More amazing news from Google I/O 2010

.. and some things I want

Yesterday, 21 May 2010, there was more interesting news from the Google I/O conference. Again I wish I had been there, especially since they were given away HTC EVO to each and every conference attendee. Accept to Google employees. Too bad for Matt!

Image by Andy-Beal via Flickr

I should start looking for sponsors for the Google I/O 2011 ...

Maybe the big announcements were to be expected and have been predicted, still I think these again to be great news. Also I am seriously considering getting my hands on these in the near future.

Update to Android

Release 2.2 of Android, codename Froyo, is coming. It has better performance and was demonstrated too a very enthousiastic crowd.

Improvements in various areas have been made.

• The speed has been boosted 2 to 5 times by incorporating a Just In Time (JIT) compiler.
• It has enterprise friendly enhancements, think Microsoft Exchange.
• Extra APIs: Application Data Backup API and a Cloud-to-Device API.
• Tethering and Portable Hotspot, work on your laptop in connection with your mobile phone.
• The browser has been boosted by incorporating the V8 engine. Javascript performance boosted 2 to 3 times.

My contract for my mobile phone is coming up for renewal, but I seriously consider jumping in on the Android train. It seems to be picking up more and more speed.

Google TV

Google TV is about using that little laptop screen to watching movies and your laptop and not on that beautiful great widescreen TV you have mounted on the wall. But also about browsing the web on that TV but with limited interface.

Last year I treated my family and myself on a wonderful Philips Ambi-light flatscreen HD TV. It came with Net TV. A very limited browser on the TV. There are a load of web sites pre loaded and easily chosen, but these are all put there by Philips. The companies behind the sites are paying Philips. I, as the owner of the TV, have no way of putting my own choices up there. I can choose some favorites from the available options, but that's it.

Youtube is there but typing in a search query on the remote is going back to text again and there is no way to hookup a wireless keyboard. All in all this Net TV is just not what it should be. I may have used it ten times in ten months.

Google TV brings the web to your TV, no it makes it part of your TV experience. You watch a football match on a TV channel and can have a Twitter stream in the top right corner or something. Also it promises to make the interaction with the Web much easier. Google TV can be built in into the TV or a separate box.

As my Philips receives software updates every month or so I just hope that the learn from this announcement and improve their Net TV software in my TV. I doubt it will come close to Google TV. But I have no doubts that in teh near future we will see more and more TV sets coming with better and better internet capabilities. May it be Google TV or not.

Eventhough I do try to limit the amount of boxes in my living room the day that a Google TV box comes in could be coming sooner than later.

It's over now for this year

Luckily it's only a two day event and that means not another day of big announcements. But these are only the big announcements and more smaller announcements have been made that may have more or less impact on you depending on your occupation and interests.

Now it's time to get back to work and let the dust settle and see what other competitors will come up with and how much of these things really gonna do what they look like doing.

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• Android 2.2: Froyo Is a Major Update (mt-soft.com.ar)
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Google I/O 2010 is amazing

.. eventhough I am not there

Since yesterday, 19 May 2010, Google I/O is raging. Many great stuff is being published and it is hard, no impossible to keep up. It's already impossible to even try to list all the new things coming soon or are even here today already.

Image via Wikipedia

I'll try to name some of the more interesting things I have picked up so far.

Google Font Directory

Ever wanted to use different fonts on your site than the limited few. Mo more mandatory Times New Roman or Arial or Courier. There were already some services out there (like TypeKit) that gave you the opportunity to use the new Web Fonts, but now Google has weighed in on that and partners with TypeKit and offers a first small set of Open Source fonts to use on your web site projects.

I know I will dive into this in the very near future.

As a matter of fact I already have ;-)

The VP8 codec

HTML5 has the <video> tag. That's nothing new. But most video now being served on is now in the format of H.264, a format that has an uncertain licensing model. A model that reminds of the old Compuserve GIF licensing model. After acquiring ON2 Google now has open sourced the VP8 codec.

Already the major browsers are backing that up and also Adobe promised to release VP8 support within Flash. That should be available to more than a billion users within the next 12 months.

Adobe also showed some of the new HTML5 tools for Dreamweaver. Making it clear to developers that Adobe not only stands for Flash (and Photoshop) but also for more cutting edge web based development. Good for Adobe.

Google Storage for Developers

With Google Storage for Developers the company from Mountain View is taking on cloud services like Amazon S3. Now only for developers from the US and invitation only. But soon it can become huge with the power of the giant behind it. I expect that some great applications will begin to popup in the next year based on Google Storage.

And more is still to come.

The consequences of these three major announcements will become apparent soon enough. Expect some more announcements in the coming days of Google I/O.

It's just too much information for now!

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Google Streetview has now covered The Netherlands

.. including my car

As I blogged earlier: Google Streetview was extending it's reach across my beautiful country. I also noted that some parts were still MIA.

That has changed now.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Netherlands are covered

Now one can go across the country in Streetview and see almost any street there is. It is great fun to look at your own house, but you can now also see what that place looks like where you are going for the first time.

How Microsoft made me leave Google Chrome

.. well, not really

As I wrote in my previous post I am busy building a Silverlight application. This week I did some more work and ran into some very weird behavior.

I was debugging the communication between the Silverlight app and the web service and I ran into very strange errors. I noticed that in my final call in the webservice two string values were assigned to the wrong variables. They were swapped. The variable username held a piece of xml and the variable drawingXml held the username. Looking through my code I could not find the line of code where I made the mistake.

It was getting late already and this is still a POC, so I decided to just swap the place of the parameters in the method definition and investigate further at some other moment.

I stopped the debugger, made the change, inserted a breakpoint and started debugging again. That's when I completely lost any understanding of what was going on.

It was late already as I said and I blamed that and I was too tired to think straight and probably was debugging at the wrong place in the application. I decided it had to be me and had to just let it be. I walked a block with the dog and went to bed

The next day

The problem stuck and I had to investigate further so I started to change my Silverlight application so it would show some debug info in the browser to make things easier to debug.

That's where things started to go even crazier. The Silverlight application didn't show anything. The TextBlock I had added to the XAML wasn't showing up! I tried again and again. But nothing!

Image via Wikipedia

Then I realized that Google Chrome (my default browser) had a problem with caching. The Silverlight application in the browser was an old version of the application. Apparently, Chrome was not refreshing the XAP file!

Googling about I saw some posts about the same problems developers had with Flash. Then I sighed and I knew it was not me.

Google Chrome

So, that was it for me. I had to revert "back" to Firefox for debugging Silverlight applications. A weird feeling having to step away from Google Chrome.

I still remember that I watched the launch live on my laptop. I watched the first part in Firefox and started downloading during the presentation. Installed Chrome and watched the last part in Chrome. I also set it to be my default browser and only occasionally I use Firefox and other browsers. Well, I have to I build websites!

Microsoft made me do it

So, in a way Microsoft made me switch browsers, made me move away from Chrome.

But it's not that dramatic. I only use Firefox now for debugging Silverlight and for day to day browsing I still use Chrome.

Had I been a Flash developer, it would have been Adobe that made me switch from Chrome back to Firefox. But still only for debugging.

Getting more hits through a banana

.. and maybe more bananas as well

In recent times I have published about the banana button and its use and also many competely useless posts about bananas. This being a more serious blog (ahum) there must be something about these banan posts. Well, I could try to pull together an interesting study about my GREAT PLAN that can take over the Internet as we know it, but no, no such plan exists. Yet.

There is just something about bananas that has always apeeled to me. I like to eat them, they're tasty and nutritiuous. But they are also connected with a smile: the curve looks like a smile when held up the right way. Bananas also have slapstick component through the eternal slipping on the peel. Top it off with the bright yellow skin and it is just a very attractive piece of fruit.

Why then yet another banana post?

Does the web need yet another piece of nonsense about bananas?

No.

Image by Technofreak via Flickr

Why then continue?

I have seen many visitors ome to this blog from very weird searches in Google and sometimes they seem totally unrelated to the blog and the content. They are however not totally unrelated. As an example, I keep getting traffic from image search for "Pippi Longstocking". I had mentioned her in a post or two along with a picture I had taken in Sweden.

The second post even increased the traffic more.

So. let's change that banana

It's a bit disturbing to get traffic to your blog like that, but on the other hand if you want traffic above anything else it is a way to do just that. In comes the banana! To the rescue comes the banana. For the people: the everlasting banana.

Bananas are healthy

It's just another stupid experiment to continu writing about all aspects of the banana to tray and make this post become one of the banana resources one would find high in serach reslts.

Bananas beat Google

As I have mentioned before apart from bananas bullets are important too.

A quick recap:

• Bananas are tasty
• Bananas are nutritious
• Bananas are fun
• Bananas are slastick
• Bananas are superior
• Bananas are traffic magnets
• Bananas are Bananas!

Let's go Bananas!

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Five years ago

.. I ran in the dark in Oregon

This morning while scanning my news feeds I cam across this post from the Official Google Blog. It's about running the Hood to Coast run.

I just had to smile. I did that ficve years ago and I really, really like it. Today, by coincidence I am wearing my Hood to Coast tee from five years ago.

Start the day with a smile

The post made me think back of the team I was thrown in at the last moment, being the third reserve. It turned out to be a great adventure and a lot of fun. Met some great people and did some great running in a great part of the world.

Eventhough a small misunderstanding in communication eventually led to a conflict with a chaotic team lead more than a year later, it's a memory I cherish.

I wish I could do it again.

Just some numbers

.. I kinda like

While waiting for a virtual image to finish installing and configuring itself I had a glimpse at my Google Analytics figures. I have had that running on this blog since November 2005 and have been pleased with it all the way. Lot's of stats and graphs that show me quite a bit about who reads what on this blog.

I decided to select the entire range from the start in November 2005 until today and saw some happy numbers. I know that many sites generate these kind of numbers in a single day and some of the bigger blogs might need a month or less to achieve this. But still, I think it's something. Impressive, to me at least.

• 15442 Visits
• 12711 Unique visitors
• 21839 Page views

Image by Jeff_Werner via Flickr

uhm

Well, that's enough to give myself a good feeling going into the weekend. Hey! the virtual machine is ready. Back to work!

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Blog traffic by Pippi Longstocking

.. weird numbers

I haven't been too active on this blog in the last few months and am only picking things up a bit again. But I always kept some traffic. And I had a liitle more detailed look at that traffic and I just had to laugh.

I noticed that a lot of people were coming to the blog from Images searches on Google. In particular I found that a photo that I linked to last year before I went on holiday to Sweden for the first time in my life. I had posted a picture of Pippi Longstocking and apparently that attracts people to my blog.

Pippi Longstocking, once again!

So here she is once again: Pippi Longstocking! This time a picture I made myself in the Astrid Lindgren park near Vimmerby. See if traffic picks up on this as well.

Back again!

.. but I wish I wasn't!

Three weeks in the States was fun and relaxing. And now, already, I wish I was back there. Again at work, doing stuff that is not always that interesting and satisfying. It is hard. Life sucks.

Well, that is a bit too hard. Still, I am already making plans for returning to Indiana. Some pictures of the trip.

So what's up?

Well, you can now find some aggregated personal info on Spock. Yes and I do Twitter! And have a look at my shared news feeds / items in Google Reader.

Well, that's it for now.

And then this

If anyone cares to give me a spare Apple MacBook Air, I would not mind at all!

Wanna know how Gmail works?

.. different from what you expected!

On the official Gmail blog they announced a challenge for people around the globe: to show how Gmail works in an funny video.

The official Gmail blog

A few of us on the Gmail team came up with an idea to stitch together a bunch of video clips that all share one element: someone hands the Gmail M-velope in from the left of the screen, and hands it off to the right. Put them all together, and they form one long chain of hand-offs

This what came out of that idea.

Mashing up is easy

.. with Google Mashup Editor

Yep, it tickled my imagination and so I tried it out: Google Mashup Editor

So, here it is:

I know, it's not much, but it was half an hour fiddling about. Fun!