Thursday, February 28, 2008

War of the Web | Google Microsoft Adobe Mozilla

There is always a constant fight between the technologies to conquer the web. Sometime back it was Google with the use of AJAX revolutionized the user experience in the web. The user experience and navigations are made very simple using javascript and XML in its products like Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheet, Picassa, etc. Now All the office applications are available on the web which makes it easy to access your data from anywhere in the world.



Later Microsoft also jumped into this with its own Microsoft Office Live Workspace which also offers the same kind of office functionalities on the net as against Google offered earlier. Microsoft Office Live is still in its beta and the access to it is restricted to very limited users. Read the review here .
Microsoft has also come out with its latest Silverlight which is a cross-browser, cross-platform plugin which is based on .Net and promises to give you rich media experience over the internet. Click here to see a small mashup application using Google maps and Silverlight.

Recently Adobe has introduced Adobe AIR( Adobe Integrated Runtime) which lets developers to create rich internet applications and lets you run it as a desktop application on various operating systems. It lets developers to develop application using AJAX, Flash and Flex.
With all these developments Adobe has acquired a startup company called Virtual Ubiquity , which has a product called Buzzword. Buzzword is an office application which is totally developed using Flash and Flex offers awesome user experience. The navigations are very smooth appearance looks very cool. Buzzword is in its beta and we can expect a lot of features to be added soon. Try out Buzzword.

Mozilla foundation also has announced its new project called Prism, which helps you to run the web applications as standalone desktop application. It works as a plug-in to the Firefox browser and let you access the web application just from the start-menu just like another application. I tried out the prototype which was released by mozilla foundation. It is really cool application which allows the applications like gmail, Google calendar,etc to run like desktop application.

With more and more applications getting on to the web, there wont be a need for a computer to access all your information. You just need a browser which will support the web application which you can even access it from your mobile phone. A very light-weight client with the access to the internet is very much sufficient to do most of your work. So all the big players are competing to capture this growing market and monetize on it.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Jumpcut : An online video editor from Yahoo

Just came across this cool new online tool for editing all your videos. When Google has an array of products on its list, Yahoo also has many such products which i was not aware. And Jumpcut is from Yahoo which was acquired recently by yahoo. Even though Google has Youtube for the online video sharing, it does not have the feature to edit any video. But Jumpcut offers you a lot of options.
These are some of the things which i was able to explore on jumpcut:

  • Upload all you video just like you do on youtube.
  • Share the videos with friends or make it public
  • Make a movie of you own by combining many small clips as you do in a video editor
  • Add sounds, animations, text in the video.
  • Amazingly all these things you are able to do online and its very fast.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

BarCamp | BarCampHyderabad5 [ BCH5 ]

Its my first experience at a BarCamp and i was most fascinated to attend this because it was hosted at the Google campus in Hyderabad. I have heard a lot about other BarCamps in bangalore and even about the latest DevCamp in bangalore which was attended by my friends varalu and paramesh.

I finally managed to make it to the Google's campus at 10.30AM accompanied by one of friend Dhuree. I was surprised to see the overwhelming number of people who have gathered over there. I could see many people coming up who have not registered at the wiki.

After all the initial registration and stuff got over we were led to the Google's massive cafeteria where the presentations were going on. From then on there were a series of talks going on by lots of enthusiastic speakers. These are some of the presentations which are worth a mention

  • Open Source Development Model by Saifi Khan from http://www.twincling.org/ - This session was too good. I enjoyed this session very much and got a lot of eye openers on the open source development model. It was very much inspiring and the speaker was able to influence the audience very well. He is part of a society called TWINCLING, which basically promotes Open source software in Andra Pradesh and parts of Maharashtra.
  • How to Build a Successful Blog by Amit Agarwal. - The speaker is a full-time blogger and makes his living by blogging. He gave very good ideas and tips for blogging and do s and donts. This session was very good and he gave many of his personal experiences with blogging.
  • Lighting up the Web with Silverlight 2 by Janakiram from Microsoft. Like a typical Microsoft campaign, this person was able to capture the attention of the audience very well. The session was very good with many demos like a mini media player on the web which can run multiple movies simultaneously with HD quality. A small demo about Moonlight, a mono based implementation of Silverlight and a mash-up application built over this.
  • Building Low Cost Scalable Web Applications by Ramesh Rajamani. Even though this session was little bit slow and very much prolonged , i was able to grab some ideas about building a good web application.
  • Ruby on Rails relevance to Startup's, Sumanth Krishna. This session must have been named as Ruby on Rails tutorial and the speaker was not sticking onto the topic properly.
  • Behavior Driven Development using RSpec, Sanjeev Kumar.

And i missed some of the presentations because of the parallel track which was going on for sometime.
And generally, we had a very good support from Google and the place was too good which had lot of ambiance, multi-point projectors, relay telecast on TVs. We had lot of support from Google employees. A special mention to the food at Google( It was excellent).
Some of the bad things which i was able to observe was there was very less participation from audience and many were roaming and disturbing the speaker sometimes. I was able to see the worst of things when the T-shirts were distributed. It was a complete mess around that place and the google folks were struggling to control the crowd. And many managed to get away with 2 or even 3 T-shirts.

I atleast expect some better way of organizing these things in the next BarCamp and also speakers should try to stick on to the topic and not to deviate from it.

PS: More Photos to be added soon. Guys if you get some photos please send me.