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• Microsoft cuts and pastes an egg By Carmi Levy, Betanews Ever since she brought me into the world, my mother has taught me many things, namely to not only learn from my own mistakes, but also from the mistakes of others.Microsoft clearly never spoke to my mom, as evidenced by its decision to leave cut, copy, and paste capabilities out of the new Windows Phone 7 Series platform, at least in the early rounds. If they had paid Mom a visit, they would have been told -- after being offered some tea, of course -- to fix all the boo-boos of earlier smartphone operating systems before releasing their own updated version. She would have advised them to understand the rough spots encountered by competitive offerings, and do everything in their power to avoid them.I think my mom's ticked with MicrosoftOkay, perhaps she wouldn't have worded it precisely that way, but I'm certain you get my point regardless. I'm sure I speak for my mother (and likely, a whole bunch of you, too) when I say I'm disappointed in what may either be Microsoft's "decision" to leave three of the most basic functions in the history of computing out of its just-announced OS, or as we seem to be learning now, it's having overlooked the whole subject in the planning phase.This morning, blogger Long Zheng reports he was told by Microsoft that cut and paste is something the company hopes will find a place in Windows Phone 7 Series at some future point.Now, the initial excuse the company provided was (and is, and quite likely always will be) insufficient and, if we're being brutally honest, more than a little arrogant: "Most users, including Office users, don't really need clipboard functionality." So what's the story now, after Long's report: "We asked users to give us some details, and they decided, most users do like clipboard functionality, just not right at first?"While I realize OS vendors have to make countless decisions about which features should and should not make it into the final product, I bristle at Microsoft's tone -- a bit like US Congresspeople explaining why the public option for health care is a really, really, really good idea, but just not for the bill being discussed today. If Microsoft (or, for that matter, if anyone at all) can learn anything from Congress this year, it's that people don't like being told by The Powers On High what they are supposed to want or not want, and when.It isn't Microsoft's place to tell users that they won't ever need to cut, copy, or paste anything for as long as they own their new devices. It's the kind of blow-off statement that sounds shockingly like Apple when it introduced the iPhone in 2007, similarly stripped of any ability to cut-and-paste. After a sea of complaints from users and reviewers who actually do know what they want, and don't need to be told, Apple wisely retro-baked that functionality back into the OS two years later. While the controversy didn't seem to dent Apple's market share, Microsoft hardly has the benefit of Apple's marketing prowess or brand equity.Apple aficionados were willing to cut the company some slack, and ended up buying iPhones anyway. Microsoft aficionados are a lot harder to find, they won't line up around the block in the middle of the night, and they'll probably pick up an Android-powered device as an alternative. With Windows Mobile...oops, Classic devices retaining this feature, and Windows Phone 7 Series lacking it, the inconsistency is difficult to understand. However you slice it, there will be no slack for Windows Phone 7 Series, and it's more than a little shocking that Microsoft couldn't see this coming.Teaching us all a lesson?In fairness to Microsoft, its new mobile OS includes a data detection service that automatically recognizes common elements like addresses and phone numbers. Within this context, perhaps there's room to make the argument that cutting and pasting is yesterday's news. This technology, popularized with the first mass-market GUIs in the early '80s, and perpetuated in virtually every desktop and mobile OS ever since, could be one of those things that we hold on to like a security blanket. And like the ratty old blanket, perhaps there's a time when we need to let go. Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft is doing us all a favor by pushing it out the door.But consumers are a fickle lot. And what makes sense from a strategic or historical perspective isn't necessarily right from the point of view of the guy forking over the dough for your new wonder-product. Never mind that Microsoft may, in fact, be "right" in concluding that we no longer need cut, copy, and paste on our mobile devices. Customers, after all, are always right, even if their choices make them look like circus clowns who do their makeup in the dark. It's their mistake to make and their shame to live down. Even if the vendor believes otherwise, it's not the smartest business strategy to call them idiots and make fun of their smudged face paint.Casting off a legacyIn fairness to Microsoft, I somewhat understand where the company is coming from. Previous versions of its mobile OS suffered from what I like to call Shrunken Windows Syndrome. Instead of being built from the ground up as truly mobile-enabled solutions, they seemed to be pared-down versions of Microsoft's flagship desktop OS products. Microsoft's philosophy seemed to be that if it worked on a PC, it would work on a smartphone or a PDA, too. I used a number of Windows CE and Mobile devices over the years, and I never got used to navigating a full-on Start menu, complete with cascading sub-menus, with a stylus or thumb keyboard. It was as if Microsoft never actually used its own mobile products out in the field, and never listened to users who complained bitterly that its design philosophy simply didn't work out there.With Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft seems to have finally gotten the mobile message. It's built from the ground up as a modern, competitive, lean and efficient mobile OS. I suspect the cut-and-paste omission is the company's way of overcompensating for years of heavy Windows legacy on its mobile products, a hackneyed way to break with its past.Memo to Redmond: There are other ways to accomplish this.It's only temporaryIf Long Zheng's reporting is accurate (and it often is), I'd wager that v7.1 will have copy and paste...that is, if Microsoft doesn't cave to the firestorm earlier and release it as an on-the-fly fix. Either way, the only way Microsoft will ever gain traction in the mobile OS market is by listening to both customers and prospective customers and integrating their suggestions -- well, the value-added ones, at least -- into successive generations of their product.This is a gaffe Microsoft simply can't afford. Its mobile OS is in the fight of its life as Microsoft battles the Apple/Google/RIM juggernaut on one hand and its own declining mobile market share on the other. Beyond the numbers, there's the risk that the market has already given up on Microsoft succeeding as a mobile vendor. That psychological factor (something Palm knows all too well) is something Microsoft needs to fix by reinstating cut-and-paste support. Now wouldn't be soon enough.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
• Google improves Maps for Android, rolls in bonus features By Tim Conneally, Betanews Today, Google has rolled out a significant update to the Google Maps application for Android 1.6+ devices, which now includes a new search results page, support for multiple accounts, a new Latitude home screen widget, and a new Maps live wallpaper for 2.1 devices.Previously, when you performed a search in Maps, you would have to choose a result from a list of markers on the map. When you clicked the marker, it would open a page with three tabs: Address, Details, and Reviews. Under the Address tab, there were options to Show the result on the map, get directions to it, call it, look at it in Street View, or add it as a contact. The other two tabs contain exactly what you'd expect, details and reviews. If you wanted to pick a different listing, you'd have to go back to the map view and pick a different marker.Now, Google has completely eliminated the tabs, turned all the actions from the "Address" tab into buttons, included digested versions of the other tabs on the first page, and added the ability to "Buzz" about the location you have picked. Additionally, you no longer have to navigate back to the map to check out other nearby results. You can simply swipe across the page to leaf through all the results.The Latitude widget that accompanies the 4.1 update lets users view their nearby Latitude friends at all times from their home screen. The Maps live wallpaper, probably the coolest bonus feature, lets 2.1 users turn their entire homescreen background into a live animated map.The update is available now from the Android Market. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Preliminary results: IE9 tech preview performs 7.8 times better than IE8 By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews In the first series of comprehensive performance tests comparing Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 technical preview, released yesterday, to stable Web browsers in current use today, Betanews confirmed superb speed gains by the IE9 chassis in specific categories. Not everything in the new IE9 was faster than IE8, but in the computational department, the development team's Chakra JavaScript engine shows much-needed gains.In anticipation of IE9, Betanews has been developing a radically improved set of performance tests to complement (and, in a few categories, replace) those we've used in recent months. Our objective is to determine not just how much faster IE9 is, but how much better and more efficient it will be, in computing data, in rendering on-screen objects, and in adapting to varying workloads.Betanews estimates that the IE9 chassis on Windows 7 offers 9.32 times better raw computational performance than IE8 on Windows 7, on the same machine. That's a welcome number due in large part to vastly improved scores in the widely respected SunSpider battery, as well as high scores in a new set of variable-workload computational tests produced by Betanews. Specifically on the SunSpider, the IE9 preview scored a 44.77 on Betanews' relative performance index, compared to 5.59 for IE8. Our index is based on cumulative relative performance in each category of the test battery, compared against the score posted by an old, slow Web browser: IE7 on Vista SP2. This means, yes, IE9 (thus far) offers almost 45 times the computational speed of IE7 on the older operating system -- easily the single largest surge we've seen between generations.A recent dev build of Google Chrome 5 on Windows 7 scored a 69.83 on that same SunSpider index, followed closely by the first stable version of Opera 10.5 with 68.64.As Microsoft embraces HTML 5, it's also managing to eke out some marginal speed gains in the rendering department, although it must be noted that the IE9 chassis is running in an almost feature-less window with very minimal overhead. As of now, the IE9 preview offers 23% better rendering performance (CSS, DHTML, support for the Canvas element in HTML 5) than IE8.Looking for the goodWhat Microsoft did yesterday was give outside developers, for the first time, direct access to just the engine of its next-generation Web browser, long before the functionality and usability features are attached to it. The reason, the Internet Explorer 9 product team says, is to elicit real-world feedback so that the product can be fine-tuned.That describes exactly what we intend to do. Over the last few weeks, Betanews has been compiling a suite of next-generation browser tests, having taken into account the feedback we've received from both our readers and browser manufacturers, Microsoft included. As rapidly as browsers have evolved in just the past year, it's become clear to us that when we compare brands, at one level, we truly are comparing apples to apple trees, or lawnmowers to bulldozers. When we concentrate on the prowess or power angle, with all the adrenaline-rushing metaphors and superlatives, we sometimes forget that sometimes, what the world really wants is an efficient lawnmower.Last year, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch asked me to take a closer, fairer look at Internet Explorer. Specifically, he said that there were architectural efficiencies to be found in the product line, if only we took the time to look for them.How I opted to respond to that challenge was to focus on one under-appreciated aspect of the Web browser that will become more important as its components are transported to six-core desktop systems on one end, and Snapdragon handsets and netbooks on the other: scalability. Specifically, I started exploring whether there was a way to effectively measure how well a browser handles increasing workloads, of ever higher orders of magnitude.Mozilla helped to begin making scalability an issue with its introduction of the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine in Firefox. Tracers make problems that appear complex in coding simpler for their processing engines to execute, by pre-processing instructions ahead of time, converting and optimizing long sequences into easily digestible, assembly language-like instructions. Theoretically, the simpler and longer the sequences, the easier the digestive process should become.So in this new era, it becomes necessary to test the efficiency of a browser's capability to digest those long sequences, to make harder problems simpler for themselves. This is the scalability element which will represent 30% of the score in our revised Relative Performance Index.Yesterday, Dean Hachamovitch played down the importance of just-in-time compiling as a factor in improving browser efficiency, promoting instead the option of moving the interpreter to a background process. But doing that alone, as we're discovering now, may not effectively combat what has historically been IE's biggest problem as a Web apps platform: the ability to fall off a cliff (see: "stack overflow") when problems get especially difficult. On new tests involving sorting algorithms, for instance, where recursion easily becomes thousands of layers deep, IE8 can spin off into a coma. So far, we have not seen the comatose effect in the IE9 tech preview, which could be the first sign of very good news for Web app developers.What I was surprised to discover in crafting this new set of tests was that IE was not alone. Chrome can fall off a cliff too, just several orders of magnitude later (after 10 million iterations, for example, rather than 100,000). As the problem gets more and more complex, the gap between Chrome or Safari or the new Opera's performance and that of IE becomes wider and wider...and wider. And that's a problem because you could arbitrarily choose some point out in space, where Chrome is a thousand times faster than IE rather than, say, ten. Wait long enough and you might get 10,000.And that, as IE proponents assert, would not be fair. It's actually the reason we chose not to include Google's V8 benchmark battery in our tests: because there does not appear to be a real-world correlation between the hundreds of times greater performance the V8 battery can report over IE, and the differences we see in ordinary use.So the goal of our scalability tests is to recognize that smaller engines can still be efficient in what they do, even when they offer lesser horsepower. Maybe IE can't run a 10-million-iteration test. But the difference between its performance in 100,000 iterations and in 10,000 can be compared to Chrome's difference between 10 million iterations and 1 million. That factor may still be meaningful.In the very first report of browsers' scalability compared to IE7 in Vista SP2, the IE9 tech preview in Windows 7 scored a 6.57 compared to IE8's score of 1.13. That means, we believe IE9's new "Chakra" interpreter offers 581.4% greater efficiency than IE8 at speeding up when workloads increase. Betanews is applying these new tests to the latest stable browsers from the other Top Five browser makers; and yes, Ross Perot fans, we'll have the charts ready when the numbers come in. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Unboxing: TiVo Premiere By Tim Conneally, Betanews Though you might come to Betanews expecting an article with either performance testing and graphs or inflammatory diatribes, we're not above a good unboxing; especially when it's a brand new piece of hardware that we intend to thoroughly test (or just very seriously play with.) Today, we're fortunate enough to have received a new TiVo Premiere, the first TiVo DVR with an HD interface designed especially to unite content from multiple sources under a single experience. They call it "The One Box." Have a look!Click the TiVo logo above for the Grand Premiere Unboxing Slideshow! Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Sprint assures that it's getting the Nexus One, too By Tim Conneally, Betanews Yesterday, an updated version of Google's Nexus One Android smartphone was released, compatible with AT&T and Rogers Canada's 3G networks. Today, Sprint is letting everyone know that it is getting the device too.This means that all four major wireless carriers have secured a spot for the Nexus One this year. Google sells versions of the device optimized for T-Mobile and AT&T's wireless networks, and a version for Verizon's network is still expected some time in the Spring, but the operator has not put out any further notices about its availability. Likewise, Sprint today isn't disclosing exactly when Google will start selling a Sprint-compatible Nexus One, nor is it disclosing any pricing plans associated with the device. Today's announcement is simply a confirmation that one is on the way "soon." Google has not updated its online store to reflect Sprint's announcement. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Things to look for at CTIA: America's first 4G smartphone By Tim Conneally, Betanews Sprint is making the bold first move into 4G smartphone market next week, a Wall Street Journal report said today. At that time, the carrier is expected to show off its new WiMAX-enabled HTC Supersonic. The Supersonic has been a pretty big blip on the Android community's radar for several months, after a whole list of HTC device names was uncovered in a leaked Sense UI ROM last December. Since that time, a few more details have been discovered, and a few blurry spy camera shots and renders have surfaced; but as far as official specs go, there are none. It looks to have the same massive 4.3" screen that the HD2 has, run on the Android platform, and possibly contain a Snapdragon processor.Sprint is the only major mobile network operator with a higher-speed "4G" network immediately available to consumers, but it is currently only accessible through USB dongles and portable hotspots like the Sierra Wireless Overdrive, and these are still only available in about 10 markets nationwide.There are nearly 30 WiMAX networks active in the US now under the Clear brand (a joint venture of Sprint and Clearwire), and this year Clearwire expects to complete 80 more cities including major markets Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Seattle, and Washington DC. Since Betanews is headquartered in Baltimore, we've been using Sprint's WiMAX network since it first launched in 2008. I ran a quick test this morning to see how well the WiMAX connection holds up against my smartphones' 3G connections, and the performance was actually only marginally better. Using the FCC's Ookla network tester three times for each network, Sprint 4G averaged 5.35 Mbps / 0.30 Mbps with 130 ms latency, Verizon 3G averaged 1.61 Mbps / 0.65 Mbps with 122 ms latency, and T-Mobile 3G averaged 0.5Mbps / 0.45 Mbps with 215 ms latency. Unfortunately, I didn't have a device handy to test AT&T's speeds in the area this morning. We will be meeting with both Sprint and HTC at CTIA next week and will be able to give you a crystal clear look at the device if it does, in fact, show up. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Microsoft loses another jury verdict, this time over obviousness of VPN patent By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Usually the purpose of a virtual private network is to establish a secure, tunneled route between two points in an IP network. Is the idea that such a network could be secured using two encryption layers rather than one, and without the need for a user to log in first, worthy of a patent? These were questions central to the latest Tyler, Texas patent infringement case for Microsoft to lose: VPN technology provider VirnetX was awarded $105.75 million yesterday, in a case closely followed by the Seattle P.I.'s Nick Eaton.It's clear from a reading of VirnetX's key patent on VPN technology, issued in 2002, that it is an attempt to go one step further with the VPN concept. The firm calls its system Tunneled Agile Routing Protocol (TARP). Here, the communications between VPN hosts are encrypted at one level, but then the routing information is hidden behind a second level. The intent is to hide not only what's being talked about or shared over a VPN, but who is sharing it, and what route it's taking to get there."Each TARP packet's true destination is concealed behind a layer of encryption generated using a link key," reads a portion of the summary from US Patent #6,502,135. "The link key is the encryption key used for encrypted communication between the hops intervening between an originating TARP terminal and a destination TARP terminal. Each TARP router can remove the outer layer of encryption to reveal the destination router for each TARP packet. To identify the link key needed to decrypt the outer layer of encryption of a TARP packet, a receiving TARP or routing terminal may identify the transmitting terminal by the sender/receiver IP numbers in the cleartext IP header. Once the outer layer of encryption is removed, the TARP router determines the final destination."Microsoft implemented its own interpretation of VPN technology for Office Communicator, the endpoint for the company's bold Unified Communications project -- its effort to render the phone networks, and PBXes that support them, obsolete. To make the Internet work more like a phone, people using a telephone console need to be able to pick up the receiver and dial. They shouldn't have to go to some dialog box and log in. Avoiding that option is what UC tries to do, and is one of the acts for which VirnetX cried foul.In hearings last July (which Eaton also covered closely), Microsoft defended itself by asserting that the whole point of a VPN is to establish both secure and anonymous communications between points, so the idea that VirnetX was somehow inventing the addition of anonymity was absurd. If you doubt that a VPN is supposed to be anonymous, counsel argued, just look it up in a glossary. Which the judge did, and that got into a wholly separate argument over the quality of glossaries, resulting in the judge in the case issuing his own glossary for the jury to interpret as fact.An excerpt from Judge Leonard Davis' opinion last July shows the extent of the argument over how deeply a glossary may define a concept, especially if that concept may be proof of "prior art" that could invalidate a patent (PDF available here, from SeattlePI.com): "Microsoft cites the portion of the 'FreeS/WAN' glossary definition for 'virtual private networks' that states, 'IPSEC [Internet Protocol Security] is not the only technique available for building VPNs, but it is the only method defined by RFCs [Request for Comments, Internet documents -- some of which are informative while others are standards] and supported by many vendors. VPNs [virtual private networks] are by no means the only thing you can do with IPSEC, but they may be the most important application for many users.'...Microsoft points out that IPSEC is the only method defined by RFCs and supported by many vendors. Microsoft argues that this narrow language shows that the 'FreeS/WAN' glossary does not identify Secure Sockets Layer ('SSL') or Transport Layer Security ('TLS') as methods for building 'virtual private networks.' Microsoft then argues that VirnetX's proposed construction is overly broad because it allows for a network using SSL and TLS. However, Microsoft's cited excerpt is an ancillary portion of the 'virtual private network' definition and is set apart in a different paragraph from the primary portion of the definition...Also, Microsoft selectively asserts that IPSEC is the only method defined by RFCs and supported by many vendors and ignores that its cited excerpt states that, 'IPSEC is not the only technique available for building VPNs.' Thus, Microsoft's cited excerpt does not support that the 'FreeS/WAN' glossary restricts 'virtual private network' to IPSEC."If Microsoft could have proved that VirnetX's contribution to VPN architecture was so obvious that it would still be covered by a published glossary definition of the term, then it might have persuaded the jury that no patent should have been issued in the first place. But that assertive defense became problematic (at best) last summer when it was revealed that Microsoft itself attempted to patent the same technology, in an application that was denied by the US Patent Office. The basis of the denial was prior art -- specifically, the pre-existence of patents issued to VirnetX.As the jury no doubt heard from plaintiff's counsel, if Microsoft didn't know about the existence of VirnetX's patents before, it did when it received its rejection notice. No haggling over glossary definitions could save the case at that point. In a statement, Microsoft continued to assert the invalidity of VirnetX's patents, and will begin the long and arduous process of appealing to overturn the verdict. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Two months after the Nexus One, Motorola Droid to get Android 2.1 By Tim Conneally, Betanews Motorola's Droid has been by far the most popular Android smartphone to hit the US market, selling at a faster pace than the first generation iPhone, and making up, by some accounts, at least 15% of all Android phones in use.It was the first handset to launch with Android 2.0, a significantly redesigned version of Google's mobile operating system, and it was the first Android device on Verizon, making it a popular choice for the wireless provider's huge subscriber base. Though it remains a very strong consumer device, the Droid's popularity in the tech community was quickly overshadowed by Google's Nexus One, which was launched only three months after it. The Nexus One became Google's first attempt at directly selling smartphones, and the first handset with Android 2.1.Version 2.1 was only a minor platform upgrade, with no new features as substantial as those brought by 2.0, but it included full multi-touch support, tweaked the UI with eye-catching animated wallpapers, became an object of desire for Android enthusiasts.This week, just two months after 2.1 debuted in the Nexus One, Verizon will begin pushing it as an over-the-air update to the Motorola Droid.The foremost feature will be the addition of multitouch to the browser and photo gallery. The Droid supports multitouch, but only recently got pinch-to-zoom in Google Maps. It will also natively support voice-to-text entry, include a new 3D gallery application, a new weather and news app with a related widget, and the famous animated wallpapers.Android Central reports that Verizon approved the update today, and that it will roll out to 250,000 Droids at a time starting at 12:00 pm Thursday, March 18. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Internet Explorer 9, the HTML 5 browser: Better than half-way there By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Download Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview via Fileforum now.[Today's delay in Betanews bringing you Internet Explorer 9 news was brought to you as a public service by the Cable Modem: Your Best Friend When It's Crunch Time. Remember, where there's smoke, there's a Comcast cable modem. Smell one today.]It is perhaps the unlikeliest scenario any technologist could imagine as recently as two years ago: Microsoft evangelizing developers to embrace Web standards by helping it to build its Web browser. Although one of the first browsers to be distributed for free, Internet Explorer has never been open source. Historically, it's always been ready when it's ready; its value proposition has been to the consumer who prefers convenience over adaptability; and when the fact that it was dirt slow was pointed out, the response typically was, the consumer isn't going to care.Today, the value proposition started to take shape for IE9, the browser that in an earlier era didn't need a value proposition. Microsoft's strategy, which premiered today at MIX 10, was to seize control of tomorrow's key talking point, HTML 5 compliance and compatibility -- to make HTML 5 identifiable with Internet Explorer. In fact, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch's greeting sentence to MIX 10 attendees this morning wasn't without the term "HTML 5.""When we started looking deeply at HTML 5, we saw that it enabled a whole new class of applications," was Hachamovitch's second sentence. "These applications will stress the browser runtime and hardware, as today's sites just don't. We quickly realized that doing HTML 5 right -- our intent -- was more about designing around what HTML 5 applications will need, rather than a particular set of features. Done right, HTML 5 applications will feel more like real apps than Web pages, and our approach to HTML 5 is to make standard Web patterns that developers already know and use, just run faster and better by taking advantage of PC hardware through Windows."Developers have always known that Microsoft has always had the capability to leverage its mastery of Windows APIs to build smoother applications. But as other Microsoft applications have weaned themselves off of the old Win32 dependencies, such as rendering using the old GDI and GDI+ libraries, Internet Explorer has fallen further and further behind. In fact, you could make the case that Silverlight gives Web developers opportunities to use the modern rendering libraries that IE should be using now natively.Soliciting general developers' help in improving IE (some will say for the first time), Microsoft today began distributing the bare-bones chassis of the IE9 Web browser -- no frills, no features, not even bookmarks. Just a rendering engine in a window. With Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and now even Opera having made effective cases for the Web being "the platform," Microsoft desperately needs to resume defining the platform before someone else ends up defining it instead.But one element of Microsoft's IE message remains the same even today: Those areas where the competitors say they have the advantage, may not be all that important to end users. Case in point: just-in-time compilation, the factor that has catapulted Mozilla Firefox and WebKit-based browsers such as Safari and Chrome into today's speed race.For example, Hachamovitch did cite the IE9 chassis' speed improvement on the widely accepted SunSpider performance test, created by the originators of the open source WebKit engine. On Microsoft's chart, Opera is the fastest performer on the SunSpider, followed by a Chrome 5 dev build, a Chrome 4 stable build, and the latest Safari 4.0.5, released late last week by Apple (apologies for the fuzzy screenshot of Microsoft's chart). So yes, IE9 comes in fifth, rather than dead last. But the difference isn't that much of a difference, he said:"It's interesting to note that the gap between IE9 and some of the other browsers to its right is about an eye-blink -- it's about 300 ms. And it took 70 seconds to identify that 300 ms difference."When it comes to HTML 5, Microsoft wants to be perceived now as leading that standard. But with respect to standards at large, the company's position remains unchanged from last year: As long as Web standards are up in the air, compliance is a foggy term anyway. Today, Hachamovitch implied that if the goal of standards bodies were the same as Microsoft's goal of one language, the fog would be lifted:"Developers want to use the same HTML, the same script, and the same markup across browsers. That's the goal of standards and interoperability. No need for different code paths for different browsers. That's a key goal for HTML 5. We love HTML 5 so much, we want it to actually work. In IE9, it will. We want the same HTML, the same script, the same markup to just work across browsers. So in IE9, we'll do for the rest of the Web platform what we did for CSS 2.1 in IE8. Now, at the same time, we want to be responsible about the standards that are still emerging, the standards that are in committee, and the standards that are partially implemented, often in different ways across browsers. So to make decisions on this front, we started from data."As an Acid3 test runs in the background (it's not done yet), Dean Hachamovitch demonstrates how 'standards' support varies between even Firefox and Chrome (lower right) for the same markup.The IE9 team leader went on to describe an internal tool that measured the script activity on 7,000 active Web sites. The telemetry that it received showed, for instance, that the #1 method in use was indexOf(), on 94% of sites measured. Number 17 on the list, used by 65% of sites, was addEventListener, a method that's key to W3C's advanced event registration model, but not yet supported in IE8."Because we started from data, what developers like you really use was our starting point for what to support." As a result, the IE9 chassis passed 578 out of 578 in the CSS3.info selectors test, putting it now on a par with Firefox. That's important, Hachamovitch noted, because developers want that one language -- one CSS, one HTML -- to work with for all browsers across the board.Meanwhile, the IE9 preview posts a 55% score on the Acid3 standards compliance test -- up from 20% for IE8, and 12% for IE7. The latest stable Firefox, by comparison, scores 94% on this test; and Safari, Chrome, and Opera all score 100%. Could the CSS3.info test be fair, and the Acid3 test unfair?"Some people use Acid3 as shorthand for standards support. Acid3 is kind of interesting, it exercises about a hundred details of a dozen different technologies. Some of them are under construction, others less so," Hachamovitch said. He added a promise that Acid3 scores will continue to improve "as we make more of the markup that developers actually use, work."Next: Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU... Offloading processing to the background and to the GPUThe architectural development that helped Firefox and others vault from banana-like bars such as those on the left of Microsoft's SunSpider chart, to peanut-like bars like those on the right, was the implementation of just-in-time compilation (JIT) -- a concept first implemented in Java and .NET, re-engineered for JavaScript. Today, Hachamovitch's tactic was to characterize JIT compilers as "JIT-ters," complete with the wimpy sound and unstable connotations, similar to how AMD characterized Intel's introduction of "hyperthreading" five years ago."In the beginning, the Web had lots and lots of HTML, and little pieces of script here and there. And an interpreter was good enough for that. Over the years, different browsers have added JIT-ters and different kinds of JIT-ters, many different kinds of JIT-ters. The problem with JIT today is that so much time and energy goes into managing the time and scope that the JIT-ter operates in. Users have to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too much, because the JIT-ter is sitting there compiling the code, and you don't get to run it. And the user has to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too little, because then the JIT-ter did a little bit, and the user is stuck running a slower interpreter."Something vaguely similar to the phenomenon Hachamovitch described is what we at Betanews have seen in a recent round of high-level browser testing, on IE and other platforms, in preparation for today's release of the IE9 tech preview. JavaScript interepreters, by today's design, are single-threaded. Their ability to run JavaScript very fast depends, to a great extent, on the relative complexity or simplicity of the instructions. JIT compilers produce much simpler machine code, but only in situations where the JavaScript instructions are relatively simple to parse, and not entangled in competing loops with unsightly timeouts. Long stretches of uniform code -- 100,000, one million, even ten million iterations -- are like butter candy to browsers like Chrome, smooth, silky, and easy to digest. But break up those instructions with interruptions (for instance, updates of an on-screen timer at one-second intervals), and what once seemed like butter now processes like rock-filled concrete. And sequences that Chrome could execute in under 30 seconds, all of a sudden, could take (by my estimate) days to execute if left unattended. It's in situations like this where the JIT-ter is jittering, to borrow Dean's phrasing. But about the only place you're going to find someone trying to do 10 million iterations of an algorithm in succession, is at Betanews, where the guy doing the testing is on his sixth cup of coffee and is jittery anyway.Still, in anticipation of the types of advances Dean described today, we've been working to create a new class of tests that would enable IE9 to shine if it truly does what Dean says it does. Today, he described how IE9 moves the JavaScript interpreter to a background process:"Compiling in the background puts hardware to use here without having to re-code the site. And the key here is to bring the best technology to the most important language you use, JavaScript."HTML 5 in large print, SVG in small printScalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a W3C standard since 1999, has never been actively supported by Internet Explorer even to this day. During today's demonstration of what he called, on the surface, "HTML 5 applications," Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch was joined onstage by Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky to jointly demonstrate the IE9 technical preview's new GPU-assisted graphics rendering support, with Sinofsky on the new browser and Hachamovitch playing catch-up with Chrome.Tucked away in the background of that clever little duel was the fact that IE9 was, for the first time, directly and openly supporting SVG.It's difficult to see from the screenshot of Microsoft's presentation above, but Sinofsky's IE9 browser at the upper left is rendering 100 simultaneous 3D extrapolations of 2D logos from various browsers, at 64 frames per second. Hachamovitch's Google Chrome, meanwhile, is rendering about 36 simultaneous logos at about 8 fps.HTML 5 may have had little or nothing to do with this result. The real takeaway from this demo is the following: For years, Web developers have relied on Adobe Flash for vector graphics that are scalable, mainly since it's the only platform that can be plugged into all the major browsers and that can run uniformly within all of them. The reason for that is IE's reluctance to embrace SVG. Well, now that embracing SVG is necessary in order for Microsoft to demonstrate its graphics processing prowess, this could change the ballgame for Web developers, who may soon have at their disposal, at long last, a single open standard for animating Web sites.Who better to celebrate that news with than the lovable Clippy character we all adored from Office XP? In a demonstration not only of processing prowess but of standards compliance, the two executives enlisted Clippy as the hero in a 3D game of Asteroids, where the targets were multi-colored circles of translucent plastic. Rendered properly, Clippy could hold his own; but stuck in Google Chrome, which doesn't appear to apply relative opacity properly, it looks like Clippy may be in trouble. And it looks like he's writing a letter of distress.Microsoft has posted links to the tests Sinofsky and Hachamovitch demonstrated on stage, on its special site devoted to the IE9 developers' preview. There you're also likely to find the stunning IE9 video carousel, which HTML 5 has everything to do with. Here, four HD videos of underwater scenes are rendered on translucent screens, that simultaneously travel along an invisible carousel-like path. Of course, you may always have known this kind of rendering power existed in your GPU, but you might never have seen your Web browser go this far to exploit that power.The IE team has always been careful to say that the advances that matter are the ones that users see and feel. Last year, the company advanced the argument that millisecond differences were imperceptible. Which they are, unless they become fruitful and multiply -- and in a Web applications environment, that will happen. The news from Las Vegas today is this: Microsoft is building a Web applications platform. Finally. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Microsoft's Bill Buxton tells UI developers to 'do it naturally' By Joe Wilcox, Betanews Microsoft should make Bill Buxton its front man -- the main spokesperson. Buxton,  principal researcher for Microsoft Research, has style, great enthusiasm and vision. In an alternate universe, Buxton founded a company like Apple; only better. Buxton is more visionary than Apple CEO Steve Jobs, has better sense of good design (he is a designer, after all) and understands great design in context of the flow of history. Perhaps if Buxton had more ego, he would run a company as successful as Apple, or Microsoft. But humility is part of his appeal.Buxton stormed the Microsoft MIX10 stage today, bringing along hearth of wisdom and loads of energy. His energy is simply intoxicating. Last year, Buxton kicked off the MIX keynotes. This year he ended them -- and not with enough stage time. The first keynote, yesterday, started with sedate Scott Guthrie, Microsoft corporate vice president, talking Windows Phone 7 Series. Today's keynote began with Internet Explorer 9 team leader Dean Hachamovitch debuting the new browser, which is available as developer preview.Hachamovitch, like Guthrie, is a competent  speaker. By comparison, Buxton is dynamic, enthralling -- and he tells great stories about great design. Buxton roams the stage like a caged tiger, but his ferociousness is insight. Scattered grey hair and lean build give him a stereotypical mad scientist look, and he rambles like one, too. I look at Buxton and think of Uncle Monty from Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. "Some of you might say I'm hysterical," Buxton joked today.Microsoft should have made MIX10 Buxton's birthday bash. He turned 61 last week. Buxton shows that excellence knows no age -- that Baby Boomers have user interface design and user experience (UX) wisdom that tech-savvy Gen Xers and Net Gen-ers need to understand. Today's cutting-edge technologies are descendants of earlier generations' bleeding edge tech. Decades, sometimes centuries, of refinement define many established technologies' UX. Take the design of AAA batteries, for example (mine not Buxton's). Bill Buxton is principal researcher for Microsoft ResearchBuxton's personal mantra reveals something important about his design philosophy. From his Website:Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the 'things' that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.This philosophy defines the differences between his approach to good design and UX from Apple's. Buxton sees good design as an expression of culture and history rather than the personality of a single designer or company. For Apple, good design is about "the things that we sell." Buxton is an expert about natural user interfaces and their historical contextGood UI design is often about human usage context, and understanding longstanding design interfaces requires some understanding of historical context. Buxton used the example of buttons on a woman's shirt. He called the buttons wrong, because of their placement. But why are they that way? Buxton explained that when buttons were introduced, women didn't dress themselves. The buttons were correctly positioned for the person doing the dressing. Men dressed themselves, so the buttons are on the right, rather than the left."Do it naturally," Buxton commanded the MIX10 audience, referring to user interface design. While Microsoft and some other tech companies treat natural user interfaces as something new, Buxton made clear they are something very old. Natural user interfaces are varied, depending on function. Buxton demonstrates a natural user interfaceBuxton asked: "What the heck does natural mean?" One of his answers: "It's the ability to acquire skills." Good natural user interfaces affect the skills that the users have acquired. He answered with another question: "How well does it [the user interface] reflect me, the end user?"Ultimately, a good natural user interface must address four human skill sets: Motor sensory skills Cognitive skills Social skills Emotional skills Stated differently, good natural user interfaces answer the question: "How do people function?" He emphasized that it's not technology that is changing but people. Good user interface design isn't about technology. It's about people. The message is particularly important for MIX's developer audience. Demonstration of what Buxton calls a "pen and touch" user interfaceSadly, Buxton could only briefly touch on one of the most important natural user interface challenges facing Microsoft and many other technology developers: Mobile devices. Development of applications for mobile must have a "sense of place," understanding changing contexts, he said. Mobile devices are all about usage context.Buxton joined Microsoft about four years ago, after running his own Toronto-based design firm (Yes, he ran a company in this universe). Before Microsoft, Buxton was perhaps better known for being chief scientist of Alias/Wavefront -- from 1994 to 2002. He is one of Microsoft's best hires in years. While Buxton talks about putting user interface design in context of human use, it's his ability to put UIs in cultural and historical context that makes him so unique among technologists. Microsoft should set up a mentorship program under Buxton and his research team for all product managers. To Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer I ask: Do you get it? Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• In light of news that it has 'flopped,' Google's Nexus One lands on AT&T and Rogers By Tim Conneally, Betanews Google's first attempt at directly selling an Android-powered mobile phone is already being called a flop thanks to reports from mobile analytics company Flurry that estimate sales to have been around 135,000 units in the first 74 days on the market (compared to 1.05 million Motorola Droids, 1 million iPhones.)However, Google's approach to selling the device is vastly different from the more common methods employed by wireless carriers: it has been primarily sold unlocked for $529 directly from Google, or for $179 with a special T-Mobile plan. Since the device was released, there's been a "Coming soon: Spring 2010" section that shows Verizon Wireless and Vodafone as the next US and European carriers.Today, Google expanded the device's compatibility in a different direction, and rolled out a version compatible with AT&T in the U.S. and Rogers in Canada. It is now the second Android device on AT&T behind the Motorola Backflip. Rogers currently offers a goodly amount of Android devices, including the HTC Dream and Magic (known as the G1 and MyTouch 3G in the U.S.) LG Eve, Samsung Galaxy Spica, and soon the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.So instead of a CDMA version as expected, today we've got a device that supports 850/1900/2100 MHz 3G/UMTS bands, and one that supports the 900/AWS/2100 MHz 3G/UMTS bands used by T-Mobile.Selling the device unlocked is unlikely to greatly expand its popularity, as it still only appeals to a niche audience. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• FCC: Wireless spectrum 10x more valuable for wireless broadband than for TV By Tim Conneally, Betanews The 300+ page National Broadband Plan that the Federal Communications Commission submitted to Congress today contains some logical goals, some ambitious ones, and some that are sure to cause a good deal of conflict between industries. One of the most contentious issues also happens to be the most important aspect of the broadband plan: the re-allocation of wireless spectrum for the use of mobile broadband. Last October, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Americans' consumption of mobile broadband has grown so quickly that we are almost at a bottleneck, and that more wireless spectrum is needed for it immediately. The plan, therefore, says that it will increase the 255 MHz - 3.7 GHz spectrum available to "terrestrial broadband services" (a.k.a., non-satellite) by at least 300 MHz in the next five years, and 500 MHz within the next ten.But where will all of this wireless spectrum come from? Of the 300 MHz due in the next five years, 120 MHz will be coming from the broadcast television bands.It's no secret that the radio and television broadcast industry is still sitting on huge chunks of unused wireless spectrum, and the recent transition to digital broadcast freed up a significant amount of spectrum in the 700 MHz band that was auctioned off to mobile network operators in 2008. By re-purposing the wireless spectrum for mobile Internet services, the FCC says it increased its value to about $1.28 per megahertz/pop. Right now, the FCC estimates that the spectrum the broadcast TV industry has is only worth about $0.11 to $0.15 per megahertz/pop. In short, the spectrum is ten times more valuable for wireless broadband than it is for broadcast television. This is due to a couple of factors. Firstly, it's because only 10% of the population is estimated to still rely on free over-the-air broadcasts. Secondly, it's because broadcast TV licensing has interference protection built into it, which leaves significant amounts of spectrum intentionally unused. So to get this extremely valuable wireless spectrum, the FCC is going to try a multi-pronged approach to restructuring the broadcast TV industry:1. Update the rules on TV service areas, distance separations, and revise the table of spectrum allotments starting at the 6 MHz channel.2. Fix the licensing framework so two or more broadcast stations can share the 6 MHz channel. (The Commission estimates that two HD video streams or several SD streams can exist within that channel.)3. Get government approval so broadcasters who have voluntarily consolidated their channels will be able to share the profits of the remaining spectrum that is auctioned off. If that is not approved, then other methods of restructuring the broadcast industry must be explored, such as by transitioning to a cellular broadcast architecture (smaller, lower power transmitters that cause less interference than the big broadcast towers) or by auctioning off "overlay" licenses where licensees must negotiate directly with broadcast TV stations to clear out the bands. Some of these alternative methods would be a little more forceful to broadcasters."We were pleased by initial indications from FCC members that any spectrum reallocation would be voluntary, and were therefore prepared to move forward in a constructive fashion on that basis," Dennis Wharton, Executive Vice President of the National Association of Broadcasters, said in a statement yesterday evening. "However, we are concerned by reports today that suggest many aspects of the plan may in fact not be as voluntary as originally promised. Moreover, as the nation's only communications service that is free, local and ubiquitous, we would oppose any attempt to impose onerous new spectrum fees on broadcasters."Now that the value of the wireless spectrum has been clearly proven and outlined, television broadcasters who have faced declining ad revenue and declining viewership could be standing before a huge pile of money. The 700 MHz spectrum block alone garnered more than $19 billion from wireless network operators in 2008 for a little under 100 MHz of spectrum. License holders in the bands to be vacated are holding very strong cards indeed. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• IE9 technology preview goes live, Microsoft claims scores 55% on Acid3 By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Download Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview via Fileforum now.This afternoon, Microsoft lifted the curtain on the first Internet Explorer 9 technology preview for developers. Initial demos at MIX 10 in Las Vegas by IE9 team leader Dean Hachamovitch reveal a minimum of end user features at this point -- the preview is described as a lightweight frame on top of a highly improved chassis."We are committed to updating the preview every eight weeks," Hachamovitch told developers today, just after a demo (along with Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky) of various graphics-oriented tests and games that the IE9 preview rendered with extraordinary precision. It is not a complete browser by any stretch of the imagination, but it's purpose is to show developers where the company is going with the new chassis.HTML 5 is the message of the day, almost the first word (or abbreviation) out of Hachamovitch's mouth. At the time of this posting, Hachamovitch promised an update of the platform preview to come later, that will attach compliance with HTML 5 video standards. That's browser-based rendering of full-motion video, for the first time in IE.FOR MORE:Internet Explorer 9, the HTML 5 browser: Better than half-way there by Scott Fulton Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• UK Lords pass bill to create Internet anti-piracy enforcement office By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews The British House of Lords has passed a bill that might, if enacted into law, put the UK's Parliament at odds with the European Commission over how best to enforce copyright anti-infringement laws. Called the Digital Economy Bill, it would charge Internet service providers with the task of keeping track of suspected file sharers and copyright violators, and reporting on them to copyright holders as well as to the country's Office of Communications (OFCOM).As the bill is currently written, OFCOM would be charged with determining the "initial obligations" of Internet service providers with respect to suspected infringers, provided those obligations meet the specific guidelines. It would be up to OFCOM, should the bill be enacted, to determine all the specifics -- the "fiddly bits" -- such as how ISPs monitor their customers ("subscribers"), at what stage it becomes necessary to report on their activities, how long they retain information on those customers, and what else they do with that data. In the UK, regulations enacted by a regulatory body such as OFCOM are called codes.Specifically, the bill would require that OFCOM "makes provision about how internet service providers are to keep information about subscribers; that it limits the time for which they may keep that information; that the requirements concerning subscriber appeals are met in relation to the code; that the provisions of the code are objectively justifiable in relation to the matters to which it relates; that those provisions are not such as to discriminate unduly against particular persons or against a particular description of persons; that those provisions are proportionate to what they are intended to achieve; [and] that, in relation to what those provisions are intended to achieve, they are transparent." (This page from Parliament.UK contains the exact text of this section.)ISPs would be indemnified from any responsibility for the infringing activity, but only if they fulfill their obligations as OFCOM would define them. Those obligations would include, according to the bill, expedient response to requests from copyright holders, as well as some sort of "technical measure" to punish the "relevant subscriber." As the bill is written now, it appears the fuzziness of "relevant subscriber" may be intentional, so as not to imply that the customer must first be found guilty of charges."A 'technical obligation,' in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against some or all relevant subscribers to its service for the purpose of preventing or reducing infringement of copyright by means of the Internet," the bill reads. "A 'technical measure' is a measure that: (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way. A subscriber to an internet access service is 'relevant' if the subscriber is a relevant subscriber to the service...in relation to one or more copyright owners."From here, the bill proceeds to the House of Commons, where elected officials will debate whether it would be fair, under the terms of the last paragraph, to punish suspected subscribers prior to their hearing in court. Liberal leaders there were quoted by the BBC this morning as having indicated such a law would be contrary to the EU's Technical Standards Directive.Last week, in a near-unanimous vote of the European Parliament, a resolution was adopted to compel participants in the multi-national Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to report to the EU Parliament, and eventually publicly, on terms being negotiated between countries. Such terms might compel member countries in ACTA to adopt laws similar to what the House of Lords just passed.Ironically, this entire affair comes on the same week as MPs begin debate on a measure, first reported by the London Telegraph, to replace the House of Lords entirely with a second, publicly elected body of Parliament. The new upper house -- which may, the report states, be dubbed the "Senate" -- would include members who may very well be lords and landowners, elected for staggered terms of up to 15 years. Some say the Labour Party is unveiling the plan now in order to attract opposition from Tory leaders, who currently have an edge in public opinion polls. Painting the Tories as "pro-Lords" could, in turn, color them as "pro-establishment," and thus out of touch with modern-day British interests. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• The National Broadband Plan is complete, now the hard part starts By Tim Conneally, Betanews The Federal Communications Commission is expected to deliver the National Broadband Plan to Congress tomorrow, and today the commission released an executive summary of what the document will contain.FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called it, "An action plan, and action is necessary to meet the challenges of global competitiveness, and harness the power of broadband to help address so many vital national issues."Some of the goals outlined in the summary include:* Having 100 million households connected at broadband of speeds at least 100 Mbps downlink and 50 Mbps uplink.* Having 1 Gbps connections in schools, hospitals and military installations in "every American Community"* Freeing up 300 MHz of wireless spectrum for mobile broadband use within five years, and 500 MHz in 10 years.* Establishing a nationwide wireless, interoperable public safety network for first responders.* Collecting and providing the best data possible about each network provider's offerings so that consumers can better choose their services.* Moving adoption rates from 65% to 90%."Based on the executive summary, it is clear the Broadband team recognized the importance of the mobile Internet to the economy and to meeting many national priorities. We applaud their commitment to providing everyone equal access to the most advanced wireless communications," said Steve Largent, President of CTIA - The Wireless Association.Of course, completing the plan was just a tiny fraction of the work needed to improve the nation's broadband conditions."Now comes the hard part: achieving the vision articulated in this plan," Tom Tauke, Verizon executive vice president for public affairs, policy and communications said in a statement this afternoon. "Verizon will review the plan when text is available, and continue to work closely and cooperatively with the FCC and Congress to help meet the nation's broadband policy goals. It is clear that virtually all of these important goals will be achieved through private investment. So it is important that the policies enacted encourage investment and innovation across the Internet ecosystem."About half of the Plan's recommendations are addressed to the FCC, and the rest are for Congress, the Executive Branch, and state and local government, who will work with the private and nonprofit sectors. The full Plan will be released tomorrow. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Windows Phone 7 Series actually looks pretty good By Joe Wilcox, Betanews Zune -- along with Expression Blend, Silverlight, Visual Studio and XNA -- may yet save Windows Phone 7 Series. During the kick-off MIX10 keynote earlier today, Microsoft product managers showcased features, development scenarios and, most importantly, user experiences derived from Zune HD. Perhaps Windows Phone 7 Series isn't a hopelessly lost cause after all. Microsoft's competitive postion would actually look good, if phones were shipping now and not in six to eight months.In September, I asserted that Zune HD should have been the Microsoft phone. The user interface and user experience (some of that derived from Zune 4.0 software) is exceptionally good -- particularly coming from Microsoft. Finally, Microsoft is carrying forward and extending a great user interface motif. Better: Windows Phone 7 Series is inheriting and extending the social sharing concepts imbued into Zune 1.0.Microsoft launched Zune 1.0 in November 2006 with marketing tagline "Welcome to my social." Zune distinguished from iPod by making music a more social and sharing experience. It was a visionary approach for the time -- sadly held back by Microsoft's limited commitment (Zune distribution in United States only) and iPod's huge market share lead.But social as executed by Microsoft was truly visionary in 2006. Many of the most popular social media/networking tools taken for granted today originated in 2006 or later. YouTube officially opened in November 2005. Facebook opened to the public in 2006 and Twitter a few months later. Most of the most popular or growing popular tools for community and self expression launched within the last three years: Disqus, FriendFeed, tumblr, Twine, Qik and USTREAM, among many, many others.Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President, Windows Phone Program ManagementWhat differentiates Windows Phone 7 Series from iPhone is the same thing that made Zune so different from iPod: Social sharing. Sure, there are other mobile phone social sharing alternatives available, like Motorola's MotoBlur user interface for Android phones. Windows Phone 7 Series as social hubBut Microsoft is making social a platform that runs deep into Windows Phone 7 Series. I've repeatedly asserted that the smartphone will replace the PC as primary computing device. As the social hub for all communications, the smartphone already has replaced the PC for many people. Shazam detects music and provides tools for social sharingThat's communications within limitations. It's one thing to use Facebook on a mobile phone. It's a whole other order of experience interacting around disparate content repositories, which is the differentiating direction Microsoft is taking Windows Phone 7 Series -- and it's a path Apple has failed to follow with iPhone. Netflix app streams movies to Windows Phone 7 SeriesSocial is Apple's achilles heal, because it's not in the company's corporate DNA. Apple has historically only allowed social sharing where it has some control. The company has a deserved reputation for deleting negative forum threads, going back years. Try to comment on Apple's YouTube channel. Comments are disabled.Every aspect of the Windows Phone 7 Series UI reminds of Zune HDThen there are iPhone limitations to consider, such as truncated multitasking and (related) the fixed battery and battery life. Apple's idea of social interaction is the push notification. It's a weak compromise that Microsoft seems ready enough to exploit (granted, Windows Phone 7 Series has push notifications, too).Comics in this app can be dynamically and quickly resizedBy comparison, "Welcome to my social" is a platform on Windows Phone 7 Series. Social sharing and interaction are seemingly available from pretty much anywhere, including third-party applications.This Associated Press app packs real-time social sharing featuresI'm still not overly optimistic about Windows Phone 7 Series because Microsoft is restarting so late and from so far behind. That said, there's hope if Microsoft is willing to commit as much marketing -- and really loads more -- as Bing. What I saw today is encouraging. Finally. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Windows Phone 7 Series has Netflix streaming, Xbox Live gaming By Tim Conneally, Betanews One year can change a lot.Today, Microsoft used the MIX '10 stage in Las Vegas to show off a lot of the applications that are currently being prepared to launch with Windows Phone 7 Series, and they are a far cry from the poor Windows 6.5 showing at last year's MIX event.The inclusion of Silverlight 4 and the XNA Framework into the Windows Phone platform has afforded developers a lot of power, and today's demonstration showed off how they can be harnessed to make Windows Phone stand out in the mobile crowd where it has lately faltered.While it included a number of attractive apps such as popular Twitter client Seesmic, location-based social network Foursquare, music identification service Shazam, and the Associated Press, a couple of demonstrations were real show stealers.Netflix was one of them. While the popular video rental service has applications across all mobile platforms right now, they are limited to accessing and modifying the user's queue of movie titles. The popular Netflix instant streaming service which has landed on everything from TiVo to the Wii has until now been limited to stationary devices. Thanks to Silverlight, streaming videos can now be watched on Windows Phone 7 Series devices. The cross-platform runtime was first used to bring the streaming video service to the Mac, and now it's brought it to its first official mobile application.The other standout wasn't really a single app, but more the Windows Phone gaming category as a whole. Thanks to the iPhone's popularity as a gaming device, games are increasingly being developed for mobile devices first and then being "ported up" to the console and the PC. Today, Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb showed off games -- such as The Harvest, shown below -- that could be played on a Windows Phone, PC, or Xbox 360. This means that no matter what platform you're playing the game on, you can unlock achievements, increase your gamer score, access leaderboards, and connect to your friends over Live.While a lot of this was discussed at the unveiling of Windows Phone 7 series, there were not full-scale demonstrations of gameplay like there were today. And unlike cross-platform ports of iPhone games; for example, games by Chillingo which have been ported to the Nintendo Wii and DS, these games can take advantage of the strengths of each platform with the XNA Framework. "Developers and designers can now build their code once and optimize it to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the phone, Web, PC or Xbox 360. Due to common shared libraries, controls and runtimes across these many screens and the cloud, developers now have the opportunity to reach over 1 billion customers," Microsoft's Charlie Kindel said in the Windows Phone developer blog today. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Google: No word yet on China pullout, negotiations continue By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Despite an erroneous headline crossing wire services early this morning, which led blogs and even news services to believe Google had already begun a pullout from China, a Google spokesperson has clarified for Betanews today that no announcement has yet been made about any such pullout.Declining to speak further on the matter, the spokesperson reiterated an earlier statement, which the spokesperson says remains true as of this moment: "We are in active discussions with the Chinese government. We have also been clear that we will no longer self-censor in China."The confusion apparently stems from a statement that Google Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong made to the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, during a hearing on the subject of the alleged attacks on Google and other US online assets last January. Wong told the House, "Google is firm in its decision that it will stop censoring our search results for China. If the option is that we'll shutter our [Google].cn operation and leave the country, we are prepared to do that."Although earlier statements from the Chinese government appeared to corroborate Google's claims (as well as those made by US State Dept. officials) that it has been in negotiations with Chinese authorities about how to proceed, last week, a vice minister for information denied that talks between China and Google had even begun. In a statement issued through China Daily last Friday, the Information Ministry attempted to "clarify" the contradictory facts by literally stating they coexisted: Google has been, the MIIT now officially states, in direct talks with Chinese authorities, though in an indirect way. (Perhaps this means by e-mail.) No "headway" has been made through these indirect, direct talks, the Ministry added.Minister Li Yizhong issued what some took to be a threat, until one reads on to the bottom where another self-contradictory clause was added: "If you don't respect Chinese laws, you are unfriendly and irresponsible, and you will bear the consequences," Li began. Then the small print: "If Google chooses to stay, that will be beneficial to China's Internet market and we welcome that," implying that it will be up to the search company whether it stays or goes. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Silverlight 4 RC, the Windows Phone 7 platform, downloadable today By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Download Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Tools Customer Technology Preview from Fileforum now.As expected, Microsoft is opening the gates for the first (probably the only) Release Candidate for Silverlight version 4 today, for developers who have been playing with the beta in Visual Studio 2010 since last November. The message of the day for Monday from Microsoft is Silverlight 4 as the functionality platform for Windows Phone 7 Series. (The "other series," for now, isn't being mentioned -- at least it wasn't as of 10:20 Pacific Time this morning.)Last month, developers were informed that Silverlight 4 will be the application platform for WP7S. What we learned today is that Express editions of Visual Studio and Expression Blend will be distributed for free, starting today, for developers to build complete S4 apps from Windows-based PCs, and emulate those apps within Windows using a real virtual machine. Silverlight for developers itself is, of course, already free.Three example apps on Windows Phone 7 Series: the Music library, the Pictures library, and the Associated Press news reader."Using Silverlight, you can deliver awesome applications for Windows Phone 7," Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie told attendees. "It's fully hardware-accelerated; it enables you to build smooth, fluid UI; you can choose to use either the default look-and-feel of the Windows Phone app [light text on dark background] or...you can have a custom app UI yourself. What this means is, you can build killer applications for this device.Microsoft Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie"Importantly, though, the Silverlight for Windows Phone programming model is the same Silverlight you already know today. It's the same programming model, it's the same code, it's the same set of tools. This isn't 'Silverlight Lite,' this isn't 'Silverlight Different,' it is Silverlight," Guthrie added, to the most applause of the day.At the start of today's demonstrations at MIX '10 in Las Vegas, Guthrie had shown off the Silverlight 4 Pivot control (shown below), which will also be made generally available to developers. It's a kind of grid for the arrangement of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of objects and thumbnails for presentation as lists or tables. "Deep Zoom" plays a role here, as transitions between thumbnails that are arranged in a heap chart or a grid are fluid and elastic, with every element appearing to effortlessly flow across the screen.What we haven't seen yet is the new Pivot control specifically being used on Windows Phone 7 Series, although we can assume attempts will be made. With Visual Studio 2010 (as of this moment in the Release Candidate stage, though that could change at any time), a developer creates a phone app almost the same way he'd build a dialog box, by dragging and dropping controls into place and attaching code.Guthrie's example was actually quite impressive: He remodeled a "Hello, World" app into a Twitter feed follower (above) by binding a list box control to the output of a Web service that contacts Twitter. The response from Twitter is wrapped in XML, and the list box control is capable of parsing XML output. Headings, messages, and avatar icons are attainable as properties. Although Guthrie inserted the layout code for the XML output from a pre-stored snippet, there were only a few lines there, and one can imagine the creation of that code could not have consumed more than a half-hour.We saw the application that Guthrie developed on the WP7S virtual machine, also released to developers today. This is important, because in lieu of a physical phone for developers to touch and hold (that's still a ways off, we don't even really know what the phones themselves will look like or what they'll be called), this virtual machine will be the only way many developers will be able to tinker with WP7S functionality for the first time.We did not see the actual transfer of the application to the phone itself. If it's anything like the way .NET Micro Framework apps are transferred from Visual Studio to an embedded device, experience could take on multiple new meanings. In place of direct information on this at the moment, there's a possibility that phone apps are transferred from the PC into a developer's cloud space, and then downloaded to the phone over the air.A similar "Express" version of Expression Blend will also be made available for "designers" (those who build an app visually rather than lexically), apparently with the ability to create SketchFlow mockups of Phone apps. SketchFlow was created a few years ago for Expression developers to generate semi-workable mockups of Silverlight apps on PCs.XNA Game Studio 4.0 is also being released for Windows Phones (we are not seeing the word "free" being attached here yet, though we may yet see something "Express"), with the promise of giving VS 2010 developers a single platform for deploying games on PCs, Windows Phones, and Xbox 360. It's important here that Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb cleverly demonstrated the existence of a game that he described as transported from Zune HD with minimal changes -- it's a way of admitting that Zune HD is not one of those seamless platforms supported by this latest XNA Game Studio.The apps demonstrations were rapid-fire this morning, which is actually a bit unusual for a Microsoft conference that typically demos tools and PC applications in a casual fashion. Helping WP7S to lay some claim to coolness, Microsoft's Jeff Sandquist successfully demonstrated a good-looking, easy-to-use version of an app/service made popular on the iPhone: Shazam. And surprise, wouldn't you know it, it just happened to successfully identify the song "I'm a Bee" by The Black-Eyed Peas (good thing it was censored a bit; this is, after all, a family-friendly conference). I wonder whether Shazam would have recognized the Neil Innes version?And while we're on the subject of family friendliness, what's a Microsoft conference without a little torture? Taking after the Nintendo Wii's implementation of "Mii's" -- the little people you create to look like you, or like someone, to play your games for you inside the Wii environment -- Scott Guthrie showed off a little Windows Phone "tool" called "Mannequin." It's a little doll you can dress up and manipulate using the phone's multitouch, whom you can carry around with you (be careful not to shake the phone too hard), and whom you can torture at your leisure.Which the typically shy Guthrie demonstrated with unusual and somewhat effervescent gusto. Wrapping his mannequin with a certain person's face, and forcing him to utter the phrase, "Phone developers, phone developers, phone developers!" he made little Stevey dance around like Howdy Doody. Using fine-tuning (seen here in the middle), the utterance can be made to sound like a malfunctioning Dalek.Certainly all of that is in good fun for the folks at Microsoft. But it's here that one suddenly realizes how highly unlikely it would be for an Apple demo to frame Steve Jobs in a similar circumstance. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
• Microsoft unveils a host of Windows Phone 7 Series developer tools By Tim Conneally, Betanews Now that Microsoft has effectively restarted its mobile strategy afresh with Windows Phone 7 Series, third party developers need a way to dig into the platform. So today, Microsoft announced Windows Phone Developer Tools are now available as a free download at developer.windowsphone.comThe tools include: Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, Windows Phone 7 Series Add-in for Visual Studio, a Windows Phone 7 Series emulator, and XNA Game Studio 4.0. There is also a Community Technology Preview of Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone available as a separate download on developer.windowsphone.com today. This beta provides exactly the same visual development workflow for Windows Phone that was previously used in Silverlight and .Net application development.This was all wrapped up with the announcement of the official Silverlight 4 Release Candidate, which Microsoft says will complete an end-to-end development platform that uses Silverlight for Rich Internet Applications, and the XNA Framework for game development. A beta of S4 has been in circulation since October. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

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