CES/Macworld Predictions

One of the biggest consumer electronics show (CES in Las Vegas from January 7th-January 11th) is going down this week, which also happens to overlap with another, the Macworld expo (January 5th-January 9th in San Fran). Don’t ask me why they decided to pick conflicting, making people choose to going to one or the other, which essentially hurts both parties. But enough of that, in this post I’ll be laying out some predictions of what I think will go down at each.

Since Macworld is here first:
There is also mounds of speculation for what Apple is going to do at Macworld, this being their last (for those who don’t know Macworld isn’t a creation of Apple, but rather Macworld Magazine) and all. So rumor has it Apple will be announcing new Mac Minis, Apple TVs and iPhone Nanos. Hardware-wise Apple will finally introduce new Mac Minis, Apple TVs and cinema displays or cinema displays equiped with the Apple TV hardware. But what I think will happen is that Apple is going to do a more software centric keynote, which will inevitably focus on its own iWork suite. They are going to take it into the cloud or create a system where you have the ability to, think about this. What is you have the ability to install on a corporate server a collaborative software suite, where all users within the network can work and access documents easily. Apple’s aim is mainly to infiltrate into the corporate environment, which Microsoft has them beat by a wide and large margin. With the impending exit of Steve Jobs as the face of Apple, they have to do something to push into new territories and I think this is what they are going to do.

CES:
CES is a whole ‘nother monster that encompasses such a wide range of consumer electronics that I’ll just keep it to general themes. The biggest theme for this show will probably be entertainment media in the living room, which will mean bridging online content, such as from Hulu, Netflix, Youtube and what have you to your TV. There is going to be a plethora of video streaming devices out there, since there isn’t really a great all-in-one out there yet. I have an Apple TV loaded with boxee, as well as an Xbox 360 setup to stream content from my computer through my personal network in my apartment. Both have their downsides and upsides, but neither is the be all end all of streaming devices. Having both work in unison achieves something close, but it still isn’t there yet, everyone always ultimately either asks me how to do what on the thing to get it to watch something or just plain gives up and goes back to the god awful Scientific Atlanta box that Time Warner has provided to watch absolute garbage on cable TV. The dream video device would do something very similar to my beloved Squeezebox Boom, but for Video, easy to use UI and just plain works, as well as be very modular in device, both in hardware and software. Apple’s closed ecosystem has led to no one wanting the Apple TV other than your enthusiasts, such as myself who will take the time and effort to soft/hard mod it to get it to do more for which boxee is a great example.

To complement all these devices, I see a plethora of content moving away from your traditional methods of broadcasting quickly. You can see it already happening with Hulu and all the contracts the major studios are considering with Youtube/Hulu and Sling Media. But what needs to happen is that these services need to be easily accessible. After seeing the success of Apple in the digital music market I’ve learned one thing, if you create something that is easy to use and at a reasonable cost people would be willing to not pirate and proceed in ways that are much easy to obtain the content they want. Apple hasn’t been as successful in the video market as they were in the audio, but that could all change if they open up and create a subscription based model. Think about the possibilities if they were to license out an API of their software and let people go at it with Apple’s name recognition the reach for digital video nirvana could be here within months. Sadly, I do not think Apple will ever adopt either.

I also predict that we will finally see a sub-100 bluray player for the masses to just buy that Dark Knight Bluray and watch it in all its 1080p glory.

To sum it up:
Macworld: Taking applications into the cloud and the corporate workspace
CES: Convergence video devices, bluray player on the cheap

BlackBerry Bold issues

So roughly using the Bold for almost two months, what do I think of it? My first issue is with the Bold or BB OS’s issue of not being able to install applications outside of the alloted 128 MB of RAM space. RIM really either needs to do 1. either give their devices a lot more RAM or 2. give their devices to install apps into either external storage cards or the internal memory space. I know they do this for security purposes, but their smart they should be able to figure out a secure solution, I mean what harm can one really do by installing applications into the internal memory (don’t answer that). Now don’t get me wrong the Bold is probably one of the best devices I have ever used cause things just work on it and things are real zippy, but I’m a pretty heavy user of the Bold and after having multiple applications open using newsgator, google maps, email… the RAM gets eaten worse the Firefox before version 3.0. There is no way to view a running processes to see which one if the hog and stop it, all you have is just clearing the browser cache and this memory cleaning thing, that I have no clue what it does and does not seem to work (Options -> Security Options -> Memory Cleaning). At times it feels like *gasp* using a Windows Mobile device, yes, you heard me right, Windows “slower than a snail, terrible memory management” Mobile. I have done many battery pulls to try to relinquish the lost memory more times now than I can count and waiting 3+ minutes for a phone to start back up is ri-dic-u-lous.

Other issues:

IMAP is pretty much broken, I don’t know if it is an issue with Gmail IMAP or just IMAP email handling in general (I’ve only used IMAP with my gmail account), but it is broken like no other. I don’t receive all my email and it tends to lag when marking an email as read, if it even marks it as read and I had no way to access all my folders. I have since reverted back to general default email settings, which is POP I believe, cause I actually get emails that way.

No fun applications at all. Don’t expect an iPhone like experience on this thing cause it really is great for managing your data and such, but other than brickbreaker or wordmole, don’t expect to be playing Metal Gear on this thing. Another thing is there is no easy way to install applications to this thing, don’t go expecting to simply load up an app store and simply search and install what you’d like from your phone. You are gonna have to search on a desktop to find an application that suites your needs, then you can either connect your BB to your computer or use the god-awful web browser to enter in the url and manage to navigate to it somehow. The impending app store may solve all these problems, but I have a feeling it probably won’t.

Approximately 1/2 of my lock ups, freezes and slow downs can be attributed to one thing, the web browser. It isn’t as bad as say Pocket IE, but its pretty bad. I mean on the surface it renders pages like its original pretty well, that’s if you manage to load a page without it locking up. But you can install Opera Mini on the Bold, so there is an alternative. I am really just waiting for Mozilla to release Fennec, the mobile Firefox browser.

The last issue, which some may or may not consider an issue is (I hate to say it), but the Bold just isn’t “fun” enough. I look at all the cool apps for the iPhone and I get pretty jealous, over the past year or so the iPhone/iPod Touch has really become an amazing platform for development. As much as I dislike some of the choices that Apple has made (ummm… Copy/Paste anyone) it is the phone everyone wants because of its applications and usability. I know plenty of people that have trouble getting around the BB, but know very few that have the same issues of usability on Apple’s mobile platform.

What I think RIM needs to do is throw out the book and create an OS along with great hardware that encompasses modern day techniques of UI. I’m not saying that they should scratch what they have with their current iterations, afterall they are the venerable email workhorse, but they should consider putting the effort into crafting a new platform that will herald in new users that would actually wow them not confuse. We’ll see what 2009 brings, CES next week is only that start of what I predict to be a very interesting year in regards to the common man.

Google Chrome – Google says “Hello World” to Browsers

So earlier today Google decided to announce a bombshell. That they have been in development of an open source browser to compete with the very competent likes of Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Opera. So why you say would they ever do that? Aren’t they purely a web-centric software company? Well to answer the second question, they were. Google has been the big name in search since the earlier 2000s, after the big tech bubble of the 90s, but they are now providing a wide array of applications, from apps on phones (Android) to ones on the desktop space (Google Earth, Google Desktop) and your traditional things, such as email (Gmail) and mapping (Google Maps). But to handle all of this, they decided that they needed to create something that came cope with the increasingly important dynamic webspace that is the interwebs, so what was created was Google Chrome.

To answer my first question, about why they would ever do this, is because today’s browsers are built on age old technologies that can’t cope with today’s online webspace. Let’s backtrack a little. Gears (formerly Google Gears) was created to help cope with the many complaints of having to be online to use web-based applications such as Google Docs or Zoho Writer. So the engineers at Google sought out to create some plugins for today’s browsers to handle and take the load off with the creation of Gears. But there was still a problem, today’s browsers were still extremely limiting and still very crash prone; a browser crash in today’s world could mean loss of much productivity. There was an inability to support multi-threaded applications, innate to all of today’s browsers being steep in old browser tech of static webpages. So Google one-upped itself and thought a few steps ahead and decided to create a browser that not only allowed for multi-threaded applications, but to support multi-processes.

The idea behind Chrome is basic to Software Engineering, instead of handling bugs by simply terminating the process and then restarting, there will be graceful degradation. When browsing and constantly opening up tabs, then closing some, then opening more, today’s current browsers leave fragments and remains in our current OS’s memory, never really clearing them up, so when in today’s world of AJAX powered webpages and having applications and never closing a browser is a must Chrome comes into the picture. Closing tabs means gracefully killing a process, completely removing it from memory, never leaving those fragments in memory to build up and slowing down your machine.

Development
The development of Chrome will be very unique. Google can test Chrome on its massive array web pages using its web crawlers, providing crucial data from millions of websites. Testing has been automated to a level never seen, of course, the usually external testing will still be there, but here is one way testing can come on a massive scale, making bug detection considerably easier.

Interestingly enough, Google Chrome will be a webkit based browser. Most likely because of how Android’s browser is also webkit-based, as well as, the growing popularity of that other webkit based browser made by Apple, Safari and its runaway mobile success. Other additions and modifications to take note is that Google is using a dev team from a company called V8, a company in Denmark, to develop a Javascript Virtual Machine to be able to run multitudes of types of code and render it in the engine. This will be created from the ground up. V8 has taken a drastically new approach to a Javascript VM. Firstly, while Javascript is innately classless, you can still create objects and such and give it new properties on the fly. So with the new Javascript VM, the optimization will be coupled and objects with same properties will be applied the same optimization techniques. The Javascript VM will also optimize on speed, where other Javascript rendering engines run most code on the fly, the code will be offset and the Javascript code will be converted to machine code, which is then compiled and ran on the user’s cpu, similar to Java. V8’s new rendering engine will also optimize on garbage collection, where other engines use conservative garbage collection to guess which objects need to be trashed in memory, V8’s will be able to detect what should and shouldn’t be there so memory is allocated accordingly. The interesting part of this is that, the V8 engine is wholly independent of Google Chrome, so Google wants other developers to be able to use V8’s new rendering browser, “setting a new bar,” as Google calls it.

User Interface
So this tech is all good and all, but what will it look like. Google Chrome’s approach mirror many modern day browsers, multiple detachable tabs, but unlike the other browsers the tabs are outside of the window (think file folders) and the Google’s own take on the Awesome Bar, which they are calling the Omnibox. Unlike Firefox’s Awesome bar, where anything from your web history pops up as you type for inline auto-completions, Google Chrome only auto-completes what you have typed, which can be a good or bad thing. Google Chrome will also integrate search on the fly into their Omnibox, when you have used say Amazon to search for that book of Moby Dick you’ve been itching to read, it automatically remembers it, so which search engines you have used and adds it in. Google Chrome’s startpage takes a varied approach similar in style to Opera’s Speed Dial, but a bit more dynamic. The startpage instead of showing something boring like a blank page, will present to you thumbnails of your nine most visited pages and most often used search engines just to the right of it.

Google has also taken a Safari-like approach to privacy, giving you the option to anonymize your search with a “privacy mode” that switches to a read-only mode when activated, giving you full access to your bookmarks on the web, but never recording anything. Google Chrome will feature its very own pop-up blocker. Google Chrome has also strived to differentiate its users web-experience, by separating as much of the browser from the webapps as possible, hence the name Chrome.

Security
Security in today’s world in most serious. Browser exploits come everyday, Google rationalizes and believes that you can’t ever catch 100% of the malware on the web, so they’ve built a sandbox mode right into Google Chrome, where when activated, webpages submit their right to read/write to your hard disk. Almost every single item is sandboxed, except plugins. Phishing lists are also created and updated continuously on Google’s end and served to you with these updates, so saving you the time to double check if that checking website you used was legit or not. Malicious sites are warned before blacklisted, so exploits can be fixed before your site is on the blacklist.

Plugins
Full access will still be given to plugin developers to fully utilize all of Google Chrome’s features without the fear of never being known. Plugins will run all in their own process, so when a tab crashes, the plugin is still alive and the page is still effectively sandboxed. There will also be full Gears implementation within Google Chrome.

So what does all this mean to you and everybody else. Google just threw down its gauntlet to everyone, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and the Opera team and they have open sourced it. Increasing interest substantially as well as opening the floodgates to the millions of developers out there. Just when I thought the race was getting boring, Google has just made it a thousand times more interesting.

Unique as ever Google has enlisted author of Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud to create a web comic

Full Comic Explanation Here by Scott McCloud
Great Over Here From Blogoscoped

Professionalism

Today I attended one of the events for Internet Week here in New York City. Mashable’s Exhibit Hall, showing off some startups and new upcoming companies, more info here. I was pretty excited to see what was looming on the interwebs. Ir started out pretty well with me meeting some guys from edopter. A website where they, by aggregating ratings from their users and a variety of other sites, tries to predict the latest trends, breaking it further down by regions (right now it is limited to major cities, but I was told it would eventually spread out to more cities) and categories that range from things on the Internet to things outside of the world of the Internet and the mainstream, as well as age and gender. Though I never tested out the feature, you could even create your own trends and see how your prediction works out with their algorithm. Eventually they will add a geographical map to point out which locations are feeding into which trends the most. They said they had to pull the feature, but will work hard to work it in by Monday, which is when they plan to do the official launch. It was a pretty robust application and worked well from the brief time I spent with it. The team was made up of three guys, two of which were present and seemed to be very knowledgeable, which I can’t say for the next company I met with.

The Rubicon Project was a mess. I loved their idea, which was an ad optimization stats site. Depending on the content you have and the current ad networks, it figures out which ads work best on your differing pages, even breaking it down to individual pages and not just the entire website. It has many cool features and can be beneficial to anyone. The project itself impressed me, but the exhibitors were unprepared and seemed very disingenius and did not impress. Since the exhibition was being held in a bar, one of the exhibitors of the Rubicon Project decided to get a beer, he was slurring his words and were not able to answer most of my questions. I came away unimpressed and downright feeling awful that any company’s PR person would act so much like a drunken idiot presenting an idea that could actually compete with the big boys. I felt so disgusted I decided to leave the event.

I hope this weekend’s other Internet Week goes well. Tomorrow I’ll trying to make it over to the Chelsea Art Museum to check out the Design and Technology Thesis Exhibit of students from the New Schools. More info here. I will also make my way to the Come Out and Play Festival here in NYC and try out their Re: Activism political scavenger hunt. I’m number 27 and only 25 get to play, so I hope I get to play. Link here. The night will end at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater to check out this Improve Music Show. It sounds pretty cool, they use audience members music and remix them or use them as inspiration for their acts that follow.