EnlightenedOsote's blog: "TECH."

Monday, October 06, 2008 6:25 PM Posted by Jon Perlow, Gmail engineer Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we're launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help. When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind? By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you're most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it's active in the General settings. Hopefully Mail Goggles will prevent many of you out there from sending messages you wish you hadn't. Like that late night memo -- I mean mission statement -- to the entire firm.

Turn off the rumor mills, pull down the mocked-up artwork, and say goodbye to the blogger speculation. Google and T-Mobile's G1, the first mobile phone built around Google's open-source, Linux-based Android platform, is officially a product. Before a warm, if not entirely enthusiastic crowd in Manhattan, executives from T-Mobile, HTC and Google (including a surprise appearance by company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page) officially unveiled the T-Mobile G1. Listing for $179 with two data plans ($25 and $35), the T-Mobile G1 is available now to existing T-Mobile customers in limited quantities (via T-Mobile's web site) and at all T-Mobile locations by late next month. It will also launch in the U.K. in November, and across all of Europe by early next year. The G1 is a dual-band HSDPA (1700/2100) and quad-band GSM device. Built by HTC, the phone features a 320x480 touch screen, a hidden QWERTY keyboard, Wi-Fi, 3G, and an accelerometer. Integrated on the G1's keyboard is a trackball for thumb-based navigation, and a 3-megapixel camera. Finally, there is a dedicated Internet and phone search button, built-in Internet applications and access to thousands of applications via the new Android marketplace. The G1 is probably most noteworthy for three things: first, it is the market's first official look at Android, a mobile operating system officially developed as part of the company-agnostic Open Handset Alliance platform, but inextricably tied to Google. Second, it allows T-Mobile to boost its own standing, similar to the high-profile launch of Apple's iPhone, which was exclusively tied to AT&T. Finally, the phone might be as close as the market will ever see to a sort of Google PC, where a Google-designed browser is paired with Google mini-applications, or widgets, running on an operating system pioneered by Google. The marketplace, whose plans Google outlined in August, is perhaps the boldest competitive statement against Apple's increasingly popular iPhone, which offers customers a tightly controlled list of applications via its Apps Store. The difference between the two platforms is Google's pledge to make Android completely open, which Google Founder Sergey Brin demonstrated by explaining that he had already written a G1 app that uses the phone's built-in accelerometer to measure the time it takes the phone to go from being thrown up in the air to hitting the floor. Right now the Android marketplace has only 23 applications and 8 games, although that's sure to grow. Andy Rubin, senior director of mobile platforms for Google, characterized the platform as "future proof because it has openness built in." Seeking to position the G1 as a mobile Internet device, Cole Brodman, chief technical officer and innovation officer for T-Mobile, explained that mobile Web adoption in the USA has lagged behind other markets. "Consumers have a desire to connect, but they haven't found the mobile Internet very compelling," Brodman said, adding only 16 percent of U.S. mobile users go online. However, Brodman characterized the U.S. consumer as having "an appetite for these devices…U.S. consumers over-consume everything. We love that." "It will appeal to a broad variety of people," HTC's chief executive Peter Chou added. The assembled executives later admitted, however, that consumers may be the earliest adopters since G1 lacks Exchange server support. The HTC-built phone offers a handful of unusual interface options, including the ability to access different functions with a "long press". So holding down on, say, a selected photo would allow users to mail that image directly from the phone. Menus and options pop down from the top of the screen using "windowshades." As you'd expect from a Google-branded device, the G1 is designed to excel at Internet-based tasks. In addition to the dedicated, physical Google search button, the G1 will come with built-in Gmail and a Google Mobile browser. T-Mobile execs called the browser, which uses the Webkit engine, "Chrome Lite". The G1 comes pre-loaded with Google maps and an innovative "Compass" mode, which lets a user use the phone to essentially preview an intersection from all directions by holding the phone and rotating in the four compass directions. The G1 phone will display the appropriate street-level view images for whichever direction the phone is facing. While the phone plays YouTube video, it does not capture it. Unlike many mobile browsers, this one will support multiple browser windows. Similarly, the phone can easily switch you out from browsing the Web to answering a call, executives promised. Instant messaging is built in, including Google Talk, along with support for AIM, MSN Messenger and Yahoo IM. In August, Google said that several features would be cut out of Android, including Google Talk, to allow the phone to make its ship date. The G1 also includes Wi-Fi and integrates with Amazon's music service. G1 owners will be able to peruse the music store and download song clips over the T-Mobile network. Full song downloads are only available via a Wi-Fi connection. The phone supports DRM-free AAC, MP3s and WMA. T-Mobile's 3G coverage is admittedly spotty, but Brodman promised that it will expand substantially by the official Oct 22 G1 launch and should be virtually nationwide by November.

by Darren Murph, posted Sep 18th 2008 at 6:21AM We've been intrigued by Sony's PlayStation Home concept for, like, ever now, but considering just how long the thing has been delayed, we're trying to avoid any contact with pre-launch fodder in order to keep our hopes low. That being the case, we realize not all of you care to safeguard your hearts in the way we have ours, so we felt it prudent -- nay, necessary -- to pass along PS3 Fanboy's in-depth walkthrough of the service. SCEA's Jack Buser recently took the time to sit down and open up for a marvelous preview of the Plaza, Game Space and lots of other nooks and crannies we're sure you're interested in venturing into. To the read link, we send you. Try not to get lost, okay?

by Thomas Ricker, posted Sep 18th 2008 at 5:06AM Following in the dubious footsteps of Creative, ASUS just announced a dedicated videophone all its own. The AiGuru SV1 followup to the voice-only S1, enables virtually unlimited video calls without a computer -- a world's first to get a big thumbs-up from Skype. The SV1 packs an 800 x 600 pixel 7-inch LCD, integrated speaker and mic (or jacks for your own), a VGA-quality webcam, and connects to the Internets over 802.11b/g WiFi or Ethernet. It'll even run off battery for up to 20-minutes if absolutely necessary. Available for pre-order in Europe and North America today for a netbook-priced, $300 beans -- ships in October.

by Stephanie Patterson, posted Sep 17th 2008 at 6:12AM Although the iWear AV310 Widescreen from Vuzix isn't the first 3D HMD we've come across, or the largest virtual display (likened to a 52' screen viewed from 9-feet), it's the first 16:9 widescreen version to hit the market. Equipped for use with both NTSC and PAL, this unit will run you about $250 and has a mysterious "video" input for use with a wide range of devices, though there's currently nothing to say what style of connector can be used or what resolution it runs at. Oh well... we're still waiting on a headtracking version anyway.

by Thomas Ricker, posted Sep 17th 2008 at 1:52AM We figured it was coming, now sure enough, Kodak just let loose a new picture frame based on CMEL's new mass-produced, 7.6-inch OLED panels. Ultra-thin as you'd expect and wireless as you'd hope, the new 800 x 480 pixel Wireless Frame should be ready for the holidays sporting 2GB of internal storage, integrated audio, a 30,000:1 contrast, 180-degree viewing angle, and photo service compatibility with Flickr and others. Unfortunately, it's got a price you'd expect from this nascent display tech: $999. Sparky, had better be worth it.

by Thomas Ricker, posted Sep 17th 2008 at 12:30AM After a brief tease, Canon just got official with its EOS 5D Mark II. The full-frame shooter updates the original 5D introduced back in 2005 with a 24 x 36mm 21.1 megapixel CMOS sensor, DIGIC 4 processor with 14-bit analog-to-digital conversion, and the ability to capture Full HD 1,920 x 1,080 video -- take that Nikon D90 and your paltry 720p. We're talking expanded 50-25,600 ISO range,15-point autofocus with 9 selectable AF points, 3-inch Live View LCD offering 4x the pixels of the original 5D, and a 3.9fps burst for unlimited JPEGs or up to 14 RAW images when using a UDMA CF card. With regard to video leaked predicted by RED CEO last week, the EOS 5D Mark II captures Full HD video at 30fps as well as VGA / 30fps for the first time on any Canon SLR. Of course, it works with any of Canon's 60 EF lenses (and whatever Carl Zeiss cooks up) for ultra-wide-angle, fish-eye, macro, and super-telephoto videography. Video can be recorded at up to 4GB per clip which is equivalent to about 12 minutes of Full HD video or 24 minutes in VGA. Video clips are recorded in .MOV format using MPEG-4 video compression and linear PCM audio. You can even record with external stereo mics attached to an input terminal. At the end of November, Canon will sell the body-only for $2,699 or bundled with Canon's 24-105mm f/4L IS USM zoom lens for $3,499. Welcome back to the show Canon, we were starting to worry.

5:25 PM, September 16, 2008 For those of you who have been anticipating the so-called Google Phone as if it were the next iPhone, the wait is almost over. Google T-Mobile USA said today that it would unveil the much-anticipated mobile phone loaded with Google's Android software next Tuesday at a press conference in New York. The "G1," which is being manufactured by HTC, won't go on sale until October. But expect T-Mobile to finally divulge some key details such as pricing. T-Mobile is just the first carrier to market the phone. Other cellphone manufacturers and carriers are expected to dial for dollars using the Google brand as bait, but they apparently have hit some snags. The Android phone is being positioned as a rival to Apple's iPhone and Research in Motion's BlackBerry. For Google, this seems like a no-lose proposition. The Internet search giant wants to make sure that all of its services, including its lucrative advertising, are available on all cellphones. So it created software for mobile phones that does that. Pundits have been saying for years that the mobile Web will dwarf the non-mobile Web once enough people have access to so-called smartphones and all of the bells and whistles that come with them. Already Google is readying a store for downloadable mobile software similar to the one that has proven so successful for the iPhone. Google showed off the handset at a developer conference in London this morning. Next week, Google and T-Mobile should start to reveal whether Android will live up to the hype. -- Jessica Guynn

By Scott Loganbill September 12, 2008 Categories: Programming, Software & Tools HTML 5HTML 5 represents the biggest leap forward in web standards in almost a decade. Unlike the specifications that came before it, HTML 5 is not merely intended to present content to a web browser. Its goal is to bring the web into maturity as a full-fledged application platform — a level playing field where video, sound, images, animations, and full interactivity with your computer are all standardized. And it may be a long way off still, but elements of HTML 5 are already reshaping the way we use the web. The last update to the Hypertext Markup Language — the lingua franca of the web — was the 4.01 specification completed in September, 1999. Quite a bit has happened since. The original browser wars ended, Netscape dissolved. The winner, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, begat IE6, which begat the current IE7. Mozilla Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape to take over second position. Apple and Google have released their own web browsers. The minority shareholder Opera continues to play the gadfly while pushing standards and software design forward. We even have a real web experience on our phones and game consoles, thanks to Opera, the iPhone and Google’s soon-to-be-released Android. But all that progress threw the web standards movement into disarray. Ideas for HTML 5 and other developing standards were more or less left on the cutting room floor. As a result, HTML 5 has been in draft form ever since. Several interested parties have banded together to form the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (simply referred to as the WHATWG), an entity charged with picking up HTML 5’s pieces. It operates separately from the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees web standards, and it includes representatives from Mozilla, the KHTML/WebKit project, Google, Apple, Opera and Microsoft. And although the draft may not be ratified for years, work on HTML 5 continues. So what does HTML 5 offer? Here’s a rundown of the most exciting advancements in the HTML 5 draft specification today: * A new, sensible tagging strategy. Instead of bundling all multimedia into object or embed tags, video goes in video tags. Audio goes in audio tags, and so on. * Localized databases. This feature, when implemented, automatically embeds a local SQL database websites can read and write to, speeding up interactive searching, cacheing and indexing functions, or for offline use of web apps that rely on data requests. * Rich animations without plug-ins. The canvas element gives the browser the ability to draw vector graphics. This means configurable, automatic graphs and illustrations right in the browser without Flash or Silverlight. Some support for canvas is already in all the latest browsers except for IE. * Real apps in the browser. APIs for in-browser editing, drag and drop, back button “waypoints,” and other graphical user interface abilities. * Content presentation tags will be phased out, and CSS will rule. In theory, HTML 5 is a breeding ground for new ideas for web standards shared among interested developers and browser vendors. But it’s all still experimental. “HTML 5 is kind of an overloaded term,” says Mozilla vice president of engineering Mike Shaver. “It’s both sort of an incubator (at WHATWG) and the standards-based track at the W3C.” Mozilla’s interest, according to Shaver, is aligned with the experimentation at WHATWG. “We’re very active in the HTML 5 group, designing and doing early implementations on those specifications and the work graduates to the W3C.” In the past year, Mozilla has released several forward-thinking projects aligned with the emerging standards, including Prism, a system for running web apps offline, and Weave, a data storage framework. Shaver says the HTML 5 movement was born out of impatience. Many sensed activity around web standards was stagnating as the W3C started directing its attention away from HTML and to another emerging technology, XML. “A lot of new architectures — XML based work — were designed to replace HTML in the web,” says Shaver. “We were really not convinced that was the way it should go forward. We don’t think people should be throwing (web technology) away to get (the web) to go forward.” Experimentation is now going strong in Firefox and WebKit-powered browsers like Safari and Google’s new Chrome, but there are growing pains. Chrome developer Darin Fisher says that while Chrome was under wraps, a few things had to go. Despite using the latest branch of WebKit (the same branch to be used in the next version of Safari), the local database features didn’t make it into Chrome’s first release. Unfortunately, the safety and performance factors of Chrome’s isolated sandbox system, which enables faster and more secure browsing by partitioning tabs in memory and CPU process, would break the built-in WebKit database functionality. Because it was developing in secret, the Chrome team was unable to get too involved in WebKit development. “We couldn’t be engaged in the WebKit community without being involved with keeping Chrome a secret,” Fisher laments. “We share one vision, and we’re really excited to help WebKit in some way. We have a lot of experienced web developers (at Google). It’s really interesting what kind of challenges people are facing. We can bridge that divide a little.” With the launch of Chrome, Fisher says his team members occasionally have lunch with the WebKit team. Some are even personal friends. Fisher claims they are eager to work with the other WebKit developers to fix some of these offline functions. Included in Chrome is the Google-born and now open-source Gears, a piece of technology used for the same purposes as HTML 5’s offline features. “Gears has a lot of great value. It’s best thought of as an alternative API already out there,” says Fisher. “HTML 5 is great if you have a newer browser, but what about the vast majority of users that have an older browsers? Gears is a vehicle to make this API available to older browsers. We’re working to match HTML 5 versions of these APIs.” Fisher stops short of labeling Gears a stop-gap to HTML 5. “Gears is very compatible and supportive of HTML 5. It is on a trajectory to become another implementation, another platform that is to put HTML 5 on people’s desktops.” The majority of work thus far has been by companies like Apple (through WebKit), Mozilla, Opera, Google and Trolltech. So, where’s Microsoft? Internet Explorer has been famously slow to adopt web standards, let along the experimentation of HTML 5. But the tide is shifting with the emergence of Internet Explorer 8. “I’m really looking forward to the work we’re starting to do to ramp up building a test suite in the HTML Working Group,” says Microsoft Internet Explorer platform architect and WHAT WG co-chair Chris Wilson in an e-mail. Wilson says the Internet Explorer team is still a little wary of some of the proposals in HTML 5. “I think all the members of the Working Group, particularly the editor, would agree we still have a lot of work ahead of us to flesh out the specification,” wrote Wilson. “Parts of the specification, of course, are more polished that others.” IE8, currently in beta, already includes several new features from HTML 5, he points out. It has a cross-document messaging system, the local data store for client-side storage, a way to insert back button “waypoints” into web history and some offline event features to detect network outages. But some stuff isn’t on the drawing board. While Wilson says canvas looks like a useful feature, it’s not in Microsoft’s plan for IE8. Wilson believes there’s definitely a future in the specification. “HTML 5 is huge, and is still under a lot of development as a specification. I think that the browser implementers, though, are working together to try to agree as quickly as possible; each browser chooses when to implement what, though, and will bring pieces online as they determine their user and developer base need it.” Web developers and browser vendors alike can agree with Wilson on one thing: “This is certainly an exciting time, and we’re really pleased to see the renewed interest in the web as an application platform.”