Tech Kernel

Multi-touch Mice

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:52:00 +0000

Now that we have all gotten used to multi-touch phones the next area of innovation may be multi-touch mice. Check out this video from TechCrunch where they demonstrate a number of intriguing, mouse concepts coming from Microsoft's Research labs. The rumors are also running wild that Apple may soon release a multi-touch mouse.

Minority Report coming to PCs

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:06:00 +0000

Microsoft announced their answer to the Wii, called Natal, at the recent E3 conference. Natal goes beyond the Wii in that you don't need any controllers. The cameras in the unit detect the movement of your body and reacts accordingly. So you can punch and kick for a fighting game or pretend you have a steering wheel in your hands for a driving game. It has face recognition and voice recognition as well so it can automatically log you in and have a conversation with you. It should make for some very interesting games, but can also be used for controlling interfaces with just the movement of your hands.

Natal was announced as a peripheral for the Xbox 360, but Bill Gates just indicated that they will make Natal available for PC's as well. That would not only make for great games, but it could be used to control a media center computer, interact with people in a Second Life like system, control a computer from across the room, or a million other possibilities.

Do you remember the futuristic man-computer interface in Minority Report? Natal would not only let you do everything that Tom Cruise did (sans the transparent screen), but actually be better, because it doesn't require the user to wear gloves. It's another case of reality catching up with science fiction faster than anyone thought.

Google Chrome OS - Wait and see

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:42:00 +0000

Google announced their Chrome OS operating system last week. But of course, you already knew that because it was virtually impossible to miss that story through all of the hype in the news. This lightweight, open-source, browser-based operating system will be free and available in the second half of 2010.

All of the Internet has been abuzz about Chrome OS, but there are plenty of reasons to skeptical of new OS. Google has said they are targeting netbooks with with OS. Unfortunately, netbooks are one of the few places Chrome OS makes sense.

Google offers Android for the smart phone market so it won't play there. On normal laptops and desktops people are looking for all of the applications and capabilities of the other OS's, like Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. You don't want to get that new computer and find that you can't run that application or game that you need for work or pleasure. Of course, the number of Chrome OS apps will increase over time and offer more capabilities, but Google has said the apps are all just web pages and usable in any standard compliant browser. So why not get Windows or OS X and be able to run of the normal programs as well as all of the Chrome apps. If cost is an issue you can go with Linux and get the same benefits.

Even on netbooks this is an issue, as evidenced by all of the people who pay more for Windows XP on the netbooks instead going with the free Linux distributions. They pay more because of the familiarity with Windows and all of the applications that are available. The same would hold true in a Windows XP (or Windows 7) vs Chrome OS comparison as well.

So who would be most interested in the Chrome OS. Certainly those alpha-geeks who love the latest technologies would be candidates will probably try it for a while (before it fades out of fashion). Those who like the minimalist look and approach of an OS that is also faster and runs on lesser computers might use it. Lastly I could see it eventually offered on very low-end computers for people who are not as tech-savvy and don't have heavy needs.

Unfortunately the potential markets don't seem very large or ones that can grow much, which doesn't bode well for Chrome OS. That being said, Google sticks with the technologies and continues to improve them, so time will tell whether Chrome OS ultimately succeeds or fails, but the initial signs don't look promising.

iPhones connect people to government

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:10:00 +0000

In an imaginative way for people to interact with government, Boston has released an iPhone app that lets people snap photos of potholes and other nuisances and send them to the city to be fixed. It's another great example of "there's an app for that".

Firefox 3.5 Released

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:08:00 +0000

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5 today. You can download it for free. Firefox 3.5 ads some new features and some HTML 5 tags, but the most important improvement is speed. They claim it is twice as fast as Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2. With Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari claiming dramatic speed improvements its good to see Firefox improving their performance as well.

Oracle to buy Sun

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:49:00 +0000

Oracle announced today that they will buy Sun for 7.4 billion dollars. Oracle wants an end to end enterprise set of solutions.

Amongst the other assets will be the Java programming language. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out in the development arena. While many had been pushing for Java to become an open source language, this move would seem to further segment the development environments into three camps:

Java / Oracle DB
Microsoft .Net / SQL Server
Open source languages (PHP/Python/Ruby) / MySQL (or other alternatives like SQLite)

It will be interesting on where this all leads...

Another Year of Browsing Stats

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:23:00 +0000

Last year I put together some web stats from Market Share and The Counter showing the trends in browsers stats for the previous year. With another year passed its time to look at how 2008 shaped up.

Web Browsers
First the browser stats. As you can see from the data below 2008 continued the transition from Internet Explorer 6 to 7. This year the rate was much slower with only 6.2% more IE 7 users ending the year than started it. With a 14.7% loss, IE 6 dropped much faster than IE 7 grew as many people moved to Firefox. Last year I thought IE 6 would virtually disappear as a mainstream browsers. The transition rate slowed, however, and IE 6 still has a 20.5% market share and will need to be included in browser testing of web sites for some time.

Both Firefox and Safari almost doubled their rate of growth from last year. Firefox grew 4.6% this year and Safari had a 2.3% rate for 2008. Most of the Safari growth appears to come from new Mac users whose operating system had the same 2.3% growth rate.

Google's new Chrome browser hit the charts in September and rocketed to an impressive 1% market share in the last four months of the year.

The gains in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome came at the cost of IE, which lost 7.8% last year across all versions.

For web development "web standards compliant browsers" continue to grow quickly with a 14.1 % increase for the year. Web standards compliant browsers is a very loosely defined term that means the browsers follow a generally accepted HTML and CSS standards that allow developers to develop sites in a standard way without a lot of hacks and browser specific CSS. I include Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and late models of Netscape in that category.

Browser	Dec '07	Dec '08	Change
Internet Explorer (all versions)	76.0%	68.2%	-7.8%
Internet Explorer 7.0	40.6%	46.8%	+6.2%
Internet Explorer 6.0	35.2%	20.5%	-14.7%
Internet Explorer 5.0 & 5.5	0.2%	0.1%	-0.1%
Firefox (all versions)	16.8%	21.4%	+4.6%
Safari (all versions)	5.6%	7.9%	+2.3%
Netscape (all versions)	0.7%	0.6%	-0.1%
Opera (all versions)	0.6%	0.7%	+0.1%
Chrome (all versions)	0.0%	1.0%	+1.0%
Standards Compliant Browsers	64.3%	78.4%	+14.1%

Operating Systems
Windows users continue to switch from Windows XP to Vista. Vista grew at 10.6% this year which was virtually identical as the growth last year. Windox XP is still the majority of users with 65.2% of the market, but XP and older versions of Windows continue to decline. More people switched from Windows to other platforms and Windows as a whole dropped 3.1% for the year.

Apple's OS X had an even better year than 2007, increasing their market share 2.3% over the year. With a total market share of 9.6%, Macs are about to cross into double digits for the first time ever. Apple has certainly come a long way from the 2.3% market share I recorded at the beginning of 2005.

Linux on the desktop continues to grow slowly. With a 0.3% growth Linux has reached 0.9% of the market in 2008.

Even with the large number of smart phones with good browsers that were released for the year, the iPhone completely eclipses all other phones in web usage. The iPhone trippled its growth this year with a 0.3% increase. Cell phone web browsing continue to be very small percentage of the overall web browsing audience, however, and the iPhone only represents 0.4% of the overall market.

Operating System	Dec '07	Dec '08	Change
Windows (all versions)	91.7%	88.6%	-3.1%
Windows Vista	10.5%	21.1%	+10.6%
Windows XP	76.9%	65.2%	-11.7%
Windows 2000	2.7%	1.5%	-1.2%
Windows NT	0.6%	0.3%	-0.3%
Windows 95/98/ME	1.1%	0.4%	-0.7%
Mac OS X (all versions)	7.3%	9.6%	+2.3%
Linux (all versions)	0.6%	0.9%	+0.3%
iPhone	0.1%	0.4%	+0.3%

Screen Resolution
It's virtually impossible to buy a new computer today that doesn't have a resolution of at least 1024x768 and that is born out in the numbers for the year. Now 92.5% of people have that resolution or higher and I expect that virtually all web sites will be designed for 1024 in 2009. Now its time to start looking at when web sites can be designed for a 1,280 or higher resolution. Here in January 2009 the percentage is already 55.0%.

Resolution	Dec '07	Dec '08	Change
800x600 or better	99.9%	99.9%	+0.0%
1024x768 or better	90.8%	92.5%	+1.7%

The Rise of the Real Mobile Internet, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:07:00 +0000

Over a year ago I wrote about how people want their mobile phones to render web pages just like their computer browsers. At the time the iPhone was pretty much the only phone doing a good job of this. Other cell phone manufacturers were delivering a huge range of mobile browsers that were often very limited and varied widely from phone to phone.

What a difference a year makes. Now virtually every smart phone has a competant web browser built in, most of which are using the same rendering engines as desktop browsers. Gizmodo recently tested the major cell phone brands out there including the iPhone, Android, LG Dare, BlackBerry Bold, Nokia E71 Symbian S60, Samsung Instinct, and Samsung Epix Windows Mobile 6.1 (with IE and Opera). While there was variations in speed and some rendering problems all of the phone did a good job rendering pages with one exception: Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 6.1. Gizmodo gave IE a failing score on every test and a score of "Utter Fail" on four of the seven tests. Hopefully Microsoft will rectify their poor performance with Windows Mobile 7.

These testing result are a big win for web developers who can now focus on make pages that work on major desktop browsers and not worry about the chaotic mobile browser environment that characterized the industry last year. It's also a huge win for mobile phone users who can surf the web from the phones with confidence.

Amazon Launches Content Delivery Network

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:51:00 +0000

Amazon launched its CloudFront content delivery network today. This is alternative to services such as Akamai at a lower price.

Content delivery networks are a great way to serve up large files such as videos and downloads from your site that might overwhelm your servers or exhaust your bandwidth otherwise. Viral marketing campaign materials are also a great choice for content delivery networks as they can have huge spikes in demand and these services can scale up to handle the demand much easier than your web server. Your files are served up from Amazon's servers instead of your own and you pay for the bandwidth at a rate of 9 to 17 cents per gigabyte.

Turning bugs into marketing opportunities

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:39:00 +0000

Electronic Arts (EA) had a bug in the latest Tiger Woods golf game that allows Tiger to walk on water to hit a ball sitting on the top of a pond which became known as the “Jesus Shot”. EA took a creative approach on how to respond and created what is sure to be a viral video bringing more attention to the game. Joystiq has an article talking about it which includes the video.

Engadget's switch: The case for iPhone formatted pages

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:35:00 +0000

Engadget, the immensely popular tech blog, had followed the standard best practices and created a mobile version of their site for all cell phone users. They had many requests for iPhone optimized versions of the site, but stuck with the concept that they shouldn’t have separate versions of the site for different mobile devices.

Then they ran the numbers... They discovered that 95.8% of all of their mobile web traffic is coming from iPhones and the similar iPod Touch. That changed their mind and they just released their iPhone optimized version.

It’s certainly something to keep in mind when considering building a website with a mobile version.

See their posting about it which includes the breakdown of their mobile traffic.

Firefox 3 Arives

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:52:00 +0000

The next round of the browser wars started yesterday with the release of Firefox 3.0. This version includes many user interface improvements such as a much more powerful address bar to one click bookmarking of sites. Behind the scenes its faster and uses less memory than Firefox 2. This version pushes web standards further and completely passes the Acid 2 browser test.

Mozilla wanted to set the record for most downloads in a day and may have got more than they bargained for when their servers were overloaded and went down for two hours yesterday.

I'm blogging this from within Firefox 3 and my initial reactions are very positive. It's a great choice to make as the primary browser for virtually anyone.

Blu-Ray wins the format war

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:38:00 +0000

For years the two competing formats of Blu-Ray and HD DVD have battled over the market to replace DVD's. Both offer high-definition resolutions so movies look fabulous on that new high def TV. Unfortunately the consumers have been the looser in this war and they have stayed away from purchasing anything until a clear winner emerged.

Within the last month, however, a number of announcements dramatically and decisively shifted the balance in favor of Blu-Ray. For a long time the studios were split with some offering only HD DVD movies, some offering only Blu-Ray movies and some offering both. But with Warner's departure of the HD DVD camp, Universal letting their HD DVD exclusivity contract expire, only Paramount remains in the HD DVD camp and even then there are many rumours of Paramount's departure. To top it off, Netflix announced today that they are dropping HD DVD. Clearly the writing is on the wall and Blu-Ray's win is ensured. Consumers can now start purchasing hi-def drives without fear and we can see the adoption rate increase. The real question is whether this is really all too late and whether consumers will skip hi def drives entirely and go straight to downloadable movies. Only time will tell.

A Year of Browsing Stats

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 18:48:00 +0000

I always like looking at stats to see where we've been and where we are going and the beginning of a new year is a great time to do that. Since I work in web development, I've pulled a bunch of stats for the last year from Market Share and The Counter. These represent numbers seen at a wide variety of web sites across the world in 2007.

Web Browsers
First the browser stats. As you can see from the data below 2007 was all about the transition from Internet Explorer 6 to 7 for most PC users. The rate rose quickly at first and then leveled off and then as Microsoft added it to the critical upgrade list the rate of growth has increased again. 2008 should see IE6 virtually disappear as a mainstream browser.

At the same time both Firefox and Safari continued their slow climb in market share with 2.6% and 1.4% increases respectively. These gains came at the cost of Microsoft, which lost 3.6% for all versions of Internet Explorer during the year.

For web development one of the most exciting trends is the dramatic rise of web standards compliant browsers. This very loosely defined term means the browsers follow a generally accepted HTML and CSS standards that allow developers to develop sites in a standard way without a lot of hacks and browser specific CSS. I include Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and late models of Netscape in that category. While IE7's support is not perfect it is dramatically better than IE6 and the adoption of IE7 has accounted for most of the growth in the standard compliant browsers category.

Browser	Dec '06	Dec '07	Change
Internet Explorer (all versions)	79.6%	76.0%	-3.6%
Internet Explorer 7.0	18.3%	40.6%	+22.3%
Internet Explorer 6.0	60.7%	35.2%	-25.5%
Internet Explorer 5.0 & 5.5	0.8%	0.2%	-0.6%
Firefox (all versions)	14.2%	16.8%	+2.6%
Safari (all versions)	4.2%	5.6%	+1.4%
Netscape (all versions)	0.9%	0.7%	-0.2%
Opera (all versions)	0.9%	0.6%	-0.3%
Standards Compliant Browsers	38.4%	64.3%	+25.9%

Operating Systems
Operating Systems are always a mater of intense, and often near religious, debate and the numbers are interesting to see. Old versions of Windows continue their slow decline into obscurity. And despite all of the talk of Vista users "downgrading" to XP, we've see Windows Vista grow to over 10% of the web audience since its release in January. That growth came at the expense of Windows XP, however, and Windows as a whole dropped 2.1% over the the year as more people bought Macintoshes.

Apple's OS X had a good year, increasing their market share 1.6% over the year and they are now up to 7.3%. What is particularly interesting is that most of that growth happened in the late in the year. Whether this trend continues into early 2008 or tappers off until the next Christmas buying season will be interesting to see.

Linux still struggles to make much impact on the desktop and only had a 0.2% increase to 0.6% for the year.

While the numbers are still very low at 0.1% its interesting to see the iPhone has grown from nothing to the 4th most popular operating system since the end of June, surpassing all other smart cell operating systems for web browsing.

Operating System	Dec '06	Dec '07	Change
Windows (all versions)	93.8%	91.7%	-2.1%
Windows Vista	0.2%	10.5%	+10.3%
Windows XP	85.3%	76.9%	-8.4%
Windows 2000	5.0%	2.7%	-2.3%
Windows NT	0.7%	0.6%	-0.1%
Windows 95/98/ME	2.7%	1.1%	-1.6%
Mac OS X (all versions)	5.7%	7.3%	+1.6%
Linux (all versions)	0.4%	0.6%	+0.2%
iPhone	-	0.1%	+0.1%

Screen Resolution
It's virtually impossible to buy a new computer today that doesn't have a resolution of at least 1024x768 and that is born out in the numbers for the year. Now almost 91% of people have that resolution or higher and I expect that virtually all web sites will be designed for 1024 in 2008.

Resolution	Dec '06	Dec '07	Change
800x600 or better	99.8%	99.9%	+0.1%
1024x768 or better	85.6%	90.8%	+5.2%

Netscape is dead

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:42:00 +0000

AOL announced today that they will be dropping support for the Netscape browser on Feb 1, 2008. Netscape used to be main competitor to Internet Explorer and the two browsers fought for market dominance for many years. Netscape finally lost that battle and has been fading into obscurity for many years with current market share figures for Netscape at a minuscule 0.6%. With this announcement AOL has finally pulled the plug on the browser and is recommending remaining Netscape users to adopt Firefox. The Netscape.com portal web site will continue to operate.

IE8 on Acid

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:09:00 +0000

Microsoft announced that an internal build of Internet Explorer 8 passed the Acid2 test. The Acid2 test was created by the Web Standards Project as a standard test that makers of web browsers could use to test if their browsers had achieved a high degree of standards compliance.

Until that time there was some variance on what "standards compliant" browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Safari would display for a given page. Worst of all Internet Explorer 6 had many standards compliance issues, but it was hard to define an authoritative list of what they should fix in the next release. The Acid2 test provided a target for everyone to use and easily test.

Internet Explorer 7 came much closer, but still failed the test. Opera and Safari soon released versions that passed the test and the upcoming Firefox 3 will also pass the test. With today's news on Internet Explorer 8, all major browsers will pass the test. This means we should be entering a world where pages look the same on all browsers (at least whenever IE8 is released and widely adopted) and that is a great thing for web developers and the Internet.

Web 2.0 - Bah Humbug!

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:01:00 +0000

Jakob Nielsen just released and article entitled Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous that shows all is not perfect in the world of Web 2.0. There are downsides to rushing to implement Web 2.0 features in your site without thinking it through.

1024 is the new 800

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:53:00 +0000

For a long time the common wisdom has been that web sites should be designed to fit on a screen with a resolution of 800x600. Most new computers have higher resolutions and as of November the places we check for global Internet statistics show that 90.3% of users have a screen resolution of 1024x768 or higher.

While we have been doing some sites designed for 1024 already, 90% is the threshold where I feel you can always design for that size. Those with smaller screens are still able to use these sites. They may just need to scroll horizontally a little bit.

These are global numbers. You may find the numbers are higher or lower for your particular industry. As always the best option is to utilize a site analytic program on your own site to see what people are using.

Email Standards Project

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:58:00 +0000

Anyone who has developed HTML emails of any complexity will tell you its an incredibly painful process. The email may look completely different depending on whether the recipient views the email in Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Lotus Notes, or any of the dozens of other programs and email websites. While web development is moving swiftly to web standards that work the same on all browsers, it's the wild west when it comes to emails. As a result we are forced to go back to 'old school' table-based HTML with font tags just to get any kind of consistency in how they look. With that in mind the folks over at the Web Standards Project are starting up the Email Standards Project to try and bring the same level of standards to HTML emails that we see on the web. Here's hoping that they are wildly successful.

The Rise of the Social Media Newsroom

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:19:00 +0000

In today's Internet based society if the press, or anyone else for that matter, comes across your company the first thing they do is pull up your website. Unfortunately, many websites have vital information scattered everywhere. Most people, and especially the media, are always in a hurry and if they can't find what they want quickly, they'll leave your site and you will have lost an opportunity to get out your message.

Vince Bank from our media department brought up the concept of a Social Media Newsroom which has been a big hit at Optiem. It's a page on your site that provides all of the information the media wants in one place. I could try to explain it more, but the best way to understand it is to look at a Social Media Newsroom prototype we built. It's a simple, but powerful idea that is already catching on with our clients. It won't be long before I expect to see media newsrooms on almost all corporate web sites.

It's definitely a Web 2.0 concept and uses other Web 2.0 technologies such as focus clouds, RSS, AJAX, and microformats.

The Rise of the Real Mobile Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:19:00 +0000

Up until recently the world of mobile Internet access has been horrible. You generally had to use primitive browsers on cell phones that don't render pages anything like they appear on your computer. Seemingly each phone displayed pages differently making mobile development a very painful process. Most web developers avoided making mobile versions of their sites and most cell phone users failed to see any reason to pay an extra $30-40 a month for a data plan to suffer through this experience.

The verdict is in. People don't want this crippled Internet. They want the "real" Internet. They want pages that look the same as they do on their computer.

A number of recent devices are helping to make this possible. One of the biggest selling points of Apple's iPhone with includes a full version of their Safari browser. At the same time Opera is offering Opera Mobile and Opera Mini to give a full browsing experience to many cell phones.

Then earlier this month Apple released its iPod Touch. Basically an iPhone without the phone, it retains the iPhone's ability to surf the web on a full version of Safari over any available Wi-fi connection opening the door to many other mobile entertainment devices having full Internet access.

This trend is only going to gain strength as more and more devices add these capabilities and people are drawn to what we see. Just as TiVo users can't conceive of going back to a world without time-shifted TV, you won't be able to conceive of not being able to access anything on the Internet from anywhere in the world. This is the real mobile Internet that is just beginning to take off.

Silverlight Released

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:07:00 +0000

Microsoft released Silverlight on Sept. 4th. This "Flash-killer" from Microsoft has gotten a lot of press. Most of it has been focused on how it competes with Flash for the animation and graphical affects for which Flash is normally used on the web. In many ways I see this side of Silverlight being the least interesting and least chance of success for the tool. Flash owns this market and creative people gravitate to Adobe, not Microsoft, for creative tools. With every computer coming with Flash and Silverlight requiring and installation, I can't see Microsoft getting much traction for a long time to come.

I think this focus, however, misses the greatest potential of the technology, the .Net Framework that underlies the tool. While Adobe has tried hard to woo developers to its camp with increasingly advanced Flash development tools, they haven't had much traction. At the same time Microsoft has a huge percentage of the developer market with its .Net framework. Silverlight includes a major subset of the .Net framework, making Silverlight development an easy transition to .Net programmers. This along with the cross-browser/cross-platform nature of Silverlight (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari/Windows, Mac, and Linux) open the door to really powerful and sophisticated applications on the web. Everything from web based word processors and spreadsheets to sofficisticated airline booking systems and event registration systems could be built on such a framework with much more intuitive interfaces than are possible with even the latest AJAX tools.

There are still many challenges ahead for Silverlight including getting enough users to install it and the SEO and bookmarking issues that already affect Flash, but it holds some strong possibilities and is worth following.

Next Visual Studio includes powerful new query capability

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:29:00 +0000

The next version of Visual Studio, currently called “Orcas”, includes a new technology called Language Integrated Query (LINQ). This technology lets you query objects in your code, controls on a page, or XML documents just as you would query a database. You can even do queries across between different types of objects in a single statement. If it works as well as promised, it would completely change the mindset on how to solve problems. No longer would we have to put on our SQL query mindset to get database information and our object oriented classes mindset for getting information from objects in our code.

MSDN Magazine has two recent articles on it. http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/06/VBLINQ/default.aspx shows how LINQ works using Visual Basic.Net. http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/06/CSharp30/default.aspx is a C# article diving into how Microsoft evolved the query language to what it is now.

How Not to Manage your Corporate Reputation: Apple MacBook Pro Crashes

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:41:00 +0000

My wife recently bought one of the very cool Apple MacBook Pro's. She had a Macintosh before, but this was her first laptop and she was ecstatic with the computer and the ability to work outside on the deck. It wasn't long, however, before things started turning sour. She started seeing crashes when she was surfing wirelessly. They weren't just 'restart Firefox' crashes. They were nasty 'the cursor won't even move and you have to power down the whole laptop and loose everything' crashes.

My wife called AppleCare and they had her try a number of things that didn't resolve the problem. In the meantime we started doing Internet searches and going through Apple's discussion forums. We looked at many discussions and found a thread that exactly described our problem. It was filled with many angry people with the same problem. While a fix isn't yet out, it looks like the problem has been isolated to a driver problem with the integrated wireless in the new Santa Rosa generation MacBook Pros. The problem occurs when using the laptop with third party wireless routers when wireless encryption is turned on (generally WPA). Ironically, the same laptops work perfectly when running Windows in Boot Camp. Apparently the fix is in testing and should be released shortly.

While it isn't good that the problem completely crashes the laptop, I understand the difficultly in catching and resolving driver issues when the hardware keeps changing and the problem only appears when working with third party routers. I do think, however, that this is a case study in how not to manage your corporate reputation.

Here was a thread on Apple's own discussion board. It has 708 replies and had been viewed 24,700 times! At the same time, no one at Apple made a single reply to the discussion. The posters' frustration was palpable and growing by the day. Apple's support was replacing computers, but since the problem is a software driver, people were sometimes on their third laptop and still having the same problem. Some posters openly talked about being disillusioned with Apple and returning to Windows Vista laptops which they described as crashing much less frequently. Beyond these very public discussion forums, the problem moved out into the blogosphere. One blogger posted each step of trying to resolve the problem in his blog with it ending up with him returning the Mac and getting a Lenovo Windows laptop. The story has also reached Digg. All of this leaves a stain on Apple's reputation as being the the more stable alternative to Windows. All of this content will be floating through the Internet for years to come for people to find. Already posters said they were about to buy a MacBook Pro and didn't because they found this thread. All of this happened without a word from Apple.

In today's Internet this content is constantly indexed and bloggers bring these issues to light. A policy of ignoring the problem publicly does much more harm than good for the company.

Imagine if Apple had employees reading through the discussion boards and external blogs for serious problems. They could have reported the issue with the engineering department to make sure they were aware of it and get a status update. They could have then posted in the forums or other areas where it is being discussed. Just a message saying 'We are getting reports on the problem and checking into it', followed later by a post saying 'It's a driver issue. We are working on a fix and should have it out soon' would have made a huge difference. It has been the silence of Apple that has been driving people away. As new people reported this problem on the Internet, others who followed the thread would tell them 'Hang on. A batch is coming.' Apple would also have to deal with fewer returned laptops as people would wait for the patch. The whole tone of the discussion would change a much more positive one. In the future as people come across this content, they would also see Apple's quick and positive response.

As is the case so often, it's not whether you have a problem. It's how you handle the problem that makes all of the difference.

Google introduces Custom Search Business Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Brent McLean) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:19:00 +0000

Google had been offering their Custom Search Engine that enables you to fully incorporate Google into your site, but if you were a for-profit organization you would see advertising which is unacceptable for must companies.

Google has now just released their Custom Search Business Edition. As a business you can now pay $100/yr for up to 500 pages or $500/yr for up to 50,000 pages to use the search and have no ads.

There are other hosting solutions like PicoSearch that fall in the middle of the range and provide a little more control of the spidering and administration, but on the low end it can be a good solutions for companies with small sites to add a powerful search engine to their sites.