm CET par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Namco, one of video gaming's most iconic brands, today announced a new cross-platform game engine called UniteSDK, which will let gamers play with one another irrespective of the platform they're playing their games on.
A user playing a UniteSDK-based game on their iPhone, for example, will be able to play against a PC user, who will be able to play against a Mac user, and so forth.
"Allowing gamers with the option to play anywhere, anytime and on multiple platforms will be a true milestone for Namco Networks -- wanting to play a friend that has an iPhone when someone only has a PC will no longer be a prohibiting factor," Kirby Fong, executive producer of web development and online gaming at Namco Networks said today. "UniteSDK allows Namco and in the near future, external developers, to create games that provide cross platform and cross game social community."
Namco's first title built on UniteSDK is called Pool Pro Online 3 and will launch on PC, iPad, Mac, Android, Java, BREW, RIM and Windows Mobile. All of these platforms will be able to engage one another.
In addition to allowing interoperability, UniteSDK also gives games the ability to support achievements, records, leaderboards, gamer profiles, in-game chat, buddy lists, one-on-one challenges, and tournaments.
It's another move by a game company toward unifying the disparate platforms under a single interoperable umbrella. A similar move was made by Valve Corporation this week when it announced it will sell copies of its games for both Mac and Windows for a single price, and that all its future releases will launch simultaneously on PC, Xbox 360, and Mac.
Namco's strategy however, has much more potential for revolution in that it makes community building considerably easier. When the platform is no longer a factor that separates players from one another, a community of gamers can get together, socialize, and play much more quickly.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
FCC releases iPhone app to learn more about network conditions

Publié: mars 11, 2010, 8:49pm CET par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

With just six days to go before the National Broadband Plan is due before Congress, the Federal Communications Commission today launched a pair of consumer tools -- an app for iPhone/Android, and a Web-based reporting tool -- to help inform both consumers and the Commission itself about broadband conditions across the US.
The mobile application bundles the Ookla Speed Test (a.k.a., Speedtest.net) and Network Diagnostic Tool together into a single package simply branded "FCC Test." Users can check their downlink/uplink speeds and network latency against different US-based servers, and can then export the results as a .CSV file. The FCC says it may use the data collected from the Mobile Broadband Quality Test to analyze coverage and quality on a geographic basis across the US, but it does not endorse one particular testing application over another, so there may be more tests rolled into the app in the future.
The Commission's Broadband Dead Zone Report is much less a tool than a simple complaint dropbox. On the page, the user confirms that they do or do not have broadband available in their home, answers one related question and then provides their address. This is intended to help the FCC determine where the demand for broadband is high despite low coverage.
"Transparency empowers consumers, promotes innovation and investment, and encourages competition," said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski in a statement today. "The FCC's new digital tools will arm users with real-time information about their broadband connection and the agency with useful data about service across the country. By informing consumers about their broadband service quality, these tools help eliminate confusion and make the market work more effectively."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Early praise for Google Maps' bike routes

Publié: mars 11, 2010, 8:44pm CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The nice thing about the Internet, or so I've been told, is that it has all this information. Perhaps you've noticed this lately, but the big problem has been that there's no one way to get at this information with any kind of consistency.
Supposedly Google is the "portal" for most of the world's information, which may be why so many people find Betanews by typing "Betanews" in Google. In one respect, you might expect Google to have an interest in creating that consistent methodology for getting at information. On the other hand, given that so many folks depend on Google Search just as it is now, you could see how Google might very easily come to the conclusion that there's no new benefits to be gained through improving its software, just to keep the user base it already has.
My friend and colleague Carmi Levy touched on that point this morning in Wide Angle Zoom, where he turned a reluctant thumb down on the Google Buzz social network experiment. You can call it "beta" or, as Google strangely decided this time around, not call it beta, but after using it for a while, it's difficult not to come away with the opinion that this is indeed an experiment...and you're the subject. But as Carmi also noted, different Google services are so inconsistent with one another that they may as well have been developed on different planets -- which suggests that Google may have been copying the Microsoft development model after all. Perhaps the best case-in-point example comes from Google Maps. Yesterday, to the delight of many, it added bicycle routes to its plotting options.
If you're a biker, you know that there are peculiar distinctions between the routes you plan as a pedestrian, and those you use on a bicycle. In cities whose planning commissions have added lanes to boulevards by destroying sidewalks, you know that unless you enjoy motocross and frequent encounters with beat cops, you can't plant bicycle tires on the same places you can plant your feet. I grew up decades ago in Oklahoma, at a time where for most areas of the state, "downtown" was denoted by the presence of the stoplight. Before I could drive a car, I biked four miles back and forth from my first high school, and (sometimes) the ten miles back and forth from my second, at a time when that was considered a normal way for a kid to get around town. Even then, I distinctly remember there were spans of a few hundred feet or so every so often where, if the paved road ended and the granite rock paths began, I'd pick up my bike and tread on foot between people's houses. It helped to get acquainted with them first (see: "beat cops").
The brilliance of the Google Maps experiment is that it accumulates the data that Google has gathered, not just through map scanning and satellite imagery and those strange cars you see cruising every little granite path, but through its advertising service as well. As a result, from day one, the bicycle route part of its service is capable of guiding cyclists using the tools that matter to cyclists: the landmarks they see along the way -- the gas station, the church with the tall steeple, the Italian restaurant. No service established exclusively for the purpose of mapping the world, for motorists or cyclists, would have ever assimilated information at this level of granularity; only through co-opting the advertising and location database with the mapping database could this ever be feasible from a business standpoint.
When I tested Google Maps last year as a pedestrian/public transit dependent in Los Angeles, I discovered it was using a form of "reverse tunnel logic" to compile its suggested routes. Quite literally, it would have me traveling by foot one mile south to catch a bus that would take me 1.1 miles north; and it also would have had me scaling viaducts where there were drainage ditches below and barbed wire above. I pointed out to Google at the time that Maps appeared to fail to consider time and effort consumed as factors in assimilating its routes. The response I got at the time from Google was, thank you for your input but, well, you can't know everything about everything. As I've learned from experience, yes, you can. Living in Indianapolis, for example, I know there is a kind of "superhighway" exclusively for non-motorists, formed from the brilliant idea of paving over a disused railroad track. Named for the railroad that used to own it, it's called the Monon Trail -- a 16.7-mile stretch of track that's well kept, fairly well patrolled, and is the most foot-friendly stretch of asphalt I've ever traveled.
Since it bisects most of the city north-to-south, there are a multitude of ways someone could get to the Monon Trail. Indianapolis is notable for having plenty of bike trails in certain areas of the city, and no way in hell a bike could get through in others. For my initial test of Google Maps for cyclists, I wanted to see whether it would make the same decisions I would, having lived here now for 18 years.
With pedestrian maps, Google's suggested route is plotted in blue, with the relatively foot-friendly paths outlined in solid green, or dotted green for "better than most." If I wanted to walk from my house all the way to, say, Conseco Fieldhouse downtown where the Pacers play, Google Maps would try to plot the most direct foot route it could. Even though I know for a fact that walking the Monon Trail is much, much faster than down the side of a boulevard, the fact that the Trail is a half-mile out of my way means that Google's walking map won't suggest it.
It is a very different story for cyclists, and here it's clear that someone at Google listened to my advice. It takes a little more effort to pedal west a half-mile to get to the Trail, but once you're there, the effort pays off with a four-and-a-half mile stretch of paved roads, overpasses, and relatively safe crosswalks ("zebra crossings"). Tunnel logic evidently was not used to compile this route, but rather an assessment of the time and even luxury benefits to be gained from going out of one's way -- the type of assessments Google Maps did not make last year in L.A.
Here's what I mean: This screenshot shows the suggested route from one of my favorite neighborhood pizza joints to Conseco downtown. Now, Google knows that Allisonville Road recently added a bike lane (not a good one, it's in dotted green), that it leads to a nicely protected sidewalk down Fall Creek Parkway, and that would be the most direct route downtown. Indeed, if I were a pedestrian, that's the route it would suggest. But as a cyclist, I know that's not the route I want -- crossing onto Fall Creek over Binford Blvd. means running across ten lanes of traffic without a crosswalk, where motorists are speeding through on a shortcut to I-69.
So Google Maps takes my bicycle (a vintage Takara racer, if you're interested) a mile out of my way, through a residential area, just to get me to the Monon Trail. And that's exactly right -- there's no question it's a lovelier, easier, and in good weather, faster route.
Next: Seeing where you're going, and where you shouldn't go...
Seeing where you're going, and where you shouldn't go
Perhaps the most wonderful feature of this service, which pedestrians already discovered, is the opportunity to blend Street View with maps to let you walk the route ahead of time. This way you see in advance all the landmarks you'll encounter along the way -- the waypoints that let you remember in your head what to look for and where to turn. Here is where I encountered a little bug in the program, and you can actually see it if you look closely here. Street View should show you a blue line, coordinating with the blue line in the overhead map, to let you follow the suggested route. The overhead map, shown below, appears correct -- travel west on 54th St., and turn left at the Trail. The landmark at that turn is one of my favorite Italian restaurants in all the world, Mama Carolla's. In the photograph, notice the trail runs right alongside it.
Notice also that the map's blue line has you making a left turn at Mama's onto the Trail (correct), but that Street View has you making a right turn. What happened here? A check of the turn-by-turn directions reveals that, for some strange reason, Maps wants you to travel down 54th St. for 72 extra feet, then make a U-turn, head back the other direction, and make a right turn. It's probably a little database problem, where the point of contact with the Monon Trail meets up with the street is off by a few feet. Nevertheless, if you printed off these directions so you could follow them from your bike, you'd be confused at this point.
Here's also where you discover a problem that Google can't solve, at least not right away: You can't take a Street View walk down pedestrian trails. There's an obvious reason for this: Towns don't want Google going down walking trails snapping shots of people anonymously.
The next best thing is to try to reposition yourself (the little orange man on the overhead map, who I've noticed isn't on a bike) on actual street intersections along the way. Here's where the software starts to fail: I should be able to just click on the blue path at an intersection where there's a photo. Instead, I have to drag the little man up in the air (he actually "flies" while this is happening, like a repositioned character in Peter Molyneux's game "The Movies") and deposit him in the vicinity of the blue line. Where it ends up dropping him, despite what the pointer says, could be up to three blocks out of the way.
The problem here appears to be with the front end of the program, not with the fundamental design. If you'll recall earlier my statement that you can know everything, the way you do so is by listening and learning. Google Maps is, to its great credit, capable of doing this: In cases where I know full well a certain route is safer or better than another, I can drag the blue line where I believe it should go. Not only is that an easy way for me to plan my own route, but for Google, it's a source of new information: If Google is smart about this (and there's no reason for me to believe it isn't), it will learn from my changes and those of others, and may suggest safer routes for other Maps users in the future.
But it can only do this if it gets its front end right first. The slightly incorrect portion of its suggested route for my trip downtown was a 72-foot diversion that actually does show up when you zoom in the map. But partly because the granularity of the line-dragging routine does not appear to be as fine as the map's own zoom capability, and partly because the U-turn is a three-step process which Google Maps presumes must lead from point to point to point in every circumstance, my attempt to simply shave off the U-turn in the directions was mistaken as a way for me to take a lap around the strip mall parking lot, shown here.
Because Google is leveraging its massive platform in multiple areas to provide an exclusive service that wouldn't have been feasible on its own, little adjustments can have big consequences. Someplace within the Google database right now, there's probably the recording that some Indy cyclist weirdo suggested that instead of a simple 72-foot loop around the middle of 54th St., one should take a big two-block oval around the strip mall. As long as that little route-adjustment bug is in there, the validity of information Google is gleaning from changes that sensible people are making to suggestions everywhere, may end up not being very sensible. And as a result, over time, someone will probably be advised to walk one mile north in order to get on the route that leads her 1.1 miles south.
Despite that little discovery, I can easily see where Google Maps will become an invaluable tool for bicyclists who want to explore not only their home town, but areas of the world they've never been. I can imagine a depression in car rentals across the country. I'm also imagining folks with their Android GPS-enabled phones in their pockets maybe someday getting spoken directions. "Turn left onto Monon Trail...No, silly, your other left."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Opera Mini 5 solves some of Android's native browser problems

Publié: mars 11, 2010, 7:56pm CET par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Following up on last week's beta release of Opera Mini 5 for Windows Mobile 5 and 6, Opera software today launched Opera Mini 5 for the Android platform.
With Mini 5, Opera Software has managed to make a cross-platform browser that provides an almost uniform experience across all the operating systems it runs on. Today's release on Android feels almost identical to the version I tested last week.
However, with Android, we're taking a different look at Opera and its comparisons to other browsers. It's easy to say, "Oh, Opera is faster than IE Mobile, but not as comprehensive as Skyfire," when comparing browsers on Windows Phones. Everybody does that.
Because there are four different versions of Google's mobile operating system in circulation right now, there are at least three different native Android browsers to compare Opera Mini 5 to. Android versions 1.5 and 1.6 have an older version (v. 4.0) of the Android browser, while Android 2.0 and up have a browser with a new UI and new features. Android 2.1 has the same browser as 2.0, but it is endowed with multitouch gestures.
We tested Opera Mini 5 against the two main Android browsers.
Opera Mini 5 on Android 1.5 & 1.6
For devices that run upon the "Cupcake" and "Donut" builds of Android, Opera Mini 5 provides a number of different experiences from the stock browser. First, Opera provides an actionable address bar which can just be clicked upon to enter URLs. In Android Browser 4, the user has to tap Menu > Go to bring up the address bar. Secondly, Zooming in and out with the Android browser is done with the preview tool and magnifying glass buttons, but Mini 5's is mostly pre-ordained. If you set it to "mobile view," pages are formatted to fit your screen so you don't have to do too much resizing. However, Mini 5 defaults with mobile view off and full screen mode off, so your pages are first going to load very quickly, but will require zooming (done by double-tapping the screen, a gesture that Android Browser version 4 actually lacks).
When considering Mini 5's interface alone, it's not a significant improvement over the stock browser. However there's much more to love about Opera than its UI, so we'll talk more about that later.
Next: Opera Mini 5 on Android 2.0+...
Opera Mini 5 on Android 2.0+
Devices running Android 2.0 and beyond are generally equipped with stronger processors, so browsing with the stock Android browser is a tough experience to compete with. Fortunately for Opera Mini 5, the experience it provides on these devices actually holds up quite well thanks to some of the features it adds that Android lacks across the board.
Principal among these is tabbed browsing. In all Android browsers, your browser tabs are a whole sub-screen which pulls you out of your current window and into a new one. In Opera Mini, browser tabs appear as an overlay in your main window with a rack of thumbnails that can be chosen from. This adds a lot to the feeling of continuity within Opera, and is an area where the Android browser suffers.
Another major complaint about the Android browser is that it does not sync your mobile bookmarks with anything. They're currently something of a dead end. This has been a big argument in favor of the Dolphin browser, which offers that feature. Even better, however, is Opera Mini 5, which actually can sync to your desktop version of Opera with Opera Link. So if you're a desktop Opera user, not only will your Speed Dial screen be automatically populated, but it also gives you instant access to your bookmark folders and RSS feeds.
The final issue to mention when talking about any of Opera's products is the addition of server-side rendering. Pages in Opera Mini 5 are digested on an Opera server before they hit your device's screen, so browsing is sped up considerably. Though browsing on a 3G connection is enjoyable on all Android devices, Opera Mini 5 can knock out pages appreciably faster.
So what's the bottom line on this beta?
It's a "Must Have" if:
You're a desktop Opera user using Android 1.5 or 1.6.
It's a "Must Try" if:
You're in an area with poor 3G coverage using Android 1.5 or 1.6.
For everyone else, it will be worthwhile to play around with it and see if you like what Opera does. After all, it is the most popular mobile browser in the world.
Opera Mini 5 beta can be downloaded today in the Android Market.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Second thoughts about Google Buzz

Publié: mars 11, 2010, 4:24pm CET par Carmi Levy
By Carmi Levy, Betanews

So it's been a few weeks since Google Buzz launched, and because I'm a good little geek-soldier who eats his own (figurative) dog food, I've invested lots of time to learn how it works and, more importantly, how it can work for me. Although I'm doing my best to be an optimist, I can't seem to warm up to Buzz. Yes, folks, I think I'm falling out of like with Google's new social media darling service.
Or, to be blunt, Google Buzz sucks.
Maybe that's a little harsh. Maybe it sucks for me and not for others. Maybe other users absolutely love the thing because they feel it's already transformed how they connect to each other. If you're one of them, please let me know, because so far, no one I know has bothered using it to any great degree.
And there, dear readers, is the core problem. Despite the fact that Buzz leverages our existing Gmail contact lists to give us a head start in the friend-population game, it doesn't seem to be translating into actual, sustained, meaningful activity.
In the early going for Facebook, as you may recall, its friend approval process often left your universe as pathetically empty as a sixth grade prom dance floor. Google, by contrast, leveraged Gmail to avoid repeating Facebook's mistake, but its jumpstart philosophy doesn't seem to be resulting in anything remotely approaching an enjoyable party. Whenever I click on the Buzz link from Gmail, I feel like I'm right back in the sixth grade, down to the dim gymnasium with the lousy acoustics and watered down punch.
There are so many reasons to rant on Google for foisting yet another social media failure on us, but for now, I've narrowed it down to these four:
1. Conversation stream hijackers. Every time I sign in, there's a monumentally long conversation thread from Robert Scoble at the top of my list. Now, don't get me wrong: I've long been a fan of Robert Scoble and decided to follow him precisely because I appreciate his perspectives on the rapidly evolving social media landscape. But his overwhelming presence at the top of my Buzz feed is starting to annoy me. To his credit, he's recognized this flaw and has apologized for it -- though he really shouldn't, because it's not his fault that bad interface design allows uber-users to overwhelm the feeds of regular folks like me.
2. Interface from hell. I wouldn't mind Robert Scoble's extreme ownership of my screen real estate if I had the ability to move things around to suit my needs. But Buzz's no-customization philosophy means you're stuck with whatever's there. You can't filter out users or threads that don't interest you. You can't prioritize the ones that do. You're stuck. And those things that look like overlaid folders? They don't work. For all the criticism that Facebook has received over the years for its revolving door of radical interface changes, at least we can eventually tweak that interface to somewhat reflect the things that matter most to us. Google Buzz assumes we all subscribe to the old Eastern Bloc notion of one size (badly) fits all.
3. Inconsistency with other Google services. Remember the nasty old days of DOS when every app had its own interface and command structure, and moving data from one to another was the PC-era equivalent of Babel? Well, after a couple of decades of getting used to Microsoft's cross-application philosophy -- with across-the-board methods for printing, saving files, cutting and pasting content, among others -- it almost seems as if Google wants us to go back to the pre-Cambrian period. Every Google service seems to come with its own unique interface and, as a result, its own unique learning curve. While I understand that a social media tool like Buzz will necessarily have a fundamentally different feature set than, say, an RSS reader like Google Reader, there's no reason why some of the baseline conventions of Google Reader, such as the ability to expand and collapse conversations and seamlessly connect to and manipulate feeds, can't be adapted for use in Buzz as well. Using the two services side-by-side reinforces my belief that they may as well have been designed on different planets. There's no reason for this.
4. Cryptic contact management. After years of finding friends in Facebook and identifying interesting folks to follow in Twitter, the Buzz approach to adding contacts is a major letdown. Not that I'm surprised, as contact management within Gmail has never been a Google strong suit. But it's particularly botched here, starting with a "Find People" routine that first forces you to scroll through the friends you're already following. Once you get to the Suggestions field at the bottom, you're faced either with a long list of people you don't know (maybe they sent spam to your Gmail account six months ago) or a really short list of people you don't know. "Load More" buttons are few and far between. Right now, I've got one under the list of folks I follow. Which means it's useless to me. I'd like to have one that helps me find new people to follow, but that's nowhere to be found. Similarly counterintuitive design decisions abound throughout Buzz.
I'm apparently not alone, because the kinds of conversations that routinely happen on other social media platforms -- multiple back-and-forth messages that often pull in participants from near and far -- just aren't happening here. I fear Buzz may go down as yet another failed attempt by Google to figure out the social media Holy Grail.
I've always thought of myself as a pretty tech-focused guy who can figure out the peculiarities of virtually any piece of software or, increasingly, Web-based service. But Google Buzz makes it such a frustrating, annoying process to get anywhere close to functional with people who matter to me that I've concluded my time would be better spent elsewhere. I'm not convinced spending hours fighting with Buzz's busted interface will do anything to get my "friends" to wake up and engage in this new environment. From where I sit, I doubt it'll change without radically invasive surgery to the product. Even then, I wonder if users already entrenched in Facebook and Twitter will even care enough to chime back in to Buzz.
Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Giant inflatable pig used in recording studios' Washington war with broadcasters

Publié: mars 11, 2010, 12:33am CET par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The danger with waging a populist political war is in potentially boiling down one's message to such a degree that it ends up insulting and patronizing the very people the message is targeting. The case in point could not be made clearer this afternoon in Washington, DC, as The Hill's Kim Hart first discovered: A handful of otherwise unnoticeable protestors outside the headquarters of the National Association of Broadcasters erected an 18-foot inflatable pig, bearing the message, "Fair Pay for Musicians."
The pig has become the mascot of the MusicFirst Coalition, the performers' rights agency that collects and distributes royalties. For the last few years, MusicFirst has campaigned extensively against the decades-old exemption of terrestrial radio broadcasters (as opposed to Internet radio) from paying performers' royalties. Stations continue to pay royalties to rights holders, which in the end, include many of the recording industry institutions also represented by MusicFirst.
Dueling bills stalled on Capitol Hill would continue this exemption indefinitely, or compel radio stations for the first time to pay performers' royalties on a scale comparable to what Internet streamers such as Pandora and Last.fm reluctantly agreed to last year. In an effort to gather momentum to move pro-royalties legislation forward, associations that support MusicFirst have formed the Radio Accountability Project; launched a Web site, PiggyRadio.com; and produced a new 30-second television spot, all of which heavily feature the poor pig.
The tactic appears to be to visually link radio broadcasters with two unpopular groups of citizens: the United States Government, and the executives of banks that accepted federal bailout money in 2008 and 2009 to remain solvent. Whether any substantive link between bankers and broadcasters actually exists is open for debate. Nonetheless, PiggyRadio.com clearly shows the corporate broadcasting pig feeding from an orange barrel marked "Bailout Funds." The theory is that, by not paying royalties, continuing to accept the exemption is virtually almost exactly similar to accepting a government bailout.
However, one tactical error may have emerged today: In its invitation to the pig-out this afternoon (PDF available here), the RAP group estimated the amount of the "bailout" -- by association, the amount of royalties MusicFirst would receive from broadcasters -- as "billions." "These giant radio companies made more than $15 billion in revenues last year without paying musicians a single penny through a performance royalty," the RAP invitation read. "Worse, they have been using the public's airwaves to lobby and intimidate Congress on the issue. Specifically, here is what the broadcast corporations want: A bailout from the federal government in the form of billions for broadcast spectrum that they got for free and don't even use."
Thus the National Association of Broadcasters -- its office windows covered in pink -- found itself today doing two things it never expected to do: explaining that its members actually have never requested federal bailout money, and buying sausage pizza for the handful of protesters (by one estimate, five) who accompanied the giant pig.
NAB Executive Vice President Dennis Wharton issued this statement this afternoon: "It's no surprise that [the Recording Industry Association of America] is now employing silly frat-boy stunts, given its well-documented practice of suing college kids to rescue a bankrupt business model. It also seems appropriate for RIAA to use an inflatable pig as its mascot, since its foreign-owned members would be the biggest beneficiaries of performance tax pork. RIAA is losing this issue on Capitol Hill and in the court of public opinion, and today's demonstration represents a new low in a campaign of utter desperation."
Wharton then went on to suggest that the recording industry at least buy a sausage pizza for "the scores of exploited musicians who have had to sue their record label to recoup allegedly unpaid album royalties."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
Apple's business database for Windows and Mac (you read right) moves forward

Publié: mars 10, 2010, 9:54pm CET par Jacqueline Emigh
By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

FileMaker Pro 11 left beta testing for general release on Tuesday, adding a host of new capabilities for better productivity in database use, faster database creation, and easy production of eye-catching charts.
Now updated for Microsoft's Windows 7 and Apple's Macintosh native Mac OS X "Cocoa" platform, FileMaker Pro is the only software in its category that runs on both Windows and Mac, noted Ryan Rosenberg, vice president, marketing and services for FileMaker, Inc., in a briefing for Betanews.
"We're number one on Mac, and number two after Microsoft Access on Windows," according to Rosenberg.
With so few rivals for FileMaker Pro on either platform, why is the Apple division adding so many new features this time around? "We want everyone to become a database user," the VP responded.
In contrast to FileMaker's Bento personal database program, a Mac-only product targeted at consumers and very small businesses, the division's flagship FileMaker product is designed mainly for "knowledge workers" at mid- to large-sized businesses.
Rosenberg said that FileMaker, Inc. now eyes expanding the adoption of FileMaker Pro among both advanced database users and novices, who might have been performing tasks such as invoicing using spreadsheets instead.
Like Bento, FileMaker Pro requires no familiarity with programming languages. In recent releases, the product has gained external links to Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server databases.
Rosenberg also contended, though, that FileMaker Pro has long contained a number of features -- such as Web publishing, for example -- still unavailable in the Windows-only Microsoft Access. He then argued that, on the whole, FileMaker's interface is smoother and easier to use.
Key enhancements in FileMaker Pro 11 include:
- FileMaker Charts for quick production of colorful bar, line and pie charts.
- Quick Find, an intuitive, iTunes-like search engine for database information.
- A Quick Start screen for making new databases, managing files, and finding help resources.
- Quick Reports for setting up data in a similar way to the popular pivot charts in spreadsheets.
- Snapshot Links for easy sharing of the most up-to-date database query results with co-workers and business partners.
- Layout Folders allowing advanced users to capture and reapply their favorite layouts across multiple types of reports.
- Inspector, a "master tool palette" for controlling layout objects and properties.
- A new Invoices Starter Solution, one of 31 template-based built-in solutions for performing specific tasks.
Rosenberg also acknowledged a certain amount of "cross-fertilization" between FileMaker and Bento, even though the two database programs are geared to different audiences.
"Features such as Quick Reports have been heavily influenced by Bento. But it really goes both ways, because Bento was originally based on the FileMaker product, anyway," he observed.
The new FileMaker series actually comes in four flavors: FileMaker Pro, FileMaker Pro Advanced, FileMaker Server, and FileMaker Server Advanced. Rosenberg said that FileMaker Server Advanced has been enhanced to remove limits on the numbers of supported users, while adding the ability to set different permission rights for various groups of users.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010