Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Multi-touch Mice
Now that we have all gotten used to multi-touch phones the next area of innovation may be multi-touch mice. Check out this video from TechCrunch where they demonstrate a number of intriguing, mouse concepts coming from Microsoft's Research labs. The rumors are also running wild that Apple may soon release a multi-touch mouse.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Minority Report coming to PCs
Microsoft announced their answer to the Wii, called Natal, at the recent E3 conference. Natal goes beyond the Wii in that you don't need any controllers. The cameras in the unit detect the movement of your body and reacts accordingly. So you can punch and kick for a fighting game or pretend you have a steering wheel in your hands for a driving game. It has face recognition and voice recognition as well so it can automatically log you in and have a conversation with you. It should make for some very interesting games, but can also be used for controlling interfaces with just the movement of your hands.
Natal was announced as a peripheral for the Xbox 360, but Bill Gates just indicated that they will make Natal available for PC's as well. That would not only make for great games, but it could be used to control a media center computer, interact with people in a Second Life like system, control a computer from across the room, or a million other possibilities.
Do you remember the futuristic man-computer interface in Minority Report? Natal would not only let you do everything that Tom Cruise did (sans the transparent screen), but actually be better, because it doesn't require the user to wear gloves. It's another case of reality catching up with science fiction faster than anyone thought.
Natal was announced as a peripheral for the Xbox 360, but Bill Gates just indicated that they will make Natal available for PC's as well. That would not only make for great games, but it could be used to control a media center computer, interact with people in a Second Life like system, control a computer from across the room, or a million other possibilities.
Do you remember the futuristic man-computer interface in Minority Report? Natal would not only let you do everything that Tom Cruise did (sans the transparent screen), but actually be better, because it doesn't require the user to wear gloves. It's another case of reality catching up with science fiction faster than anyone thought.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Google Chrome OS - Wait and see
Google announced their Chrome OS operating system last week. But of course, you already knew that because it was virtually impossible to miss that story through all of the hype in the news. This lightweight, open-source, browser-based operating system will be free and available in the second half of 2010.
All of the Internet has been abuzz about Chrome OS, but there are plenty of reasons to skeptical of new OS. Google has said they are targeting netbooks with with OS. Unfortunately, netbooks are one of the few places Chrome OS makes sense.
Google offers Android for the smart phone market so it won't play there. On normal laptops and desktops people are looking for all of the applications and capabilities of the other OS's, like Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. You don't want to get that new computer and find that you can't run that application or game that you need for work or pleasure. Of course, the number of Chrome OS apps will increase over time and offer more capabilities, but Google has said the apps are all just web pages and usable in any standard compliant browser. So why not get Windows or OS X and be able to run of the normal programs as well as all of the Chrome apps. If cost is an issue you can go with Linux and get the same benefits.
Even on netbooks this is an issue, as evidenced by all of the people who pay more for Windows XP on the netbooks instead going with the free Linux distributions. They pay more because of the familiarity with Windows and all of the applications that are available. The same would hold true in a Windows XP (or Windows 7) vs Chrome OS comparison as well.
So who would be most interested in the Chrome OS. Certainly those alpha-geeks who love the latest technologies would be candidates will probably try it for a while (before it fades out of fashion). Those who like the minimalist look and approach of an OS that is also faster and runs on lesser computers might use it. Lastly I could see it eventually offered on very low-end computers for people who are not as tech-savvy and don't have heavy needs.
Unfortunately the potential markets don't seem very large or ones that can grow much, which doesn't bode well for Chrome OS. That being said, Google sticks with the technologies and continues to improve them, so time will tell whether Chrome OS ultimately succeeds or fails, but the initial signs don't look promising.
All of the Internet has been abuzz about Chrome OS, but there are plenty of reasons to skeptical of new OS. Google has said they are targeting netbooks with with OS. Unfortunately, netbooks are one of the few places Chrome OS makes sense.
Google offers Android for the smart phone market so it won't play there. On normal laptops and desktops people are looking for all of the applications and capabilities of the other OS's, like Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. You don't want to get that new computer and find that you can't run that application or game that you need for work or pleasure. Of course, the number of Chrome OS apps will increase over time and offer more capabilities, but Google has said the apps are all just web pages and usable in any standard compliant browser. So why not get Windows or OS X and be able to run of the normal programs as well as all of the Chrome apps. If cost is an issue you can go with Linux and get the same benefits.
Even on netbooks this is an issue, as evidenced by all of the people who pay more for Windows XP on the netbooks instead going with the free Linux distributions. They pay more because of the familiarity with Windows and all of the applications that are available. The same would hold true in a Windows XP (or Windows 7) vs Chrome OS comparison as well.
So who would be most interested in the Chrome OS. Certainly those alpha-geeks who love the latest technologies would be candidates will probably try it for a while (before it fades out of fashion). Those who like the minimalist look and approach of an OS that is also faster and runs on lesser computers might use it. Lastly I could see it eventually offered on very low-end computers for people who are not as tech-savvy and don't have heavy needs.
Unfortunately the potential markets don't seem very large or ones that can grow much, which doesn't bode well for Chrome OS. That being said, Google sticks with the technologies and continues to improve them, so time will tell whether Chrome OS ultimately succeeds or fails, but the initial signs don't look promising.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
iPhones connect people to government
In an imaginative way for people to interact with government, Boston has released an iPhone app that lets people snap photos of potholes and other nuisances and send them to the city to be fixed. It's another great example of "there's an app for that".
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Firefox 3.5 Released
Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5 today. You can download it for free. Firefox 3.5 ads some new features and some HTML 5 tags, but the most important improvement is speed. They claim it is twice as fast as Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2. With Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari claiming dramatic speed improvements its good to see Firefox improving their performance as well.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Oracle to buy Sun
Oracle announced today that they will buy Sun for 7.4 billion dollars. Oracle wants an end to end enterprise set of solutions.
Amongst the other assets will be the Java programming language. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out in the development arena. While many had been pushing for Java to become an open source language, this move would seem to further segment the development environments into three camps:
Amongst the other assets will be the Java programming language. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out in the development arena. While many had been pushing for Java to become an open source language, this move would seem to further segment the development environments into three camps:
- Java / Oracle DB
- Microsoft .Net / SQL Server
- Open source languages (PHP/Python/Ruby) / MySQL (or other alternatives like SQLite)
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Another Year of Browsing Stats
Last year I put together some web stats from Market Share and The Counter showing the trends in browsers stats for the previous year. With another year passed its time to look at how 2008 shaped up.
Web Browsers
First the browser stats. As you can see from the data below 2008 continued the transition from Internet Explorer 6 to 7. This year the rate was much slower with only 6.2% more IE 7 users ending the year than started it. With a 14.7% loss, IE 6 dropped much faster than IE 7 grew as many people moved to Firefox. Last year I thought IE 6 would virtually disappear as a mainstream browsers. The transition rate slowed, however, and IE 6 still has a 20.5% market share and will need to be included in browser testing of web sites for some time.
Both Firefox and Safari almost doubled their rate of growth from last year. Firefox grew 4.6% this year and Safari had a 2.3% rate for 2008. Most of the Safari growth appears to come from new Mac users whose operating system had the same 2.3% growth rate.
Google's new Chrome browser hit the charts in September and rocketed to an impressive 1% market share in the last four months of the year.
The gains in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome came at the cost of IE, which lost 7.8% last year across all versions.
For web development "web standards compliant browsers" continue to grow quickly with a 14.1 % increase for the year. Web standards compliant browsers is a very loosely defined term that means the browsers follow a generally accepted HTML and CSS standards that allow developers to develop sites in a standard way without a lot of hacks and browser specific CSS. I include Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and late models of Netscape in that category.
Operating Systems
Windows users continue to switch from Windows XP to Vista. Vista grew at 10.6% this year which was virtually identical as the growth last year. Windox XP is still the majority of users with 65.2% of the market, but XP and older versions of Windows continue to decline. More people switched from Windows to other platforms and Windows as a whole dropped 3.1% for the year.
Apple's OS X had an even better year than 2007, increasing their market share 2.3% over the year. With a total market share of 9.6%, Macs are about to cross into double digits for the first time ever. Apple has certainly come a long way from the 2.3% market share I recorded at the beginning of 2005.
Linux on the desktop continues to grow slowly. With a 0.3% growth Linux has reached 0.9% of the market in 2008.
Even with the large number of smart phones with good browsers that were released for the year, the iPhone completely eclipses all other phones in web usage. The iPhone trippled its growth this year with a 0.3% increase. Cell phone web browsing continue to be very small percentage of the overall web browsing audience, however, and the iPhone only represents 0.4% of the overall market.
Screen Resolution
It's virtually impossible to buy a new computer today that doesn't have a resolution of at least 1024x768 and that is born out in the numbers for the year. Now 92.5% of people have that resolution or higher and I expect that virtually all web sites will be designed for 1024 in 2009. Now its time to start looking at when web sites can be designed for a 1,280 or higher resolution. Here in January 2009 the percentage is already 55.0%.
Web Browsers
First the browser stats. As you can see from the data below 2008 continued the transition from Internet Explorer 6 to 7. This year the rate was much slower with only 6.2% more IE 7 users ending the year than started it. With a 14.7% loss, IE 6 dropped much faster than IE 7 grew as many people moved to Firefox. Last year I thought IE 6 would virtually disappear as a mainstream browsers. The transition rate slowed, however, and IE 6 still has a 20.5% market share and will need to be included in browser testing of web sites for some time.
Both Firefox and Safari almost doubled their rate of growth from last year. Firefox grew 4.6% this year and Safari had a 2.3% rate for 2008. Most of the Safari growth appears to come from new Mac users whose operating system had the same 2.3% growth rate.
Google's new Chrome browser hit the charts in September and rocketed to an impressive 1% market share in the last four months of the year.
The gains in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome came at the cost of IE, which lost 7.8% last year across all versions.
For web development "web standards compliant browsers" continue to grow quickly with a 14.1 % increase for the year. Web standards compliant browsers is a very loosely defined term that means the browsers follow a generally accepted HTML and CSS standards that allow developers to develop sites in a standard way without a lot of hacks and browser specific CSS. I include Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and late models of Netscape in that category.
| Browser | Dec '07 | Dec '08 | Change |
| Internet Explorer (all versions) | 76.0% | 68.2% | -7.8% |
| Internet Explorer 7.0 | 40.6% | 46.8% | +6.2% |
| Internet Explorer 6.0 | 35.2% | 20.5% | -14.7% |
| Internet Explorer 5.0 & 5.5 | 0.2% | 0.1% | -0.1% |
| Firefox (all versions) | 16.8% | 21.4% | +4.6% |
| Safari (all versions) | 5.6% | 7.9% | +2.3% |
| Netscape (all versions) | 0.7% | 0.6% | -0.1% |
| Opera (all versions) | 0.6% | 0.7% | +0.1% |
| Chrome (all versions) | 0.0% | 1.0% | +1.0% |
| Standards Compliant Browsers | 64.3% | 78.4% | +14.1% |
Operating Systems
Windows users continue to switch from Windows XP to Vista. Vista grew at 10.6% this year which was virtually identical as the growth last year. Windox XP is still the majority of users with 65.2% of the market, but XP and older versions of Windows continue to decline. More people switched from Windows to other platforms and Windows as a whole dropped 3.1% for the year.
Apple's OS X had an even better year than 2007, increasing their market share 2.3% over the year. With a total market share of 9.6%, Macs are about to cross into double digits for the first time ever. Apple has certainly come a long way from the 2.3% market share I recorded at the beginning of 2005.
Linux on the desktop continues to grow slowly. With a 0.3% growth Linux has reached 0.9% of the market in 2008.
Even with the large number of smart phones with good browsers that were released for the year, the iPhone completely eclipses all other phones in web usage. The iPhone trippled its growth this year with a 0.3% increase. Cell phone web browsing continue to be very small percentage of the overall web browsing audience, however, and the iPhone only represents 0.4% of the overall market.
| Operating System | Dec '07 | Dec '08 | Change |
| Windows (all versions) | 91.7% | 88.6% | -3.1% |
| Windows Vista | 10.5% | 21.1% | +10.6% |
| Windows XP | 76.9% | 65.2% | -11.7% |
| Windows 2000 | 2.7% | 1.5% | -1.2% |
| Windows NT | 0.6% | 0.3% | -0.3% |
| Windows 95/98/ME | 1.1% | 0.4% | -0.7% |
| Mac OS X (all versions) | 7.3% | 9.6% | +2.3% |
| Linux (all versions) | 0.6% | 0.9% | +0.3% |
| iPhone | 0.1% | 0.4% | +0.3% |
Screen Resolution
It's virtually impossible to buy a new computer today that doesn't have a resolution of at least 1024x768 and that is born out in the numbers for the year. Now 92.5% of people have that resolution or higher and I expect that virtually all web sites will be designed for 1024 in 2009. Now its time to start looking at when web sites can be designed for a 1,280 or higher resolution. Here in January 2009 the percentage is already 55.0%.
| Resolution | Dec '07 | Dec '08 | Change |
| 800x600 or better | 99.9% | 99.9% | +0.0% |
| 1024x768 or better | 90.8% | 92.5% | +1.7% |
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