Opera wants to make your computer part of the cloud

Opera has recently announced a new software/service offering called Opera Unite.  This is included in a beta version of the Opera 10 browser that you can download directly from the company's website.   With Unite Opera plans to help you bring a piece of the cloud home with you, by allowing you to simple and almost effortlessly host content for public consumption, within your own computer.

Opera Unite will work as a platform, allowing new services to be added to the browser and thus adding new functionality for the end user.  What interest this platform will stir up amongst developers is still too soon to tell.

While the concept is rather interesting whether or not the implementation will prove to be useful, or even usable, also remains to be seen.  The main drawback to proposed approach is that while more and more people have permanent broadband connections to the Internet, even more people have notebook computers which they carry around all the time and which are thus unavailable to serve content on-line.  This can, however, prove to be a powerful tool for people working in small distributed groups or that are part of tight communities such as college students.  

My first contact with Unite has me interested but not yet overly optimistic about its usability.  I will continue to follow the product's development, and even more importantly to follow what new services are added to this platform Opera is introducing.

What do you think of Opera Unite?

The incompatible IE 8

I haven't been using Internet Explorer for a long time. I think I made the full time switch to Firefox back in 2006, when I left employment at a company whose website only worked on IE. That need to use I to check on the website was the only thing holding me back from using Firefox for everything and on leaving the company I made the switch without even thinking about it. I just stopped using IE all together.

Earlier today I was making some updates to my one-page website, which lists the different blogs I write and I decided to try it out on IE. Turns out that it looked terrible on IE 8 and only on IE. I tried it on Chrome, Firefox and Safari and they all showed exactly the same thing - what they were supposed to.

I had had some compatibility issues with IE7 and 6 in the past, but you'd expect that things would get better, not worse as time passes. Firefox got better and better. Safari has improved markedly and Chrome takes advantage of all the work that has already gone into WebKit to make Safari work well. That leaves IE on the outside.

The thing that bothers me the most is a simple question: Why does Microsoft sink money into creating a browser that is less compatible with all the others, than the previous version? It's not like it is doing anything else better than all the others.

I made a small change to the website, just so it would not look too bad on IE and in order to do that I sacrificed some of the design that appeared on the other browsers. Even so, the site in IE still looks different from what it looks like in all the other browsers I tested it on.

I've spent quite some time thinking about this today and I've come to the conclusion that Microsoft is more and more becoming a company whose products I don't care about. That seems very weird to me as I used to be a fervent defender of some Microsoft products such as Windows and Office. Both great products that Microsoft managed to break in their latest releases. They didn't just add new features or make some improvements. They changed the products and made them incompatible with hardware (in the case of Windows Vista) and with their own previous version (Office).

Looking into this compatibility issues in IE 8, I came across some discussions that suggested that even some Microsoft owned websites had some compatibility problems with version 8 of Internet Explorer. Weird, to say the least.

Looking at the sort of things Microsoft has been doing and at something like the Wave product that Google demoed yesterday, I get a feeling that the sun is really setting for Microsoft as a trend setting company.

A little bit more reflection brings me to the perception that as I work on my latest book, there isn't a single piece of Microsoft involved in the process. For the first time in the fourteen years I've been been a writer nothing I'm using comes from Microsoft and I hadn't even really noticed that.

Google Wave: The wave of the future?

Google just introduced a developer preview of a new product called Wave. This new product combines in a single application most of what you can do with email, instant messaging, wikis, forums and collaborative word processing.

The demo is quite impressive and is available on YouTube. While some may say that Google has not created anything really new with this product, just cobbled together a bunch of preexisting concepts, I feel that the vision behind Wave has a lot of merit. Combining all these things in a really usable interface is quite a challenge and despite not having used the system yet, the demo left me with the feeling that the Wave team got it right.

If you have the patience to go through the full hour and twenty minutes of the demo you will get to see that Google is pushing the line of what a web-based application can do, with real-time multi-way collaborative editing, on-the-fly spell checking in over 30 languages and other rather impresive little features.

In an interesting move Google will open source the Wave application. All the application's algorithms and formats have been published, along with the specification to the APIs that the service offers. According to Wave's creators any one will be able to use Google's code to host their own Wave servers which should seamless interact with Google's and those of any other companies. In this respect, Wave works pretty much in the same way that email does.

Also demoed where extentions to the Google Wave application which allowed it to interact with other services, such as Twitter, stock quotes, etc. The extentions seem to be the major reason for Google to have announced this product some months before it is ready. In the comming months interested developers will create dozens of extentions to the not yet released service.

Google Wave is supposed to be available for general use still within this year.

On information overload...

The current day's information overload is a topic that has been covered by many people, many times. Just having gone through one of those moments of revelation when you notice just how much time you've just spent reading a bunch of interesting, but thoroughly useless tidbits of information, I decided to throw in my two cents.

Over the years I've developed certain habits. I visit certain sites to read general news, technology news and general things of interest. As new forms of obtaining information became available, I've adapted to incorporate them into my daily routine. Some things, seem to add to the time I spend digesting information, while others seem to make me more productive. Sometimes, though, it is a tough call to make, deciding in which category something falls.

One such case for me is Twitter. Though I've had an account for about a year, it was only in the last couple of months that I've actually become a user. I have to say that I have no interest in following when one of my friends went to buy bread, or got on a wrong bus. I, therefore, do not follow people who write about those things. I like to know what people are doing in their professional lives and what they find of interest, though. I've read some pretty interesting articles that were commented on by friends or acquaintances in their Twitter accounts. Considering this, I would say that Twitter had made me more productive as I get a stream recommended articles to read. These articles have already been read by people I know and whose judgment I trust.

With some frequency, perhaps once a month, I run into something on the Web that triggers my interest and ends up consuming several hours of time as I browse from one article to another. On a recent incident I ran into a reference that CBS had made available several episodes of the 1950's Perry Mason TV show, based the books by Erle Stanley Gardner. I remembered watching that show on TV, when I was a kid in the 1970's and started looking into it. I ended up reading about the show, the character, the actor who played the main character and the author's life. In the end I had absorbed a lot of information that, though interesting, was immediately useless to me.

The one bit of information that was most useful was that the one I started from, that you can watch some episodes directly through the browser.

The Internet and the Web make getting information incredibly easy, these days. In fact it is so easy that you need to be careful of not looking too much for information. That was what happened to me in the example Perry Mason incident. I found something of interest, because it reminded me of good moments of my childhood, and just dived into the incredible sea of information that seems to be available about almost anything, on the Web.

An interesting artifact that has, surprisingly, helped me expedite information processing is an iPod Touch. I have been reading most of my email on it. It is helps me quickly discard of what is useless and process what is of interest. Ever since I've gotten it, I have never left unread emails on my GMail account which I have to admit was rarely the case before that. Another source of information I now generally consult through the iPod is Twitter, using one of the many clients that are available for usage on the device. In fact, even on my notebooks I've been using TweetDeck to access my Twitter account and read what the people I follow have to say.

Information is now available in huge quantities, all around us. In our computers, phones and now even in our iPods. We must adapt our habits to these new ways to access information but we must, also, learn to figure out when we've gotten enough on a particular subject so we don't just waste our time.

The iPhone OS and the rest...

Every once in a while I come across a discussion about smartphones. There is a fellow saying that he prefers Nokia model A while another is arguing that Blackberry model B is much better. Every time I run across this scenario, my thoughts are the same: "these fellows haven't got it yet".

For me, an extra feature here, or an extra button there, doesn't come close to having a real, live hand-sized computer in the shape of a phone. That is what an iPhone is.

Now, Google is going in the right direction in trying to build a mobile platform with Android, but by not making the phones themselves, they fall into the same pit as Microsoft with Windows Mobile. They loose control of the end-user experience. Nokia, in this respect, is much better positioned now that it controls both development of the software platform and the hardware.

With the iPhone OS, a specialized version of the same OS X that runs on the Macs, Apple has scored a hit as few have in the techonolgy industry in the past. There can be little doubt that the iPhone OS running now in million of iPhones and iPod Touches in the world, have established a thriving user, software and accessories ecosystem.

The speed with which developers rushed to build iPhone applications is telling of the fascination these nifty little devices exert on people. I have been a user of handheld devices in the past. For many years you wouldn't catch me going out without my faithful Dell Axim, which succeded two Palm handhelds. Today, I use an iPod to do all the things I used to do with my Windows Mobile device, in a much easier, faster and more elegant way, and to do a whole lot more.

The technological lead that Apple has over all its competitors isn't just associated with having a great hardware device. Quite the contrary! The technology that distances the iPhone from all its competitors is the iPhone OS and all that it inherits directly from OS X.