XML Aficionado

Team collaboration and project management: the need for a new cloud-based approach

2012-05-18T13:08:00.001-04:00

The reality of any form of collaboration on a project in today's world is that teams are faced with increasingly complex challenges and are more distributed than ever before. This is certainly true for any software development or IT project, where you might have people from different departments and locations collaborating with outside service providers, consultants, customers, or even out-sourcing firms. And it is also true for any other form of project management in the real world, such as construction projects where you have architects, builders, LEED consultants, engineers, and many contractors and sub-contractors working together.

We hear about these challenges from our customers every day, and I've seen the issues first-hand over the past four years when I undertook a house restoration project to revitalize an 1899 coastal home that had been in disrepair for almost fifty years and we turned it into an energy-efficient green building that achieved LEED For Homes Silver certification. And these collaboration problems are certainly not limited to the software or construction industries - barriers to efficient communication and confusion about roles and responsibilities are a universal issue that plague projects across a broad range of industries and disciplines.

There are several essential pieces that need to come together to enable a distributed team to collaborate effectively and work efficiently:

Clear communication: all team members need to adopt a shared vocabulary and the same term needs to have the same meaning for everybody. Especially when people are in different locations or come from different backgrounds, any miscommunication can become very costly.
Central knowledge base: teams have started to adopt wikis and similar content management tools in greater numbers, because they provide an easy way for team members to capture and record any knowledge about the project so that it can easily be shared with others.
Goal-oriented management of to-dos and task assignments: teams need a way to delegate and monitor assignments, deadlines, and task statuses, allowing each member to stay informed via personalized to-do lists, views, and e-mail notifications.
Clearly defined roles and responsibilities: as the team grows, people need a single location for managing team roles, responsibilities, and members. When team members have clearly defined roles and responsibilities, they have the autonomy and focus necessary to complete project tasks.
Proper decision making process: to make decisions appropriately and to document the outcome of every decision as well as the thought process that went into it, the team needs a tool that facilitates decision making by lending structure and transparency to the process. Structured decision making is more efficient, more inclusive, and generates more sustainable outcomes.

Our vision was to provide all these essential components in one easy-to-use cloud-based application. That's why we created MetaTeam and started making it available as a free public beta this week:

MetaTeam is a different kind of project management tool. Designed to support the entire team – not just the project manager – MetaTeam fosters collaboration and promotes a sense of ownership among all project stakeholders. MetaTeam’s individual apps provide all the essential features discussed above to help your team create an environment of transparency and information accessibility.

No matter if you are part of a virtual team, or collaborate with others just within one organization - you need a cloud-based service for project management and efficient team collaboration that can be easily accessed from any device, any computer, any network, and any organization.

While there are already many other online to-do list services around, and even some more elaborate project management systems, most of them lack the essential Glossary and Decision Making components, and none of them provide all the essential components in one place. That's what makes MetaTeam so unique and, therefore, makes teamwork in MetaTeam so productive and rewarding!

For a quick two minute introduction to MetaTeam, please watch the above video, or you can go directly to metateam.net to read more about the different apps in more detail or view the video in a larger window and HD quality.

Once you have done that, click the sign-up button on metateam.net to create your own free beta account and start using MetaTeam for your next project.

The Emperor's New Clothes - a "New iPad" Review in a "Post-PC World"

2012-03-19T12:07:00.000-04:00

As I've mentioned on this blog before, I love gadgets and usually am an early adopter of the latest and greatest toys that tech companies produce and I often share my opinions about these devices with the world. I bought the original Kindle, the Kindle 2, the Kindle Fire, all generations of the iPhone, various Droids, the Xoom, the original iPad, the iPad 2, and now… the new iPad.

When Apple did their big announcement on March 7th, I immediately went online that afternoon, pre-ordered one in the largest configuration (WiFi+4G 64GB), and it arrived yesterday afternoon. I am not going to repeat the benefits and new features of the device, since they've been aptly covered by Walt Mossberg and many others. And the new screen with its super-high resolution is really stunning.

Instead, I wanted to put Tim Cook's claim that this is now a "post-PC world" to the test and decided to set up my new iPad without connecting it to either PC or Mac and use my iCloud backup of the old iPad 2 to set up the new iPad.

Restore from iCloud

To prepare for the migration from my iPad 2 to the new iPad I made sure that I had previously upgraded my iPad 2 to the latest version 5.1 of iOS and also completed a backup to iCloud over my Wi-Fi network at home on the previous day.

I also should probably say at this point that my home Wi-Fi network is 802.11 g+n and my home is connected to the Internet via a Verizon FIOS connection at 50 Mbps. Therefore, running SpeedTest or similar apps on iPhones or iPads typically report latencies of only 64ms, downstream bandwidths of 17-18 Mbps and upstream bandwidths of 16-17 Mbps on the home Wi-Fi network. So by any means, this is not a slow network. One would think that this is the ideal environment for iCloud to shine in a "post-PC world".

After unpacking the new iPad and attaching the cover I started it up, connected it to my home Wi-Fi network, and entered my Apple ID to connect to my iCloud account. As expected, the iPad offered me the choice to restore from iCloud or to restore via iTunes on my computer. I elected to put the iCloud Restore to the test.

To my initial great delight, the iPad showed a download progress bar, and after a short period of 2-3 minutes proceeded to restart the device, show another progress bar underneath the Apple logo, and completed the whole process in about 5 minutes.

Or did it?

When the iPad came back from its reboot, all my apps were in their usual places, but every single one of them had an empty progress bar underneath. And then I was greeted with a rather unspecific message that said "Restore Incomplete":

Not only did the message not inform me of which apps or what data I would be missing, it also left me with the uneasy feeling that this was perhaps not restricted to just apps, because it said "Some items could not be downloaded".

I was still optimistic that all the apps would now quickly download and I could start using my new iPad soon. However, as it turns out the entire process of restoring all the apps from my iCloud backup took more than 3½ hours. Given that I have about 22GB of apps on my iPad and the available network bandwidth mentioned above, the process should have taken less than half and hour!

4G LTE Activation

The next step was to activate the new high-speed 4G LTE data network option. Based on my poor experience with AT&T activations in the past, I decided to go with Verizon this time around. Furthermore, I was looking forward to using the iPad as a mobile hotspot, and presently only Verizon is offering that feature at no extra cost.

After entering all my credit card data and choosing the 5GB data plan, the iPad informed me that it would take up to 15 minutes to activate the new data plan. What really happened after about 5 minutes, however, was that I got the following "Data Plan Activation Failure" message:

A second attempt to "Try Again" just produced the same message after a several minutes of no information and no progress bars. On my third attempt I then got this rather interesting message about the need to "reprovision" my device:

I followed the steps prescribed in this screenshot and was soon greeted my another cryptic message - this one more surprising than all of the others before, because I had not touched the SIM card slot at all and so the card was most definitely still there:

Indeed, after another 15-20 minutes or so, the problem disappeared entirely on its own, the iPad finally connected to the 4G network and also properly activated the data plan. As a next step I wanted to see how fast the 4G network really is…

4G LTE Performance

Living on the Boston Northshore, I've always had network coverage issues in certain rooms in my home, so for this test I went to a window in the attic facing in the direction of the closest cell phone towers and was rewarded with 3 out of 5 bars of LTE signal strength. I ran the trusted old SpeedTest app and to my great delight found downstream bandwidths of 17-18 Mbps, which is indeed as fast as the Wi-Fi connections at my house. Network latency was a bit poorer with 117ms vs. the 64ms on Wi-Fi, and upstream bandwidth was much lower as expected. By comparison, on my iPhone on AT&T's HSPA+ network in this area (which now also shows up as "4G" on the iPhone, even though it is technically just 3G) I get downstream speeds of 2.8 Mbps and upstream speeds of 1.1 Mbps with a latency of 181ms. So these LTE speeds are indeed about 6 times faster than typical 3G speeds and that is quite impressive.

Next I wanted to put it to the real test and download an app over 4G. I picked Infinity Blade II - one of the new apps that were just recently released and optimized for the new high-resolution "retina" display. Imagine my surprise when I got the following message on my screen:

The astonishing thing about this is that Verizon advertises their LTE network with the words "Verizon 4G LTE means real-time responsiveness. Apps. Games. Movies. Seamless streaming". And even though I just signed up for a 5GB data plan they are not letting me download a 791MB game? I could certainly understand the need for a warning message that would advise people that this game has a certain size and ask them if they were sure they wanted to download it over LTE. But to not allow them to download it at all makes little sense.

Similarly, as has already been mentioned in various other blogs it is not quite understandable why FaceTime would not work over the LTE network:

More specifically, there is no technical reason for this arbitrary restriction. As I now have an iPad 2 and the new iPad, I was easily able to turn on the Personal Hotspot feature on the new iPad, create a Wi-Fi network from it, then connect my old iPad 2 to that Wi-Fi network an successfully make a FaceTime video call to Europe from the iPad 2. So the LTE network is easily able to carry the data traffic for FaceTime.

So it seems that while the new iPad does indeed shine technologically on the LTE data speeds as well as the beautiful screen resolution, the whole "post-PC world" hype is to a large degree bogus and it will take quite a while until even the new iPad can be used to its full power on the LTE network.

Some will probably argue that the "post-PC world" meme is not just about smartphones and tablet becoming untethered from computers and directly connecting to the cloud. The idea is supposedly that you can now do certain things on the tablet that required a computer just a few years ago. However, if you look at what the best-selling applications on tablets actually do, then you quickly find that 95% of them are games and the remainder are mostly social media apps or consumer-level tools for editing photos, videos, or organizing personal to-do lists.

For example, while the iPad versions of iMovie and iPhoto are certainly impressive and give people the ability to edit their photos a bit, they are at best useful for hobbyists and when you look at the features available they simply cannot even being to compare to the state of the art of professional photo or video editing tools that exist on computers today.

Summary and Clarification

Just to clarify, I really enjoy using iPads, and continue to believe they are great media consumption devices. I love to read books on them. I love to read magazines and newspapers on them. I even watch the occasional movie or play a game. And for all these purposes, the improved screen resolution of the new iPad as well as the 4G LTE network capabilities are fabulous improvements.

But for any expression of creativity, for software development, for photography, for cinematography, for journalism, blogging, marketing, science, engineering, architecture, … in other words for any serious work … tablets are somewhere between mediocre to useless. For all of these fields the PC - be it Windows, MacOS, or Linux based - has been and will be the essential tool of any creative mind. Therefore, I firmly resent the hubris of people proclaiming this to be a "post-PC world".

The reality distortion field

It is amazing to see the efficiency of the Apple PR machinery at work and how all major newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to the NY Times are praising the new iPad and giving its launch such huge coverage. And all the bloggers are doing their part to extol the virtues of the new features by endlessly repeating the same mantra: "insane Retina screen resolution, faster GPU, 4G LTE, same long battery life".

Apparently the reality distortion field is alive and well, even after Steve Jobs has passed away.

But doesn't anyone see that the emperor is wearing nothing at all?

Postscriptum

P.S. Kudos to Joe Brockmeier of ReadWriteWeb for publishing a critical article last week on what we lose in a "post-PC" world.

P.P.S. For comparison purposes, I also set up my wife's new iPad yesterday and in her case used iTunes on her MacBook Pro to install it, activate, it, and restore the backup from her old iPad 1 via the computer. The entire process worked seamlessly with none of the errors I encountered and was completed in about half an hour. She was happy to read her email, go on Facebook, and play Boggle on her new iPad in no time, while I was still waiting for hours for my "Restore from iCloud" to complete…

Fun with EPUB

2012-02-23T10:38:00.001-05:00

Release 2 of the Altova MissionKit 2012, which was announced today, adds tons of new features to various products in the MissionKit, including EPUB support in XMLSpy.

Since there has been a lot of recent press and blog coverage of Apple's iBooks Author program, I wanted to point out that an open standards-based alternative exists in the form of EPUB and that we at Altova are fully committed to supporting such open standards.

EPUB is published by the <idpf>, the International Digital Publishing Forum, and is widely supported by various manufacturers and on many devices. The standard is based on XHTML, CSS, SVG, and other well-known web standards and a huge volume of freely available EPUB books already exist today.

From "The Canterville Ghost" by Oscar Wilde, 1906

Let me point out a few useful resources for getting started with the EPUB standard and also outline the new EPUB capabilities in XMLSpy.

To consume EPUB documents, you will need a reader application for the device of your choice. On Windows 7 or MacOS X computers I would recommend Adobe Digital Editions, which is a free eBook reader applications that supports EPUB as well as PDF/A. On the iPhone or iPad you can simply use the standard iBooks app, which supports EPUB as well as PDF and the Apple-proprietary iBooks formats. On Android devices you can use Aldiko, and you can also read EPUB books on the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, and other devices directly.

There are many web sites dedicated to providing collections of free eBooks that you can download to get started, but I recommend Project Gutenberg, which was started by Michael Hart in 1971.

Now let's talk about EPUB support in XMLSpy. Essentially, an EPUB file is a ZIP archive that contains all necessary components in a compressed archive to reduce space. Within that archive is a navigation document, metadata, content documents, CSS stylesheets, as well as all required image files (for further details, please see the EPUB specification, which can be found here). When you open an EPUB file in XMLSpy you are able to view all the included components.

From this archive view you can now directly edit the CSS files as well as other XML-based navigation and content files and you can validate the entire EPUB package file using epubcheck directly from within XMLSpy as well as preview the publication in XMLSpy's built-in browser preview.

We are all keenly aware that the publishing industry is undergoing a radical change these days. People consume magazines and books increasingly via electronic devices rather than in print and in the process the books themselves transform into a more interactive reading experience than we had ever seen before. Having an open standard like EPUB available ensures that no one manufacturer or company can dominate the industry and it also allows us to preserve many existing books and make them widely available via organizations such as Project Gutenberg.

While my wife and I are collectors of printed books - the above photo is from our home library - I believe the march towards electronic books is inevitable. I am convinced that within the next few years we will see the huge shift in the industry continue and I hope that EPUB support in our products will allow people to create as well as consume electronic books in many ways.

HTML5, large-scale ETL, Java API, JDBC, MDA, and web differencing

2011-10-19T07:33:00.001-04:00

It is always a very exciting time of the year here at Altova when we reveal our latest major software version, and I am pleased to announce our MissionKit 2012 release today!

As always, we've packed a ton of exciting new features into this release and they span the entire product line.

So here it is in a nutshell - the cool "stuff" that is now available in version 2012:

Major enhancements for web developers

HTML5 is quite obviously the way to go and we now have full HTML5 support in both XMLSpy and StyleVision. In fact, XMLSpy's intelligent editing support and entry helpers make for super-fast web development in both HTML4 and HTML5 with support for previews in multiple different browsers. In addition, the CSS editor in XMLSpy now fully supports CSS3 in addition to CSS2, and we've added CSS3 support to StyleVision as well.

Another major feature for web developers is now available in DiffDog: Web Differencing! You will love the ability to do file differencing as well as directory comparisons between local directories and server directories accessed via FTP or HTTP. You can even do differencing between two servers! This takes a lot of pain out of deployments or keeping servers in sync, as well as helping greatly with moving to the cloud!

Support for large-scale ETL

ETL ("Extract-Transform-Load") projects as well as larger and more complicated data transformations and mappings are now a breeze with the new streaming support in MapForce. In addition to the existing streaming output capabilities, MapForce 2012 adds new streaming input capabilities that lets you process XML, CSV, and FLF text files as well as database rows with no limitation on size.

Major improvements to Java support

We've always supported Java application development, but the integration APIs for XMLSpy, MapForce, and other products got a major overhaul this time around with an all-new extended Java API that makes using our products from within Java applications a breeze, and there are now cool new code samples available to demonstrate the use of the new APIs.

In addition, we've added JDBC driver support to all our products that integrate with databases. This complements the existing ADO and ODBC drivers support nicely and provides for better performance and more integration options with some database servers.

Support for MDA

If you work with UML you are going to love the new UModel. We now support platform independent models that can be described without concern for the details of any specific programming language. This lets software architects focus exclusively on the logic of the subject domain rather than worry about the characteristics of any particular programming language.

Through the new Model Transformation selection in UModel you can then instantly transform into any supported language, such as Java, C#, Visual Basic, databases or XML Schema.

You can even apply Model Transformations to a project that has been reverse-engineered from existing source code. For example an existing Java application can be reverse-engineered by UModel to create a UML model and then transformed to generate C# classes. Imagine that!

But these are just the highlights - there are many more new features in this release! For more in-depth information, check out the Altova Blog as well as the What's New page on our website. And all of it is available immediately for downloading from our website.

Recent popular articles on the Altova Blog

2011-10-18T22:45:00.001-04:00

Just a quick pointer to make sure that you didn't miss any of the excellent articles that we published on the Altova Blog these past couple of months. These contain tips on using our products, helpful development pointers, use-cases, and much more. Here is a quick digest of some of the most popular articles…

Feel free to follow any of the links below to directly access the articles mentioned, or go to the Altova Blog home page to read more.

Software Testing for State Machines

Regardless of a software project's goals or source code language, it's obvious that the earlier a defect is found the easier, cheaper, and more rapidly it can be fixed. Altova UModel 2011 (r2 and beyond) can generate code from UML state machine diagrams that can be used to validate conceptual logic very early in the project lifecycle, potentially saving you days of development time.

Read the post ...

Switch Statement vs. Look-up Table in MapForce

One of the great things about working with software developers is that you get to see firsthand how they architect different solutions to design challenges. We recently received a comment from a developer in response to our post Expandable If-Else Works like a Switch Statement in MapForce suggesting a more elegant solution to an expanded if-else statement. He rather convincingly suggests that a value-map would accomplish the job more efficiently.

Read the post ...

New XML Schema Editing Tools in XMLSpy

XMLSpy is the industry's leading XML editor for a reason – XMLSpy delivers power and flexibility in the same package. Earlier this year Altova introduced additional functionalities including sorting in schema view, schema refactoring, intelligent support for changing types, and customizable XML Schema documentation. Wow!

Read the post ...

XML in the Cloud

More and more enterprises are discovering the advantages of implementing database applications in the cloud – high availability and reliability, automatic scaling, and freedom from hardware costs and maintenance requirements to name a few. In this blog post we demonstrate how to connect to the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and build a small database using Altova DatabaseSpy. Since the database Connection Wizard is consistent across the Altova MissionKit, you can connect the same way using XMLSpy, MapForce, or StyleVision as well.

Read the post ...

Using Charts to Effectively Communicate Data

XMLSpy, StyleVision, and DatabaseSpy have intuitive features that allow even the most novice user to create powerful reports with sophisticated charts based on XML, XBRL, and database data. With Altova tools you can easily create stacked charts (bar and area) and candlestick charts, use chart overlays, control background images and color gradients, change the position of axis labels, and more! See how you can leverage this functionality to support your own projects.

Read the post ...

A personal tribute to Steve Jobs

2011-10-07T10:57:00.001-04:00

I learned about the passing of Steve Jobs this Wednesday as I was in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld. I was munching on a cream puff from Beard Papa's on my way back to the hotel when the message popped up on my iPhone.

Image credit: Jonathan Mak (麥朗)

I was thunderstruck by the news and observed a moment of silence and remembering. While I only ever had the opportunity to meet Steve in person once at a talk he gave during his time at NeXT, he and the company he built have made a huge impact on my life in numerous ways.

It all started in the early eighties when I went to high school in Linz, Austria, and discovered my love for computers and learned how to program on the TRS-80 we had in school, on a Commodore PET that one of my friends owned, and an Apple II that was built into some laboratory equipment in my dad's organic chemistry lab at the JKU university.

In 1983 I bought my first computer, an Apple IIe, and two years later I bought my first Mac. It was through these two machines that I got deeper and deeper into programming, became a serious computer geek, and learned everything from BASIC to UCSD Pascal and assembly language for the 6502 and 68000 microprocessors. And I started working while still going to high school and wrote software for small businesses in the area to help finance the purchase of various computer upgrades, modems, printers, and other gadgets.

After high school I went on to study semiconductor and solid state physics at JKU university and continued to work part-time. During that time I worked as a teacher at a local computer camp for kids that offered sailing and programming instructions (on Apple II and Macintosh computers) over the summer, and I started working for Apple's Austrian subsidiary in Vienna, doing training for their reseller channel as well as participating in the founding of AMDA, the Austrian Macintosh Developer Association.

It was through that Apple connection in Vienna that I got the opportunity of a lifetime in 1988 when I was admitted into the summer-intern program at Apple's main campus in Cupertino. For three summers and one February break I contributed to various projects at Apple ranging from a modification of the Calculator desk accessory to support international number formats, modifying the internal disk image program that was then used to transfer operating system images from the Cupertino campus to the Fremont factory, to writing the 'KCHR' editor and numerous other modules for ResEdit. I made many great friends during those years and, in fact, just had dinner again with some of them last week in San Francisco.

What I had learned at Apple in those years profoundly influenced my life and kindled a love for elegant and powerful developer tools that continues to live on in what I do at Altova today. Ultimately, these three summers in California also played a significant role in my decision to relocate to the US in 2001 with my entire family and to become US citizens in early 2009.

My life would truly have been very different without the influences of Apple, it's products, and it's visionary founder.

Thank you, Steve.

Photo credit: Nora Falk

A life-changing software called “Lose It!”

2011-03-04T19:46:00.001-05:00

It is not often that I would give a piece of software the attribute “life-changing”. Certainly, XMLSpy and it’s huge success has changed my life and that of many people at Altova. And others have called DiffDog a life-saver before:

"DiffDog saved my life! Recordare developed MusicXML as an Internet-friendly format for publishing and sharing digital sheet music. As MusicXML became more popular, we needed a truly XML-aware differencing program to evaluate the XML files created by our Dolet plug-ins. DiffDog gives us the high quality regression testing tool that we had long sought for our MusicXML projects."
- Michael Good, CEO, Recordare

But the software I discovered on January 1^st this year is the one that best deserves this label. Like so many other years before, my New Year’s resolution this year was to finally lose some weight. And most every year that resolution didn’t last very long. In fact, over the past 17 years I had managed to gain just a few lbs every year – but those added up and ultimately got me from 200 lbs to about 291 lbs in over a decade. Not good.

But this year it was different. This year I discovered Lose It! – a nifty little iPhone app plus website – and started on a real weight-loss program (in combination with a consultation with my doctor). What Lose It! does is deceivingly simple: it helps you track your calories – both those taken in as food and those expended in the form of exercise.

But it doesn’t restrict you in your choices of what foods you can eat. Due to the tracking you quickly learn what is good for you and what isn’t, so you end up making healthy food choices automatically.

And over time your actual habits start changing. For example, when I now know that I have a big dinner with friends ahead of me, I always make sure to exercise right after work and build up a calorie-deficit going into the dinner. And the fact that you are counting calories with the iPhone app right at the dinner table helps you learn portion control and get back to eating in moderation.

As a result of that, Lose It! has enabled me to lose 25.2 lbs in the past 9 weeks. That’s just a little over 2.5 lbs per week, so it is a very healthy rate of weight-loss.

I still have a long way ahead of me and only time will tell if I can reach my goal on time. But I already feel a lot better and have a lot more energy. And it feels truly empowering and liberating to finally see those extra pounds disappear.

This post may sound like a commercial for the latest weight-loss fad, but it isn’t. In fact, I have no financial interest in the company behind Lose It! or their products. And the iPhone app is free. The only reason for me to blog about this is to (a) give a tip of the hat to the people who created Lose It! and (b) hopefully help a few other people get started on their way to a healthier weight.

Altova MissionKit packs a punch with new features in v2011r2

2011-03-03T16:37:00.001-05:00

I’ve been traveling for a bit, so I haven’t even had time to tell you about the new version 2011r2 of our Altova product line yet. As always we’ve been very busy in the past four months and have added a number of very cool features to all our products. As a result the Altova MissionKit v2011r2 packs a nice punch and shouldn’t be missing from any professional developer’s toolbox.

Here are the highlights among the new features:

Huge improvements in the charting functionality that we’ve originally introduced in v2011 with a wide range of new customizable charting features, including Stacked Bar Charts, Area Charts, Stacked Area Charts, Candlestick Charts, Chart overlays, Background images, Color gradients, and customizable axis labels.
Embedding external files in XML documents via CDATA blocks (supporting Base 16 and Base 64 encoding).
XML Schema refactoring in XMLSpy.
Customizable generation of documentation from XMLSpy, MapForce, and UModel via StyleVision stylesheets. This provides countless options to customize your documentation from adding your logo to creating a detailed in-depth report about your mappings or models for later analysis.
Data streaming for file output in MapForce for large ETL projects.
Support for IATA PADIS EDI format in MapForce.
Automatic creation of reverse mappings in MapForce.
Barcode support for QR, DataMatrix, PDF417, Codabar, Code39, and many other formats.
Ability to create multiple output files from a single design template in StyleVision.
Ability to create ASPX web applications for dynamic data output in StyleVision.
Support for BPMN 2.0 in UModel.
Code-generation from state machine diagrams in UModel.
Word comparison in DiffDog.

And there are many more additional features. Also make sure to check out the latest couple of posts on the Altova Blog that go into more detail.

As always, you can download a free 30-day trial version from our website and our tools are available in English, German, and Japanese versions – plus XMLSpy is also available in a Chinese version now.

Motorola Xoom a huge disappointment

2011-03-02T22:42:00.001-05:00

I couldn’t resist the temptation to get my hands on the first Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) device and wanted to explore the tablet world outside of iOS a bit, so I bought a Motorola Xoom the day it came out. I’ve now spent a couple of days with the device, downloaded apps, explored all the features, and come to the conclusion that the Motorola Xoom and Android 3.0 are a huge disappointment.

Let’s start with the Xoom hardware problems first:

It is rather heavy
The battery life is too short (about 5-6 hours rather than the 10 advertised)
The power-button is in the most ridiculous spot on the back of the device (next to the camera & flash)
The plastic snap-on cover is bulky and adds weight and thickness to it

Yes, the screen with HD resolution is nice. But that’s about the only thing that is better than the original iPad.

Now let’s talk about the Android 3.0 issues:

There are only about 16 apps available that are designed for an Android tablet form-factor. Robert Scoble goes into great detail on that issue in this blog post today.
When you run a few apps (and download some that are more designed for a phone) you inevitably arrive at a state, where the UI starts to feel sluggish – despite the dual-core CPU. The way that background applications can eat processor cycles and make your foreground application feel incredibly slow is a design flaw that I’ve already observed in the Motorola Droid a year ago. And it hasn’t been fixed in Android 3.0.
In using the device for a couple of hours, I got multiple apps to crash on me.
The Android app store is still extremely difficult to navigate and you cannot easily tell the good applications apart from the “me too” junk.
When connected to an Exchange server and trying to archive a piece of e-mail, the list of available folders is shown by flattening the entire folder hierarchy instead of displaying it properly. Therefore, I have to scroll down for 4-5 pages until I find the folder I need.
The idea to put widgets on the home screen that are more than just an icon is nice. But the implementation is ridiculous. There are plenty of apps that claim to be a widget, but all they are is an icon. Other apps, such as Twitter, have a widget view, but you cannot control the update frequency. With the CNN widget this leads to flickering and nervous screen updates. Then, when you tap on the widget, it takes forever to load the app and display the news.
Flash player isn’t available yet.
There is no movie availability other than YouTube. Nothing even remotely similar to the iTunes store where I can simply rent or buy a movie anytime.

I could go on for a long time. It is simply ridiculous how far from the truth the TV commercial for the Motorola Xoom is.

And, of course, now that the iPad 2 has been announced today, the Xoom looks even worse…

Watson 9000

2011-02-15T23:08:00.001-05:00

I’ve been watching Jeopardy – The IBM Challenge for the last two evenings and the Nova documentary “Smartest Machine on Earth” the week before. What the folks at the IBM Watson team have pulled together is really quite impressive. Not only is Watson in the lead so far – and by a huge margin – it has also taken a giant leap forward for natural language processing in computers.

From the early days of the Eliza program by Joseph Weizenbaum it has always been a challenge for computers to recognize and process human language (click here for a JavaScript version of Eliza that you can interact with). While we’ve made remarkable progress in speech recognition in the past couple of years, the actual ability to understand and interpret language has eluded even the most sophisticated computer systems.

Humans just have a tendency to use colorful phrases, idioms, pop-culture references, and mix it all with humor in a way that is difficult to grasp for a machine. Nevertheless the Watson team seems to have made great strides in tackling these difficult problems.

It was immediately obvious that Watson did best when the question was directly related to an encyclopedic fact, such as the various illnesses in the “Don’t worry about it” category tonight. But even with humorous categories like “Church & State”, Watson did fine. In fact, Watson didn’t just do fine tonight: he (it?) dominated this second day of the Jeopardy challenge finishing with a crazy lead of $36,881, to $5,400 for Rutter and $2,400 for Jennings before going into Final Jeopardy.

The big surprise, however, came in the Final Jeopardy round tonight, when the category was “U.S. Cities”. In response to the answer “This city’s largest airport is named for a World War II hero, and its second largest airport is named for a World War II battle”, Watson came up with “What is Toronto”, which is clearly not a US city, while the two human contestants both responded with the correct answer (What is Chicago? The airports are O’Hare and Midway). However, Watson was reasonably unsure about its answer and only wagered $749, so his loss was kept nicely under control. Clearly, there is something amiss in the interpretation of categories in Watson’s algorithms. It could potentially be as simple as a missing entry in a synonym table that equates “U.S.” with “US” and “USA”…

But we’ve seen that same weakness in the category interpretation also in various rounds of test games that we saw in the Nova documentary.

It remains to be seen how Watson fares tomorrow in the final round of Jeopardy. I will definitely be watching…

In any case, now it is just a simple matter of time until IBM shifts its company name one letter to the left and comes out with the next release of Watson, which will probably be called version 9000:

HAL 9000 responding to Dave Bowman in “2001: A Space Odyssey”

More commentary on Watson can be found on Techmeme, and in particular I recommend this article All Things Digital.

UPDATE: For an explanation of the “Toronto” incident by David Ferrucci, project manager for Watson, please see “The Confusion over an Airport Clue” on the IBM Smarter Planet blog.

Using Altova tools for Cloud Computing

2011-01-07T11:01:00.001-05:00

Obviously, cloud computing is one of the major trends of 2010 and continues to excite people. We just posted a brand new detailed article on the Altova Blog about XML in the Cloud that shows how to use DatabaseSpy, MapForce, XMLSpy, and StyleVision to work with an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instance in the cloud.

Essentially the Amazon RDS is a big MySQL database in the cloud, so you can use the Data Source connection wizard in all Altova tools to easily connect with the cloud instance, just like you would connect with a local instance of MySQL:

Similarly, in a previous post last summer we showed you how to configure Altova tools to work with a SQL Server Azure instance, if you prefer the Microsoft cloud computing platform. And in another post we showed you in detail how to work with XML data in SQL Server Azure.

Check out all three articles and see how easy it is to use Altova tools not just for your enterprise in-house or classic web development projects, but also for your cloud computing projects!

Microsoft files patent for shape-shifting touchscreen

2010-11-29T12:22:00.001-05:00

Every now and then a new technology comes about that has the potential to change the way how we interact with computers in a profound manner. The first computer mouse, the first touchscreen display, the first use of multi-touch – all paved the way for a new generation of user interfaces.

I believe we are now witnessing the introduction of the next such new technology. In a new US patent application 20100295820, which was published last week, Microsoft inventor Erez Kikin-Gil proposes a new way to construct a “tactile feedback” touchscreen. According to this new invention, a shape-memory polymer film is placed onto a computer display and UV light is used on a pixel-by-pixel basis to selectively change the topography of the surface.

While tactile feedback displays are nothing new per se, previous approaches by Nokia, Disney, and others had been using voltages of different frequencies to trick fingertips into experiencing some touch sensations. The huge disadvantage of such vibrotacticle displays, however, is the annoying humming sounds they emit. Which might be one reason why they were never widely successful.

The Microsoft invention completely circumvents that problem and proposes a radically different approach using UV lights and a plastic film that is using shape-memory polymer technology. Here is the abstract from the patent application:

“A light-induced shape-memory polymer display screen is provided herein. One example display device includes a display screen having a topography-changing layer including a light-induced shape-memory polymer. The display device further includes an imaging engine configured to project visible light onto the display screen, where the visible light may be modulated at a pixel level to form a display image thereon. The display device further includes a topography-changing engine configured to project agitation light of an ultraviolet band towards the display screen, where the agitation light is modulated at a pixel level to selectively change a topography of the topography-changing layer.”

And here are some of the drawings attached to the patent application to further illustrate the invention and its use in display technology:

FIG. 2 schematically shows agitation light projected onto a light-induced shape-memory polymer

FIG. 5 schematically shows a user interacting with an example display screen having a topography-changing layer

It is widely assumed that such shape-shifting touchscreens would at first be used in surface computing displays, like tabletop computers, but it isn’t impossible to imagine smartphone or tablet computers using such technology, too. How cool would that be!

For further reference, see this article in New Scientist Tech, as well as blog posts on Gizmodo and more via Techmeme.

Communicating more efficiently with E-mail and Social Media

2010-10-18T20:38:00.001-04:00

Every now and then – sometimes in response to one of my jubilant “inbox zero” tweets – people ask me for tips on how to communicate more efficiently using E-Mail as well as various social networks. For a long time I have resisted their questions or occasionally simply given people the link to the “Inbox Zero” video by Merlin Mann.

However, over the past year I gradually came to realize that while I initially started out just following the Inbox Zero paradigm in the spring of 2008, my system of dealing with E-Mail and social media interactions has evolved considerably since then.

I am not going to repeat any of the Inbox Zero principles here – for those I recommend the above-mentioned video or getting Merlin’s upcoming book on the subject – but instead will focus on what I do differently and in addition to his principles.

Inbox Zero²

Clearly zero² is still zero, so take the topic with a grain of salt. My approach to keeping my E-mail inbox cleaned up and down to zero focuses much more on prevention than just managing the incoming flow of E-mail. An E-Mail that you don’t even receive in the first place immediately translates to less work spent on dealing with it.

Step 1

Get the best spam filter you can afford. Some come bundled with anti-virus and security software and those work well. Others are stand-alone products and that is fine, too. The most important thing is to configure it correctly so that all your contacts are white-listed and the spam settings are updated constantly via subscription service. If tuned correctly, a spam filter will virtually eliminate 98% of spam while yielding very little if not even zero false-positives.

Step 2

Once your spam filter is running smoothly, modify the Inbox Zero rules that you are using so that the most desirable action is no longer to delete an e-mail. Instead, the most desirable action is now to mark an e-mail as junk and block the sender from ever sending you e-mail again. This sounds incredibly brutal, but just think of the countless newsletters, cartoons of the day, or other useless noise you’ve subscribed to at some point in time in the past and then think about how often you actually read them today. Instead of deleting them – which forces to delete them again and again and again week after week – unsubscribe from them if there is a legit unsubscribe-link at the bottom or mark them as junk so that the spam-filter will automatically delete them for you. The one exception is, of course, the Altova Developer Newsletter – that is the one newsletter you should indeed read every month. ☺

Step 3

Whenever you are filling out a web form, placing an order, or requesting a white-paper, take great care in reading all the options and making sure to uncheck the “send me a monthly e-mail” check-box.

Step 4

Don’t hesitate to use the mark e-mail as junk and block the sender function on unsolicited sales messages, out-sourcing offers to India, or uninteresting and irrelevant business-development requests. This may feel a bit impolite at first, but remember: these messages came unsolicited, so there is no need to be polite or even respond at all.

Step 5

If there are annoying e-mails that you must receive as part of company-internal policies or correspondence that you cannot simply mark as junk e-mail, you may want to consider setting up a special folder for them and using a rule to automatically have those e-mails delivered into that folder. Then you simply make time once a week to read those internal e-mails and scan them for important information before you archive them.

Step 6

Last, but not least, observe your own e-mail behavior and realize that a lot of the e-mail you receive probably is in response to a question you sent. In essence, you are generating your own inbound e-mail flood. Now adjust your own behavior by determining which questions can be better and more efficiently dealt with in a phone call, an IM conversation, a Skype call, or even via social networking tools, like Twitter. You will find that as a result of adjusting your outgoing e-mail practices, your inflow will adjust in a similar fashion.

By adopting these steps and following all the other best practices from Inbox Zero you can develop a habit of reducing the amount of e-mail you have to deal with and keeping your inbox empty, your stress-levels low, and your to-do list nicely organized.

Be Smart. Get a Smartphone.

The second most important productivity increasing tool is the use of a smartphone. I personally prefer to use an iPhone, 4 but it doesn’t really make a difference if you use Android, Windows Phone 7, or the iPhone. The key is to set up your e-mail account in such a way that you can not only read your e-mail on your smartphone, but also process it according to Inbox Zero principles. This means you need to be able to (a) delegate e-mail via forwarding; (b) reply to e-mail quickly; (c) archive it after reading; and (d) delete it if it wasn’t important.

If your smartphone only allows you to read your e-mail, but doesn’t allow for the above processing, it is entirely useless, because now you are wasting time on reading an e-mail which you will have to later read again. If that is the case, you may need to get a better e-mail provider, better smartphone, or just figure out how to use it properly.

In my case we use a Microsoft Exchange server as our e-mail back-end system in the office, and I use an iPhone 4 as my smartphone – and it works like a charm and lets me do all the processing I need to do.

Now why is that important? The answer is quite simple: there are uncountable minutes of “dead time” during a day that you don’t even realize you have or that you are currently wasting. Anything from waiting at a Dr.’s office to an unproductive meeting and from waiting in front of the school to pick up your kids to standing in line at the post office. There are always unused periods of 3-4 minutes each – sometimes even 5-10 minutes – that you can use for reading and processing e-mail.

The Inbox Zero video teaches you to not have Outlook (or your preferred e-mail client) open all the time and instead dedicated specific periods of time during the day for dealing with e-mail. By using a smartphone and processing e-mail during otherwise dead periods of time, you can easily reduce the duration and frequency of your e-mail processing times during your work day and thus gain more productivity.

Once you get good at this, it will also no longer be necessary for you to set up “Out of Office” notifications when you are on a business trip. Instead you will find that you can easily deal with the normal e-mail inflow by using your smartphone during the day and perhaps spending one hour per day on dedicated e-mail processing on your laptop in the morning or evening in your hotel room, during which you reply to those e-mails that cannot be answered with a simple 1-line reply from the smartphone.

Social Media

We’ve already discussed that the Inbox Zero approach teaches us to not have the e-mail client running all day long so that it doesn’t interrupt our work constantly. The same is true – perhaps even more so – for social media. If you keep Facebook open in your browser the entire day, don’t be surprised if you can’t get anything done. The social life of our friends is guaranteed to always be more interesting than your current job or assignment.

I am by no means saying that social media are useless. But you can easily waste a lot of time, if you don’t deal with social media in a carefully measured approach.

My recommendation is to only open Facebook or other social media sites from your computer at home, but not use it at all from your work environment. If you have to check Facebook during the day, do it in your lunch break using your smartphone.

Last, but not least, think about your approach to social media. If you are primarily a consumer and reading what other people post, you are probably wasting a lot of time. Try a different approach and think of social media as your personal broadcasting tool to spread your ideas, amplify your blog, increase interest in your product – and you will find that a lot more productive interactions and real conversations will happen as a result.

At the same time, be careful that you are not getting sucked into over-sharing…

Becoming even more efficient

Clearly, this blog post is already way too long. Which brings me to the one problem I haven’t mastered yet in my own communication: to try to keep all e-mail, messages, blog posts, etc. short and sweet. Ideally, I would want to aim at having all my e-mail be less than five sentences. But that is really hard to do…

Time Warp: Ray Ozzie posts Windows 1.0 Press Kit

2010-10-15T08:30:00.001-04:00

Ray Ozzie has resurfaced and is apparently blogging again. In his first post he unearths an ancient artifact that he stumbled upon while cleaning up his home office: a press kit folder with collaterals from the Windows 1.0 launch in November 1985.

A very interesting historic document and definitely recommended to read…

EOR (End of Recession) and OOW (Oracle Open World)

2010-09-20T21:19:00.001-04:00

It is now official. The recession ended over a year ago. That doesn’t necessarily make us all feel better, but seeing the huge number of attendees at Oracle Open World this week and their great interest for all products is certainly a positive sign that the economy is indeed getting better – if only slowly.

There are also some rather lavish displays by some of the industry’s biggest companies – it almost feels like the good old pre-recession days of 2007 again.

If you happen to be in San Francisco this week, please stop by at the Altova booth in the Moscone West hall and say hello. We are demo’ing the latest features of the new MissionKit 2011 as well as all the other awesome database-related functions in our product line, such as:

Looking forward to seeing you at Oracle Open World…

Privacy, geo-location, and over-sharing

2010-09-15T11:20:00.001-04:00

There has been plenty of discussion already on privacy settings on Facebook and how our approach to sharing personal information on social networking sites has changed over the years – and I’m not going to repeat any of that. However, the recent growth and considerable hype around geo-location, location-based services, and location-sharing on social networks has taken over-sharing to a whole new level.

Applications like FourSquare and Gowalla, who let users earn badges or awards for checking-in when they visit a restaurant or other location are now often linked to Facebook or Twitter. People post their travel plans on services like Dopplr and TripIt. Facebook itself added the Places feature recently. And Twitter has captured the location of each tweet for quite a while already, provided you use a Twitter app on your GPS-enabled smartphone or allow your browser to determine your location based on your IP address.

Now this all sounds really cool and for a while apps like Foursquare are indeed a novelty and fun to use. In fact, I like to experiment with new things myself and will admit to even becoming the mayor of 25 places on Foursquare, before I quit.

The problem with all of that geo-location information is, of course, that it is more widely available than you would imagine – and sometimes it is even publicly available, e.g. when you connect other geo-location services to Twitter, or when you use the geo-tagging of tweets on Twitter itself. Keep in mind that by default all tweets are public, unless you restrict them to only your followers.

Concerns about this issue have been voiced by others before, e.g. the web site PleaseRobMe.com was launched in early 2010 and displayed aggregate information from Twitter and other sources to publicly show when a person was not at home. It was a stunt to draw attention to this problem, and the site no longer shows that info, but it was an effective theoretical experiment.

This experimental threat has now become reality. Last week, police finally caught up with a burglary gang in New Hampshire that had robbed multiple homes this summer, where the homeowners had announced via Facebook that they were not at home, on a vacation, or provided some other information that could be used to infer that the house was going to be empty.

So what about using privacy settings to make sure only your real friends can see this information? That may sound like a good approach at first, but keep in mind that once you share that information with any app or social networking website, it is stored in a database somewhere – and once it is stored somewhere it can be found and abused by someone. In fact, just this week Google fired one of their engineers for stalking teenagers, whose information he had obtained from the kids’ GMail and chat accounts.

We use GPS ankle-bracelets to track sex offenders and other criminals in our criminal justice system. As a free citizen, why would we voluntarily want to provide anybody with the same tracking information about our personal life and whereabouts?

So here is what I did this weekend to end my own over-sharing of geo-location information:

I deleted my FourSquare account and the FourSquare app from my iPhone
I deleted my Gowalla account
I deleted the Twitter app from my iPhone
I changed my Twitter settings to turn off “TweetLocation” and deleted all location information from my past tweets:
I deleted the Facebook app from my iPhone
I adjusted my Facebook privacy settings to hide all Places information, to not allow others to check me into Places, and to never include me in “People Here Now”. I also tightened down all the other privacy settings to the maximum.
I deleted my Dopplr account
I decided to no longer post any messages on Twitter or Facebook that would reveal my travel plans (“flying to Las Vegas tomorrow”), current location (“family dinner at Asahi – awesome sushi here”), or my whereabouts (“I’m on the boat”)

And I’m not even sure I got all the places that I may have signed up for in the past, so cleansing my digital tracks and removing all geo-location information and ending past over-sharing will be an ongoing process…

XBRL Chart Wizard

2010-09-12T21:45:00.001-04:00

Now that XBRL has been mandated by the SEC for a while, we have a large collection of financial data publicly available and it is of great interest to both individual savvy investors and institutions to analyze that data. StyleVision has already been great for taking existing XBRL data and turning it into human-readable reports and more specifically extracting some data sets that are not immediately visible in the high-gloss annual reports that companies normally provide.

But the new v2011 of StyleVision takes XBRL analysis to a whole new level! Adding to its XBRL rendering capabilities, StyleVision now allows users to generate charts in their XBRL reports using a comprehensive wizard. This is an enormous benefit to those working with XBRL and can reveal trends that otherwise would remain hidden.

Charts are created by simply dragging a financial statement or other parent node to the design pane and choosing Create XBRL Chart to start the XBRL Chart Wizard.

Users can customize the data rendered in their charts by selecting the desired category or series values (Concept and Period are default) in the properties dialogs. The screenshot below shows the Concept Properties dialog, where users can select the XBRL concepts they wish to render in their charts.

The Period Properties dialog gives options on how to handle XBRL periods, which convey the relevant instant or intervals of time for XBRL reporting.

As with the charting feature mentioned above, chart styles and properties can be controlled using the All settings button in the Chart Wizards and/or by using the StyleVision entry helper windows, where users can select chart type, background color, fonts, alignment, etc.

The example below shows XBRL data presented in tabular form and the same data presented as a chart in HTML. The same data can also be instantly rendered in RTF, PDF, or Word 2007+ simply by clicking on the relevant output preview button.

The XBRL Chart Wizard is just one of the many new features in the Altova MissionKit 2011 that we released last week. Make sure that you download your 30-day free trial to see for yourself how much more powerful the MissionKit 2011 is.

Altova MissionKit v2011 just launched

2010-09-09T09:26:00.001-04:00

I’m very excited about all the new features we’ve packed into the 2011 version of the Altova MissionKit that we just launched this week.

The most eye-catching feature certainly is the charting and reporting functionality for analyzing and communicating XML, database, XBRL, EDI – virtually any type of data – and produce the usual Line Chart, Bar Chart, Pie Chart, etc. Charts are created with a few clicks inside the MissionKit tools and can be immediately shared via copy/paste or saved as image files – that’s right, no more exporting to Excel – or integrated in reports or data entry applications designed in Altova StyleVision. Of course, you can also get the XSLT or XQuery code for generating the chart for use in your own apps using AltovaXML. Here is an example of a MapForce data transformation that directly links to a StyleVision output stylesheet, showing the result in tabular form as well as in a chart:

Equally impressive is the new UML database modeling feature in UModel 2011, which allows you to extend software modeling functionality by modeling relational databases along with your Java, C#, and Visual Basic software applications. This high-level modeling of databases nicely complements the existing low-level database structure editing of DatabaseSpy to make the MissionKit a complete solution for all database modeling needs.

For people working with XML Schema, we have two exciting new features in XMLSpy: (a) a Schema Subset Generator that allows you to generate subsets of existing XML Schemas, which is extremely useful e.g. for IEPD development for NIEM; and (b) a Schema Flattener that allows you to create a new flat schema in just one file from any complex hierarchy of included or imported schemas.

Last, but not least, we’ve added a complete Authentic Scripting Environment in StyleVision to let you create powerful XML content-editing and data-entry applications – including event-handlers, macros, buttons, toolbars, etc. - based on the Authentic platform.

The Altova MissionKit 2011 is now available in English, German, and Japanese versions and comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions!

So come and check out all the new features, then download your 30-day free trial to see for yourself how much more powerful the MissionKit 2011 is.

Altova and NIEM (the National Information Exchange Model)

2010-05-10T14:31:00.001-04:00

In February this year I was invited to give the keynote address at the NIEM Town Hall meeting in Washington, DC, to talk about how Altova tools can support projects that facilitate the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). In particular, I covered the use of Altova tools in the life cycle of developing the Information Exchange Package Documentation (IEPD). The slides from that speech are now available on slideshare and a recap of the NIEM town hall meeting is also available on the NIEM website.

Altova NIEM keynote

View more presentations from Alexander Falk.

Since then we’ve been working with NIEM to add new features to the Altova product line that further support the NIEM development cycle and in particular our recent release of XMLSpy 2010r3 adds two features that are very important for NIEM:

NIEM defines a set of Naming and Design Rules (NDR) that specify how XML Schemas for a NIEM-conformant information exchange have to be constructed. XMLSpy now includes an extended schema validation function that allows a developer to validate a schema against naming and coding conventions, and in particular XMLSpy ships with a set of extended validation rules that allow validation against the NIEM NDR.
Another important step during the development for an IEPD for a NIEM-conformant information exchange is the production of example XML files that demonstrate the data that can be exchanged. To provide better example files, XMLSpy now lets developers specify user-defined example values for each element, attribute, or type in an XML Schema. During the generation of example XML files XMLSpy then uses these user-defined example values to produce meaningful example documents that are immediately suitable for documentation and testing purposes.

Further details about Altova tools for NIEM can be found in the Solutions Center on the Altova website and also in today’s article Altova adds to NIEM support in v2010r3 on the Altova Blog.

Tablet computers, video, HTML5, and the great Flash debate

2010-04-30T13:05:00.001-04:00

Even if you are not always plugged into tech blogs or the latest social media networks, I have a short reading list for you for this weekend. There’s just a fascinating combination of interesting stories all happening in the same 48h period:

HP drops the Slate project (=tablet PC running Windows 7 that was announced at CES last year by Steve Ballmer)
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/29/hewlett-packard-to-kill-windows-7-tablet-project/
Microsoft drops the Courier tablet project (=innovative folding screen tablet computer with both hand and pen input)
http://gizmodo.com/5527442/microsoft-cancels-innovative-courier-tablet-project
HP buys Palm and is rumored to be working on a tablet computer running Palm’s WebOS
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2010/100428xa.html
Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs attacks Flash in an open letter on the Apple website and clearly speaks out in support of HTML5 and the H.264 video standard
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen (who?) responds to the Steve Jobs letter in a TV interview with the Wall Street Journal (and offers very weak responses only – mostly cookie cutter style)
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/29/live-blogging-the-journals-interview-with-adobe-ceo/
Microsoft responds to the Apple-Adobe debate on the Internet Explorer Blog and also expresses support for HTML5 and H.264, but – in an attempt to not take sides – also states that “Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web”.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/29/html5-video.aspx
Apple starts shipping the 3G version of the iPad in the US today
http://www.apple.com/ipad/

To see all these things unfold in such a short period of time is quite fascinating, and thus far Apple and the iPad are the clear winner here…

Talking of which: according to FedEx my two WiFi+3G iPads are already on the delivery truck today and should arrive at my house before 3pm.

Also, if you are interested in following more of these tech stories unfold in real-time, check out http://techmeme.com/

iPad Review

2010-04-05T14:54:00.001-04:00

With all the hype surrounding the iPad this weekend, I decided to wait a bit and only write about it on Monday. This was also just a picture-perfect weekend with ideal weather in New England and the Red Sox Opening Day on Sunday, so I spent most of my time outdoors rather than playing with or writing about the iPad.

Being a technology geek I had, of course, pre-ordered my iPad a while ago and so it arrived on Saturday via UPS truck as promised. The truck driver jokingly remarked that he had a full truck of just iPads to deliver and he wished he had bought Apple stock a while ago. The first sales data that Apple reported today does indeed sound promising.

But is the iPad really a new “magical” device as Apple likes to describe it? Or is it the beginning of a dystopian future where Apple controls what we are allowed to see, the apps that are approved, and the end of an open Internet (as some pundits claim)?

I won’t bore you with unboxing details that others have reported before, or give you a detailed guide to the best applications you should download to your new iPad.

Instead, I will distill the benefits of the iPad down to the one product image that explains it all:

Yes, the iPad is a primarily a media consumption device. Think of that cozy armchair in your living room, or the sofa, or the couch, or a bench in your backyard. Anywhere you would sit down with a good book to read. Have you tried using a laptop in any of those spots? It doesn’t quite work. Laptops are – despite their name – really only useful when you put them on a hotel room desk or airplane tray table.

By contrast, the iPad is really made for consuming media wherever and whenever you don’t want to sit at a desk! Now, in addition to reading books from the iBooks or Kindle bookstores, you can also read comics by Marvel (see image above), consume newspapers in digital editions, catch up on TV that you missed, watch movies you buy or rent on iTunes or Netflix, and browse the web. And if you are one of those always-connected people (like me) you can even read your e-mail and respond to the occasional important one, or access one of the many social networking sites or apps.

And it does all of that extremely well – to the point where it is indeed a new class of device and since everything just works and is super fast, it really has a certain “magical” feel to it. In fact, when I showed some of these apps to my family this weekend, I immediately got requests for additional iPads that they now want me to buy…

The one iPad app that is of great interest to this XML Aficionado is, of course, the iBooks app, which is both a very pretty e-Book reader and also a bookstore where you can buy these e-Books directly from Apple. The interesting thing about iBooks is that apple decided to support the open ePub file format for e-Books rather than a proprietary format like the Kindle. As you may have guessed already, ePub is XML-based and the content can be provided in either XHTML or DTBook format. The result is that with the launch of the iBooks bookstore there are not only a few publishers who have already signed up, but you also get a ton of works in the public domain, whose copyright has expired, and you can download all of them for free from the iBooks bookstore.

Above and beyond that, the iPad is really a great educational tool. Using WolframAlpha on the iPad is just a joy and there are also new apps, like The Elements: A Visual Exploration that are really beautifully made.

Yes, there are also some business applications, like Keynote for presentation, Pages for word processing, and Numbers for spreadsheet-type work. Those are really very pretty and easy to use and will certainly be useful for some people, but I am guessing these are more attractive for people who don’t have a laptop and, therefore, want to use the iPad for that purpose, too.

Regarding the iPad hardware: the device fits comfortably in your hand and even though it is a bit heavier than the Kindle, it just feels right. The screen is really beautiful and the colors are vibrant. I used the device for several hours on Saturday and Sunday and the battery life was much better than expected. And it is really fast and responsive. I didn’t find any feature or app where I had to “wait for the computer”. Very refreshing, indeed!

So should you buy an iPad now? That decision is entirely up to you, but this flowchart might help. ☺ All kidding aside, if you are an early adopter, like new technologies, and have the money to spend, I would go for it. Likewise, if you are considering buying a Kindle or a PSP, I would buy an iPad instead. However, if you don’t yet have an iPhone and are trying to decide between iPad and iPhone, I would probably rather go with the iPhone – in my opinion it is the more versatile device.

There is another group of people, for whom the iPad is probably ideal: those of the older generation, who have not yet bought any computer. The iPad is certainly the most gentle way for a senior to get access to e-mail, web browsing, and sharing photos with the younger generations. If you want your parents or grandparents to finally “get connected”, then a broadband Internet connection with wireless router plus an iPad is probably the best solution out there.

Are there any negative things to say about the iPad? I’m afraid not many. There is, of course, the one issue that developers of applications for the iPad are totally dependent upon Apple with respect to whether the apps can be sold through the app store, since Apple has a mandatory approval process and can reject any app for any reason. Tim Bray, co-author and editor of the XML specification, has been very outspoken about that issue and recently said:

“The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.”

The same is true for the iPad as much as for the iPhone. On the one hand I agree with Tim about freedom not being optional, on the other hand there are very few apps that Apple rejected that I would miss (Google Voice being the only one I can think of right now). The one benefit of Apple’s tight control over the app store is the total lack of viruses and malware on the iPhone/iPad platform. And it adds a layer of QA on top of most applications, so the software you buy in the app store typically works and is useful.

The second issue with the iPad that is worth mentioning is that there are apparently some Wi-Fi issues that people have reported. I haven’t seen any of those problems myself - either at home or in the office - and the iPad has been flawless in its ability to connect to the Internet anywhere I tried.

Finally, for those who are not convinced and would rather want to see the iPad being abused, there are already some interesting videos out there…

Altova unleashes 64-bit power for working with XML

2010-02-16T08:36:00.001-05:00

It’s no secret: XML files are getting bigger every day as people devise more ways to utilize XML for real-world applications that involve large amounts of data. Up until now people were limited in the size of XML files that could be comfortably edited or processed due to the 32-bit nature of Windows and the limitations of memory that was available to applications.

Not anymore! I am very excited to announce that Altova today launched version 2010 release 2 of our entire product line and all our applications are now available in both 32-bit and shiny new 64-bit versions. Obviously, the 64-bit versions of our tools require a 64-bit version of Windows Vista or Windows 7 to be installed on your computer. And once you take the leap to 64-bit you will never want to look back.

I’ve personally been using Windows 7 64-bit since the launch of Windows 7 last fall and my computer now has 20GB (!) of RAM and you just won’t believe how super-fast applications like Adobe Photoshop CS4 (which is available in a 64-bit version!) suddenly are in such a configuration.

And now you can add XMLSpy, MapForce, UModel, StyleVision and all the other MissionKit applications to the list of super-fast and efficient 64-bit applications. Here is an example of the 64-bit version of XMLSpy 2010r2 editing a 2.7GB XML file – in this case a Wikipedia abstract dump (i.e. all abstracts for all Wikipedia articles):

You just can’t do that in any other XML editor today. There may be some competitors who want to make you believe that just by running their Java-based editor on a 64-bit version of the JVM you suddenly have a 64-bit app, but if you read their tech support forums you will quickly find that they cannot actually edit any files larger than 2GB. Hmmm, really?

What it boils down to is this: XMLSpy really is the only 64-bit XML Editor you can use today for working with large files without any limitations, provided you have enough RAM in your computer. And “large files” doesn’t necessarily mean GB-sized! You will notice that working even with 100MB files is significantly faster in the 64-bit version.

To ease the transition period from 32-bit to the new 64-bit world for our customers, we have configured all our tools so that you can install both versions in parallel. This might be necessary especially if you are using database drivers that aren’t available in 64-bit versions yet. Read more about the new 64-bit versions here and learn when you may want to use which version. Also, if you are using a Microsoft Access database you might want to read our new TechNote about Using Access Database in a 64-bit world.

In addition to the new 64-bit versions of our applications, we have also added several significant performance improvements that affect both 32-bit and 64-bit applications, such as optimizations upon opening files that result in files sized 10-100MB opening about 15 times faster than before.

And version 2010 release 2 contains tons of other new features, such as SharePoint support, UML 2.3 support, DiffDog integration for Windows Explorer, external C# and Java calls in MapForce mappings, and many more features.

Google’s new Tower of Babel

2010-02-08T20:31:00.002-05:00

You have to admire the sheer market power and dominance that Google has these days. They announce speech-to-speech machine translation on future Android-powered phones – and the whole tech blogger universe goes ballistic in talking about it and likening it to the famous Babel fish of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.

So why does everybody think machine translation should suddenly work? If you happen to be bi-lingual or even just fluent in more than one language, you know very well that tools like Google Translate can only convey the basic and most rudimentary nuances of any document. Now combine that flawed and unreliable piece of technology with something equally unreliable: speech recognition. What do you get when you mix these two and stir well? Possibly the foundation for a new Tower of Babel, but certainly not the famous Babel fish!

But do not take my word for it. Or rather, please do take my word for it exactly as it is being processed by those two technologies. After drafting this little blog entry I decided to put Google to the test. As a Google Voice user I already get access to their famous speech recognition, so I called my own Google Voice number and recorded this script. I then took the transcription that Google provided and fed it through the Google Translate service twice: once translating it into German, and then translating it back to English for your enjoyment.

Do you now see what I mean… this is the stuff that can start wars…

Transcription of the above text recorded with Google Voice:

You have to. My but she in market power dominance that Google has these days. Again that owns speech touch each machine translations in future, and with Pulte Homes and to hold tech blog universe goes the lease taken talking about it and liking it to the famous people cessation of. Douglas Adams the Hitchhiker's Guide. To, galaxy. Why does everybody think machine translation should probably work. If you happen to be bilingual, or you can just fluent in more than one language. You know very well but tools like Google Translate can only come database. He can mostly. Maintree nuances of any documents and I'll come by and that's log on reliable piece of technology was something equally unreliable speech recognition. Both you get when you mix these two Lindstrom well. Possibly the foundation for a new tell label, but certainly not the same Staples which but then I'll take my word for it. Or rather, please do take my word for exactly as it is being processed by those to Technologies at the draft this little blog entry. I decided to put group of the test, google voice use them. I would get access to the famous Peter deficient. So I called my own voice number and records the script. I didn't took the transcription of Google provided and said he'd through google plates of twice, one is translating it into driving and then translating it back to English for your enjoyment. Do you know see what I mean, this is the stuff, but in stock awards.

Taking the Google Voice transcription and translating it into German produces:

You have to. Meine aber sie der Marktmacht Dominanz, dass Google in diesen Tagen. Auch besitzt die Rede berühren sich maschinelle Übersetzungen in Zukunft und mit Pulte Homes und Tech-Blog-Universum zu halten geht den Mietvertrag aufgenommen, darüber zu sprechen und Zuneigung es zu den berühmten Einstellung der Menschen. Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide. So, Galaxie. Warum alle denken, die maschinelle Übersetzung, sollten Sie vielleicht zu arbeiten. Wenn Sie gerade sind zweisprachig, oder Sie können einfach fließend in mehr als einer Sprache. Sie wissen sehr gut, aber Tools wie Google Translate kann nur Datenbank kommen. Er kann vor allem. Maintree Nuancen von Unterlagen und ich komme vorbei und das ist log auf zuverlässige Teil der Technologie war etwas ebenso unzuverlässig Spracherkennung.Beide erhalten Sie, wenn Sie Mischung dieser beiden Lindstrom gut. Möglicherweise die Grundlage für ein neues Label zu sagen, aber sicherlich nicht die gleiche Staples, die dann aber ich werde mein Wort zu nehmen. Oder besser gesagt, bitte nehmen Sie mich beim Wort genau so, wie es von jenen, die Technologien auf den Entwurf verarbeitet diese kleine Blog-Eintrag. Ich beschloss, Gruppe die Probe gestellt, Google Voice verwenden. Ich möchte Zugang zu dem berühmten Peter mangelhaft. Also rief ich meine eigene Stimme Anzahl und zeichnet das Skript. Ich habe nicht nahm die Transkription von Google zur Verfügung gestellt und sagte, er würde durch google Platten zweimal, ist eine Übersetzung in die Lenk-und übersetzt sie dann wieder auf Englisch für Ihren Genuss. Weißt du was ich meine, das ist der Stoff, sondern in Wertpapieren.

Taking the German translation and translating it back to English yields:

You have to. My but they dominate the market power that Google in those days. The question has come in contact with machine translation in the future, and Pulte Homes, and Tech Blog Universe to hold the lease is taken to talk about it and love it to famous people's attitudes.Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide. Thus, galaxy. Why do all the thinking, machine translation, you might want to work. If you are not bilingual, or you can just fluent in more than one language. You know very well, but tools like Google Translate can only database. He is above all. Maintree nuances of documents and I come by and this is log on reliable piece of technology was something as unreliable speech recognition. Both of you get when you mix these two well Lindstrom. Perhaps to say the basis for a new label, but certainly not the same Staples, which then I shall take my word. Or rather, please take my word for it just like it from those technologies are processed in the draft this little blog entry. I decided to put the sample group to use Google Voice. I want access to the famous Peter deficient. So I called my own voice number and characterized the script. I did not take the transcript made available by Google and said he would be counted twice by google tiles is a translation into driving and then translated back to English for your enjoyment. You know what I mean, this is the substance, but in securities.

But this isn’t limited to just English>German>English translations. You can have as much fun going via a detour into Japanese. Taking the Google Voice transcription in translating it into Japanese results in:

あなたがしなければならない。私が、彼女は市場の力を支配するには、Google、これらの日があります。もう一度、音声将来的に各マシンの翻訳を触れると、所有しているとPulteホームズとハイテクのブログ宇宙保持するためには、リースはそれについての有名な人が停止することand liking話して撮影だ。ダグラスアダムズヒッチハイクガイド』。、銀河する。なぜ誰もが機械翻訳はおそらく動作するはずだと思う。もしあなたがバイリンガルにするか、またはだけで、複数の言語に堪能することができます。 You know非常によくしかし、ツールGoogle翻訳のような専用のデータベース来ることができます。彼がほとんど。任意のドキュメントのMaintreeニュアンスと私が来るから、技術の信頼性の高い作品には、そのログ何か同じように信頼性の音声認識された。 Both youするときにも、これらの2つのリンドストロムミックスを取得します。新しいが、確かに同じステープルズは、しかし、私はそれを私の言葉を取るよていないラベルを伝えるためのおそらく基盤。というか、してください正確には、ドラフト、この小さなブログのエントリでこれらのtoTechnologiesによって処理されている私の言葉を取るか。私は、テストのグループに配置することを決定、Googleの音声を使用します。私は、有名なピーター欠乏へのアクセスになるだろう。だから、私は自分の声を数と呼ばれるスクリプトを記録します。私は提供される転写of Googleしたことはなく、彼を2回、1つして運転英語を楽しむために戻すの翻訳には翻訳さのプレートのGoogleのだという。私の言いたいことを知って、このものですが、在庫あり賞を受賞した。

Last, but not least, taking the Japanese translation and translating it back to English yields:

You have to do. I, her ability to dominate the market, Google, these days there. Again, and touch each machine in the future translation of speech, and owns space to hold Pulte Holmes and tech blogs, the lease is known to stop people talking about it, shooting it and liking. Dagurasuadamuzuhitchihaikugaido 』. To galaxy. Why Machine Translation I think everyone should probably work. If you or a bilingual, or just can be fluent in several languages. You know But very often, you can get Google tools such as a dedicated database of translations. Most of him. Any documents and I'll come Maintree nuances, reliable technology work is recognized as a reliable voice something that log. Both you even when these two get one Rindosutoromumikkusu. The new Staples is certainly the same, but I was probably based on a label to tell I do not take my word for it. I mean, exactly please the draft, those in this little blog entry to Technologies take my word for it or being handled by. I decided to put to the test group, Google will use the voice. I would want access to the famous Peter. So, I called the script logs the number of your voice. Of Google I never provided a transcript, he twice returned for one to enjoy the English translation of the two drivers is that Google's translation of the plate. You know what I mean, that is, the award-winning stock.

Now imagine any of the above translations being read back to you with text-to-speech synthesis...

And that is why I’m very skeptical about such announcements of speech-to-speech machine translation – even when they come from Google.

Hubble photo showing Klingon Bird of Prey?

2010-02-02T17:08:00.001-05:00

OK, is it just me, or does the Hubble image that NASA published today reveal a cloaked Klingon Bird of Prey in our asteroid belt? Here is the close-up of what NASA calls a “suspected asteroid collision”:

This is an excerpt from NASA’s press release today:

“NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

Asteroid collisions are energetic, with an average impact speed of more than 11,000 miles per hour, or five times faster than a rifle bullet. The comet-like object imaged by Hubble, called P/2010 A2, was first discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research, or LINEAR, program sky survey on Jan. 6. New Hubble images taken on Jan. 25 and 29 show a complex X-pattern of filamentary structures near the nucleus.

"This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets," said principal investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. "The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies."

Hubble shows the main nucleus of P/2010 A2 lies outside its own halo of dust. This has never been seen before in a comet-like object. The nucleus is estimated to be 460 feet in diameter.”

Sounds plausible, but as a Star Trek fan I still see a Klingon Bird of Prey that is about to decloak. Don’t believe me? Look at the picture again, but this time look more closely:

Live long and prosper… ☺

Taking the leap into the 3D world

2010-01-15T17:39:00.001-05:00

As many other computer geeks, I’ve always been fascinated by 3D technology and admired the big Silicon Graphics 3D workstations of the early days and saw the early 3D movies with red/blue glasses or the next generation based on polarized glasses in the movie theatre.

This past fall I finally made the leap into the 3D world myself and equipped my computer at home with fully immersive stereoscopic 3D capabilities. I already had the benefit of having a PC equipped with an nVidia geForce-based graphic card, so all I had to do is get the goggles and upgrade my monitor to a model that is capable of 100Hz refresh frequency or more.

As you know, a 50Hz or 60Hz refresh frequency is necessary for a smooth monitor picture, and since the 3D goggles are basically shutter-glasses that alternatingly show one frame to the left eye and one frame to the right eye, you need a monitor capable of doing at least twice the 50Hz for a smooth 3D experience. After checking the 3D system requirements, I decided on the ViewSonic VX2265wm 22” monitor.

But I didn’t want to just watch pre-made 3D content – I wanted to create 3D content myself, so I purchased the Fuji FinePix Real 3D W1 camera that can shoot both 3D photos and make 3D videos.

So my complete 3D setup looks like this:

Since I also wanted to show the 3D photos off in our living room, I added the Fuji FinePix Real 3D V1 viewer (a 3D photo frame) and put it on a countertop to run a slide show of the latest 3D images.

So what can you do with such a 3D setup at home? Essentially there are three main uses:

3D Photography: the Fuji 3D camera is as easy to use as any point&shoot digital camera with one exception – you have to constantly watch where you are putting your fingers, because the camera has two lenses in the front and it is very easy to get your finger showing in one of the two photos. The back of the camera has a 3D display so you can immediately correct for parallax problems if they occur (mostly in close-ups). Just like with any other digital camera you can record photos or movies and then transfer them to your computer. Photos are recorded in the MPO format, so for those of us who like to edit their photos in Photoshop this is presently a problem.
3D Games: most of the modern PC-based games have you walk around in a virtual world as you drive fast cars, shoot zombies, or practice magical spells. As such a large majority of them already support 3D and you can just put on your 3D goggles, push a button, and you are suddenly inside the game in a much more immersive experience. I happen to play World of Warcraft myself, and it is just a lot more fun when my mage faces dragons like Onyxia in immersive stereoscopic 3D vision…
3D Movies: Avatar was just the beginning. There is a whole bunch of movies coming out in 3D in 2010, including Alice in Wonderland, How to train your dragon, Toy Story 3, etc. While Sony and many other TV manufacturers are now gearing up for 3D TVs, I think I’d rather watch 3D movies on my PC…

Of course, one of the problems with 3D photography is that you cannot easily share the 3D photos you produce with other people, unless they have their own 3D display setup at home already. However, as an interim solution, there is a website called Start 3D that lets you turn 3D photos into pictures that wobble left/right to create the illusion of a 3D effect – and those can be embedded in websites or shown on web-based galleries.

As an example, here are just two 3D photos that I took recently and converted into the Start 3D format for inclusion in the blog. This is a meeting with my architects and the builder for our house restoration project:

And secondly we have a 3D photo of my son and wife on the balcony of the new carriage house posing for the special 3D effect:

If you’d like to see more 3D images of our construction site as well as some 3D family photos, those can be found on this 3D image gallery…

XML Aficionado

Team collaboration and project management: the need for a new cloud-based approach

The Emperor's New Clothes - a "New iPad" Review in a "Post-PC World"

Restore from iCloud

4G LTE Activation

4G LTE Performance

Summary and Clarification

The reality distortion field

Postscriptum

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HTML5, large-scale ETL, Java API, JDBC, MDA, and web differencing

Major enhancements for web developers

Support for large-scale ETL

Major improvements to Java support

Support for MDA

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Using Altova tools for Cloud Computing

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Communicating more efficiently with E-mail and Social Media

Inbox Zero2

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Step 6

Be Smart. Get a Smartphone.

Social Media

Becoming even more efficient

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Google’s new Tower of Babel

Hubble photo showing Klingon Bird of Prey?

Taking the leap into the 3D world

Inbox Zero²