At MIX10 they are currently bragging about Silverlight’s superior video quality and its ability, when combined with Microsoft IIS’s smooth streaming technology, to deliver 720p content to millions of people during the Olympics. They’ve also just announced Silverlight 4, and with it some seriously juicy features:

• Webcam & microphone support — Chatroulette will be prettier… woo
• Multicast streaming – if you don’t know what this is… it’s big news!
• Drag-and-drop — Ebay are demonstrating an app that lets you drag images from the desktop into a new item listing, very cool
• Offline DRM, trusted offline applications — you’re going to see apps that work on Windows Phone 7 devices and PCs… and anything with Silverlight installed, basically. Goodbye, Adobe AIR.
• Full Visual Studio integration for Silverlight development – WYSIWYG, and so on. Hooray!

And, most importantly, Silverlight 4 will let you watch full-screen videos on one screen, and use your other screens without minimizing the video!

Now they’re onto Pivot, which Erez has already reviewed…

Update: Silverlight 4 Beta RC is now available to download.

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One of the most interesting attempts is the Ibis reader, which is actually an HTML5-driven website, which is almost as cross-platform as you can get.

I say almost as cross-platform as you can get because it does have a couple of drawbacks: HTML5 is not widespread yet, and Ibis itself is not open-source. It’s more of a platform than a tool — you read Ibis books on the Ibis site itself.

This is why I find Monocle interesting. It is far less visually impressive than Ibis, but it’s based on Javascript — a well-established technology, already available just about anywhere. It’s also open-source, and you can use it to embed an e-book on any webpage. It’s designed to work with the ePub book format (same as everyone else), but it claims to be able to process other formats as well.

I think the major issue with providing e-books is the content rather than the medium, so it remains to be seen who will be using Monocle. Still, choice is a good thing!
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Half the tool’s value lies with the informative cheat sheet, showing you exactly what each regex character does. I would have been happy for some “popular regexes” such as “matching an email address” and “matching a US phone number” etc, but even so, this is definitely a tool I am going to bookmark for future use.
The regex cheat sheet:


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Stories about Apple’s stranglehold of control over the iPhone App Store have been raging since its inception. However, without signing up to the developer program, it’s not easy to find out just what rights developers do and don’t have.

This is due to the terms of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement; all iPhone developers have to agree to these terms in order to be eligible to submit their programs to the App Store. One of the terms states specifically that developers must abstain from making any public statements about the agreement without Apple’s prior written approval.

Luckily for us, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted a copy of the agreement which includes commentary on specific sections that they chose to highlight. Apple watchers won’t find anything particularly surprising, but it certainly does represent a major shift in the rights that developers will have, with regard to the platforms they are developing for, going forward. The number of willing developers is far greater than the number of potentially lucrative platforms, thus putting the platform vendors firmly in the driver’s seat.

Border Radius allows you to optionally generate CSS code for CSS3, as well as engine-specific code for the WebKit and Gecko rendering engines.

That might not mean a lot to some of you, but it should. For the longest time, the largest breakdown between real life and computers — the killer paradigm shift — is how data is processed. We humans process data in parallel, while computers are classically linear or procedural in their execution: step one, step two, step three. But suddenly we have the power of parallelism and the ability to concurrently process wildly varied data — just like humans!

It’s all happened very quickly, with Intel and AMD finally bringing multiple processor cores to the mainstream consumer a few years back, but it IS here — and it’s time to face facts: the current arsenal of tools available to a developer just don’t cut it when it comes to concurrency.

Most of the programming languages we use today are at least 10 years old, with some being much older. There’s a grand total of zero popular programming languages that have concurrency as a primary feature. There have been revisions to old favourites to bring them up to date, but to really make the most of new technology we need a new language.

Fortunately it’s already here in the form of Go, and it’s being developed by a team at Google.

Since we first covered it four months ago, a lot of development has transpired! It’s not ready for mission-critical stuff yet, but in an email to the Good Gear Guide, Rob Pike (one of the Go project leads) said it was more than ready for “simple Web servers, text processing and other such things”. What I’m trying to say is that, if you’re a developer, you should go and get stuck in right now.

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Firebug is an insanely useful add-on, even for those of us who are not all-out web developers. I tweak HTML every now and then, and Firebug is the best tool I know for figuring how why exactly your document doesn’t look right (in Firefox at least, and now in Chrome too). It lets you easily select parts of your document for viewing, and change CSS on-the-fly so you can see what’s the exact CSS rule which makes your page look all wonky.

One cool feature I found out about while working this morning (not new to this release): When you edit CSS, you can use the down-arrow on your keyboard to select all valid values for a certain property. This pretty picture shows it better:

1.5.2 is a pretty minor update, but it basically means they’re done with the 1.5 branch for now, and are focusing on the next version (1.6).

It’s just one of the many sub-clauses of the settlement but an incredibly important caveat for software developers all over the world. If you run a program on two functionally-identical processors, one manufactured by Intel, the other by AMD, the program might run 47% faster on the Intel chip. Other than the open-source community’s GNU GCC, there isn’t really an alternative to the Intel compiler — and for some applications the Intel compiler is the only option.

It’s crazy but true! If the compiler detects that it’s being run on a non-Intel chip, it produces slower, less-optimized code. You can see now why AMD — and a huge number of software companies and programmers! — was seeking such huge damages from Intel.

Let’s hope the settlement in November means we’ll see an end to the anticompetitive play, and a new compiler!

Open-source development is one tricky can of worms. Unlike almost every other technology, time and energy and code is given freely by its developers. It’s crazy, and counter-intuitive by most capitalist measuring sticks, but it seems to work — it’s just darn messy. Take Android for example: there are branches everywhere with patches coming in and going out from every which way. All the while you have the leviathan-like megalith of Google producing its own source and only periodically gracing the repositories with its new code. Let’s not forget the primary partner-and-now-competitor Motorola: they have ‘behind the scenes access’ to Google’s Android code, which they can develop into their own fork — later, they might splice it back into the main branch.

And it works. It works at a rate unmeasurable by any non-contemporary standard. Sometimes, for the sake of progress, a little sloppiness is acceptable: after all, the only resource you have to lose is developers — developers that aren’t being paid anything! “[...]The only thing that really matters is how many of these we ship — how many Android phones. There is a linear relationship between the number of phones you ship and the number of developers,” DiBona says in the interview. As cynical as it sounds, it’s true. There’s no Android roadmap, no way for developers or Google or Motorola to predict what Android 2.2 or later might bring: there’s just developers. Throw them at it and see who sticks. In today’s day and age such a model is a huge advantage: no one knows what will happen within the next year, let alone a few months.

Open-source projects, to compete with the old-school, closed-source, NDA-ridden oligarchs, simply have to attain a critical mass of developers. That’s the sole purpose of the Nexus One: more users, more apps, more coders. Once Android has enough interested and invested parties, there’ll be no stopping it. I just hope someone sends out a rescue vehicle to pick up those that are flung by breakneck speeds to the wayside.

[via The Register]

That’s why so many schools want to get their hands on the PC version. The move from console to desktop means Kodu is even easier to control, using the mouse and keyboard, and it also means kids can share their games online and in the classroom, even with friends who don’t have Xboxes.

The creator of Kodu, Matt MacLaurin, was inspired by his young daughter, and now kids in over 60 schools worldwide are playing with it, too. Who knows, maybe one of them will be the next Sid Meier or Will Wright!

[via VentureBeat]