Current Waves… Adobe & Google
The tides are over us in terms of waves rolling and breaking all over the online ecosystems.
Two of these are the Adobe and the Google Wave.
Essentially their business model is somewhat similar, however their initial exhibition displays somewhat differences in focus and application (not in the technical sense of the word “application”, but in the sense in which way it can and is expected to be used).
Whereas the focus for the Google Team is to display the collaborative element of creating and “riding” waves, Adobe seems to focus more in the initial phases on offering organizations to create “buzzes” to which subscribers can stay tuned. The technologies and implementation underneath the applications are quite similar in terms of fundamental features, however the Google implementation does offer more flexibility, features and eventually better prospects for playing a major role in the near future communication landscape.
In essence “Adobe Wave is an all-purpose aggregator designed to let you keep up to date on a variety of different media streams. The application is a simple AIR app that connects to a variety of different services and displays a small alert when new content is available.” (http://www.insideria.com/2009/07/adobe-launches-wave.html).
On the other hand, “Google Wave…is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web.”
The description continues with defining that “a wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.” (http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html)
So, to clarify… the current application of the two “waves” have very few things in common and the common word “wave should in this case not be considered to be anything but a an abstract term and not something indicative for either application or implementation.
Google Wave… likely now not waporware, and now with an AS API
Google Wave will now suddenly not become waporware… I never thought it would, however lots or credible people have spoken about the chance that Google Wave would either never see the day of light or if then, only for a short time.
If you want to get started with utilizing the Google Wave API’s and like I am currently, mostly building systems based on ActionScript and Flex, you don’t need to start implementing your own delegate API Google’s API, a couple of guys from the Google Developer Community has created a simple ActionScript implementation already.
Check it out…
http://code.google.com/p/wave-as-client/
A couple of notes…
* it uses ExternalInterface to call the actual JavaScript implementation (so no new communication logic)
* its released on the Apache License
* its very recent and active (last commit at the time of this post was 28 hrs ago)
Introducing Google’s PowerMeter…
How much does it cost to leave your TV on all day? What about turning your air conditioning 1 degree cooler? Which uses more power every month — your dishwasher or your washing machine? Is your household more or less energy efficient than similar homes in your neighborhood ?
Its nearly impossible to make informed choices about electricity. This is a problem but also a huge opportunity for us all to save money and help the environment by reducing our power usage. Studies show that access to your household’s personal energy information is likely to save you 5–15% on your monthly bill. Even greater savings are possible if you use this information to see the value of retiring your old refrigerator, installing a new air conditioner or insulating your home. The potential impact of large numbers of people achieving similar efficiencies is even more exciting. For every six households that save 10% on electricity, for instance, we reduce carbon emissions as much as taking one conventional car off the road.
In Denmark we have Elsparefonden’s MyHome project and some clever legislation forcing Utility Companies to share consumption data with the clients. However, its far from the situation in most other places in the world which is why its so interesting what Google is doing with their PowerMeter application. At Google they’re doing their helping enable a future where access to personal electricity information helps everyone make smarter energy choices. Google PowerMeter shows consumers their electricity consumption in a secure Google gadget. Currently they are testing the product with utility partners in the US, India and Canada and they plan to expand the rollout of Google PowerMeter later this year.
Check it out…
http://www.google.org/powermeter/
Join other Google Developers… at I/O
For two days in May, more specifically the 27 – 18th of May 2009, thousands of web developers will come together to learn how to develop web applications with Google and open technologies. Its a chance to learn from product experts about Android, App Engine, Chrome, Google Web Toolkit, AJAX APIs and more Google related stuff…
If you are in to any of that stuff, you should consider attending… its in the Moscone West Conference Center in San Francisco (same venue for MAX 2008 NA).
Check it out…
http://code.google.com/events/io/
SRWare Iron : Google Chrome without privacy controversy
If you are thrilled by the fast rendering, sleek design and innovative features of Google Chrome… but are concerned about what and who Google may be tempted to sell your usage patterns to: SRWare Iron is the answer…
It’s based on the Chromium-source and therefore offers the same features as Chrome, but without the critical privacy problems.
Check it out…
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php
Google Chrome dislikes Microsoft Architecture
This is the display I get when I attempt to navigate to the Microsoft Architecture site with Google Chrome…
…I guess Google are not that fond of Microsoft Architecture 
PS… the problem is isolated to one machine, others of my machines with Google Chrome is not displaying this behavior… it’s just a lonely sparrow.
Google Chrome – The Beta is here…
The Google Chrome Beta is now available for download!
At a quick glance it’s off course fast and tight in its behavior… however, the first fly in the ointment is that an application such as UltraMon is not supported because Google have decided actually to do their own Chrome without support for OS-extensions…
Google Chrome
The employee initiative program at Google is spawning many new ideas; among the most recent is the Google Chrome which is to be released tomorrow
Google are recognizing that web-sites most often are web-applications and that this tendency is more than a mayfly (read “one-day wonder”) and have thought of how it would be to reinvent the browser platform to facilitate the application usage model more than the current which is inherently targeted at the browse usage model…
Google has created an illustrative cartoon that describes it…
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
…and more about the details here…
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html
Google Gears
The latest entry among the candidate RIA technologies is Google Gears.
Still in version 0.3 at the time of this writing, its obvious that a lot of work needs to be done.
However, Google Gears (GG) has a couple of neat features…
* Database based on SQLLite.
* WorkerPool (JavaScript MultiThreading).
* Desktop Module to interact with the OS.
The Database module provides browser-local relational data storage to your JavaScript web application. Gears uses the open source SQLite database system. Ergo exactly as we have grown accustomed with Adobe AIR.
The WorkerPool module allows web applications to run JavaScript code in the background, without blocking the main page’s script execution.
In web browsers a single time-intensive operation, such as I/O or heavy computation, can make the UI unresponsive. The WorkerPool module runs operations in the background, without blocking the UI. Scripts executing in the WorkerPool will not trigger the browser’s “unresponsive script” dialog.
Nevertheless, since the browser’s XmlHttpRequest object is not available in the context of a worker, Gears provides its own HttpRequest object to fill that need. Gears HttpRequest provides most of the features of XmlHttpRequest except for the ability to access the response as an XML DOM object and the ability to send a request synchronously.
Check it out…
http://gears.google.com/
A couple of more cool features are scheduled, but lets see which ideas actually make it out of the labs alive.
Some reasons to consider GG are that it does not require an explicit installation, just that you allow a specific site to run Gears enabled and that its open source in contrast to e.g. Adobe AIR and there a couple of more pretty interesting features of GG, but I will not get into that now.
When this is said, in my very humble graphical understanding – I think there exist a striking resemblance between Adobe AIR logo and the Google Gears logo and to be totally honest, the feature set if we disregard the very promising multi-threaded Javacsript… do you see what I mean ?
Google Trends of XAML and MXML
Despite the huge momentum Adobe Flex have gained the last year or so, its clear that XAML still have more momentum overall, according to Google Trends.
XAML is the markup language from Microsoft to create RIA’s and one of the cornerstones in Silverlight, MS’s “new” primary RIA platform. MXML is the markup language used in Adobe Flex, Adobe’s primary RIA platform and has been around for quite a shorter time than XAML.
Here is a direct link to the comparison I did:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=xaml%2Cmxml
An interesting observation is related to the geographical distribution of the searches, seeing that India is top-ranking in regards to Country, however in regards to City its Redmond, VA (The home of Microsoft).
Another interesting point is that Denmark and Danish is at the time of this comparison (it’s off course subject to change, partly due to the dynamics of the Google indexing system based on statistically enhanced numbers and off course due to the fact that the numbers eventually do change over the course of time) ranked 10 and 6 respectively, positioning the Danish RIA community high on the international rank.
Combine this with the positions of our brothering countries, Sweden and Norway, Scandinavia is definitely in the super-liga of RIA regions.
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