Feb 9, 2010    Google to make Gmail a little more social

Google to make Gmail a little more social



source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10449250-265.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

Feb 8, 2010    Adobe promises faster Flash on Macs

Adobe promises faster Flash on Macs

Adobe Systems, evidently stung by recent criticisms of its widely used Flash Player browser plug-in, has promised better performance on Mac systems.

"Given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system," said Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch in a follow-up comment to his own blog post. But Adobe and Apple have been cooperating to make things better, he said. "In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to Core Animation, which will further reduce CPU usage and, we believe, will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering."

Things should get better with video, too, one of the primary reasons Flash has thrived on the Web. "Video rendering is an area we are focusing more attention on--for example, today a 480p video on a 1.8Ghz Mac Mini in Safari uses about 34 percent of CPU on Mac versus 16 percent on Windows (running in BootCamp on same hardware). With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video."

The words reflect an Adobe effort to explain itself while under competitive threat. HTML is gradually encroaching on the turf Flash has had largely to itself, and some are taking advantage of the opportunity to bash Flash.

Adobe also is taking on the matter of bugs.

In particular, it's answering a security problem Matthew Dempsky reported in September 2008, shortly before Flash Player 10 was issued. Dempsky took Lynch to task for his statement in the comment that "we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today."

Flash Player manager Emmy Huang apologized for the issue in a separate blog post.

"We picked up the bug as a crasher when it was filed on September 22, 2008, and were able to reproduce it. Remember that Flash Player 10 shipped in October 2008, so when this bug was reported we were pretty much locked and loaded for launch. The mistake we made was marking this bug for 'next' release, which is the soon to be released Flash Player 10.1, instead of marking it for the next Flash Player 10 security dot release. We should have kept in contact with the submitter and to let him know the progress, sorry we did not do that," Huang said. "It slipped through the cracks, and it is not something we take lightly."

And for those who are interested in helping Adobe track down problems, Adobe's Ted Patrick called on people to try the Flash Player 10.1 beta.

source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000055-264.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

Dec 19, 2009    Why Google may want Yelp

Why Google may want Yelp

Online reviews powerhouse Yelp might just be what Google needs to help rid the world of 40-pound tomes with yellow pages.

Throughout the second half of 2009, Google has had its eyes squarely on one of the last remaining online advertising markets it does not dominate: local. With a series of moves, Google has shown a clear interest in combining Google Maps, search results, and its small-business-oriented advertising technology into its next big source of revenue growth as offline local businesses come online.

However, Google management seems to have decided to step up the pace. TechCrunch and the New York Times reported overnight that Google is in discussions to acquire Yelp for $500 million or more. Yelp has grown into a huge destination for those looking for new places to have fun, turning it into one of the more pervasive brands among the digerati.

And it's not just bars and restaurants anymore: dentists, churches, and top-notch local golf instructors can be found on Yelp. That makes the site a huge repository of locally sorted data on how people are spending money, and that's the kind of thing that gets Google and its advertisers excited.

"We want to make search a way to discover things that are interesting about a place. A big interest of ours is helping you get to a place and also helping you identify what is interesting about the place when you're choosing one," said Carter Maslan, director of product management at Google and overseer of all things local. Maslan declined to comment on the reports about Yelp (as did Yelp itself) but he was more than happy to talk about the huge opportunity that Google sees in local search.

Local business listings have been available on Google since 2005 through the Local Business Center, which allows business owners to essentially claim their establishment on Google and add basic information such as their phone number, hours of operation, and a link to their Web site.

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source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10418625-265.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

Dec 18, 2009    Mozilla hopes to finish Thunderbird 3.1 in April

Mozilla hopes to finish Thunderbird 3.1 in April

Mozilla Messaging hopes to release Thunderbird 3.1 in early April, a date that reflects a new frequent-release strategy adopted from the better-known Firefox effort at Mozilla.

Dan Mosedale, a programmer for the open-source e-mail software, published the date in a Thunderbird schedule draft he announced Thursday.

"If we're lucky, we relabel 3.1RC1 [release candidate 1] as final and ship it on Tuesday, April 6. Otherwise, there's an RC2," Mosedale said in the planning document.

The new version is due to get an updated Web browser engine. Using the same Gecko project that Firefox is built atop means Thunderbird messages can integrate with Web activity such as Google Calendar.

Another possibility for 3.1 is a revamp of the Thunderbird start page, Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher said Friday. That redesign, which Ascher described in May, could show more useful information than the present splash screen--for example, information about what activity people has been up to help pick up where they left off.

"The 'start page,' which makes a lot of sense in Firefox, never made a huge amount of sense to me in Thunderbird. In particular, it's shown only when a folder is selected, and no message is selected. That's hardly a logical time to show the (colorful, pretty, but fairly useless) page we show now. Instead, why not show information about the selected folder and help people who clearly intended to select a folder, so most likely wanted to do something related to that folder," Ascher said in the blog post.

The faster Thunderbird release cycle is just one attribute the Thunderbird team is trying to adopt from Mozilla's higher-profile Firefox effort. Also on the longer-term plan is financial self-sustenance. Those are big challenges, though. An easier adoption will be fun names.

Starting now, Thunderbird versions will be named after beaches, Ascher said in a blog post this week.

"Firefox releases have cool code names while in gestation," Acher said. "Firefox picks national parks as code names, as metaphors for the values that go into making a Firefox release. The idea made a lot of sense to us, so we decided to follow suit for Thunderbird. Rather than parks, we picked beaches."

First up: Hawaii. Thunderbird 3.1 gets the name Lanikai, Ascher said, adding that he misspelled it "Lanakai" in the blog post.

source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10418809-264.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

Dec 17, 2009    Visual Studio launch delayed by 'a few weeks'

Visual Studio launch delayed by 'a few weeks'

Microsoft said on Thursday that it would delay by "a few weeks" the launch of its Visual Studio 2010 developer tool suite and version 4.0 of the .Net Framework.

In a blog posting, developer division head S. Somasegar said the company needs more time as it continues to work on some performance issues.

Microsoft had planned to launch the product in March. The company now plans an added test version--a release candidate--to launch in February, with the final version coming a few weeks after the planned March launch.

"Since the goal of the release candidate is to get more feedback from you, the team will need some time to react to that feedback before creating the final release build," Somasegar said. "We are therefore moving the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 back a few weeks."

Among the features in Visual Studio 2010 is a TiVo-like recording capability, dubbed IntelliTrace. Other features new to the 2010 release include support for Windows 7 and Windows Azure as well as tools for building on top of Microsoft's Sharepoint product.

source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10418440-56.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0