Mozilla has announced the availability of Fennec alpha 2, a new prerelease of the organization's evolving mobile browser. This version includes some much-needed performance optimizations that improve the responsiveness of the program.
The Fennec project, which aims to bring the full power of Gecko and Firefox 3 to handheld devices, was first announced last year. Mozilla's successful effort to reduce memory consumption during the Firefox 3 development cycle finally made the browser a viable choice for resource-constrained mobile environments. Mozilla also built an improved JavaScript engine this year called TraceMonkey that has delivered big performance gains.
Despite all of that heavy optimization work, the first Fennec alpha, which was released in October, was very sluggish. Our tests on the Nokia N810 found it to be promising, but still far from usable. The situation has improved considerably in the new alpha release, which offers faster loading and scrolling.
"While we focused much of the previous alpha on getting the user experience how we wanted, we've spent much of the time since focused on improving performance," wrote Mozilla developer Stuart Parmenter in a blog entry. "We've made major strides improving startup performance, panning and zooming performance, and responsiveness while pages are loading."
Mozilla XUL guru Mark Finkle also wrote about the new release and published a blog entry that provides insight into some aspects of the underlying implementation and several of the specific optimization techniques that were used to increase the browser's responsiveness.
Fennec's main content area is rendered on a canvas element instead of using a conventional browser element. The content is painted on the canvas with the drawWindow method, a nonstandard function that Mozilla added to its own implementation of the canvas JavaScript API. Fennec uses the canvas in order to improve panning and zooming performance, but the developers discovered that it incurs a high overhead during display updates. Finkle explains that they switched to using the drawImage function for updating thumbnails when possible, which is quite a bit faster.
The new version also hooks into the MozAfterPaint event so that canvas regions can be updated conditionally as needed instead of repainting the entire canvas after every change. In addition to the rendering performance enhancements, Finkle also describes File I/O optimizations that improve startup time.
As Fennec development continues to move forward, the value and significance of having the complete Firefox stack in a mobile environment is becoming increasingly apparent. Developers have already started creating innovative add-ons for the new browser that increase its functionality in various ways. For example, the TwitterBar extension allows users to post to Twitter directly from the Fennec address bar. An early Fennec port of Mozilla's Weave framework is also underway.
The new version is available for download from the Mozilla web site. A package is provided for Nokia N810 devices that are running OS2008. There is also a XULRunner-based version that can be used to test the browser on desktop computers. For download links and more details about Fennec alpha 2, see the official release notes.
A Beijing man who was the target of a "virtual lynching" by vigilantes after being blamed for his wife's suicide, has received a payout in China for the cyberbullying. Wang Fei was awarded about 9,000 yuan (about $1,300) after losing his job and being harassed online and at his home.
Wang Fei's wife, suspecting that her husband was having an affair, jumped from the 24th floor of a building last year after posting photos online of the woman she suspected was sleeping with her husband.
A male friend of the wife's posted Wang Fei's personal details online, and shortly thereafter Fei began receiving death threats. Vigilantes also painted "blood must be repaid with blood" over the doors of his and his parents' homes, called his office colleagues to denigrate him and picketed outside the advertising agency where he worked, forcing him out of his job. He suffered from insomnia and depression.
So Fei sued his oppressors -- the man who posted his details online and launched the vigilantism and the internet company that hosted the information -- saying he had suffered emotional distress from having his reputation tarnished and his privacy violated.
A Beijing court order the defendants to pay Fei about $1,300 in fines and court fees and to publish an apology online.
Fei had sought 135,000 yuan in compensation (about $19,600), but the three judges presiding over the case said they docked him for moral turpitude. Fei admitted in court that his wife's suspicions were correct -- he had been having an affair.
As Christmas approaches and Hanukkah comes along to the later days, there’s a chance you might be expecting a new computer, or perhaps even a netbook.
Now, what to the do with the old computer, or even with the netbook? Why not give your old computer a new life by running Linux on it? It may seem like a scary thought, but chances are you have a few misconceptions about Linux and that’s keeping you from making the jump.
Here is a list of five of the biggest Linux myths out there and how you can make Linux your friend.
5. It won’t connect to an iPod or MP3 player.
This might not apply to everyone, but to some people who only have one computer it could be a big deal. Most people now have some sort of MP3 player, and need a computer to put music on it, with special software on top of that, especially with the iPod.
Now, of course, you can’t use the App Store without iTunes (which has some problems installing with WINE), but you can easily buy songs from Amazon MP3 store, or rip them from CDs. Most music players for Linux support MP3 players, and even iPods, some like Songbird even look like iTunes if you’re almost too comfortable with the program.
4. Linux is not compatible with Mac/Windows files.
This seems to be a general misconception about computers in general. A lot of people seem to think that files from one operating system won’t work on any other one. This is true about applications, but not for the files they use or create.
If you’re working with a word processor, chance are it can export files to .doc files, which just about any program can use. Music is usually stored in MP3, AAC or FLAC files, all of which are easily usable on any platform. Having compatible files is easily avoided if you use cross-platform applications such as OpenOffice, that way you dont have to worry about exporting to other file types
3. Linux can’t play games.
This might not be important to everyone, but to some people games are the main reason why they stick with Windows. Even if all they play is World of Warcraft, they don’t want to give up their games just because thy switch to another OS.
There’s actually a lot of games that are native to Linux, though most aren’t as pretty as the newest games. There are ways to play those new games on Linux, however. There’s Codeweaver’s Crossover and Crossover Games, Cedega, and WINE (Crossover is essentially a more stable, paid version of WINE). Between these three, most popular games are easily played. I run WarCraft III on Ubuntu Eee using WINE, and it can easily handle WoW or even games liek Team Fortress 2, assuming your computer can handle it, of course.
2. Apps are hard to find.
Most Linux distros come with a lot of useful software, but sometimes you might want to replace them with something else or find something else you might want ot need. Unlike Windows, and to a lesser extent Mac, there aren’t many retail box copies of Linux software. However, with a quick Google search for “Linux apps” I was able to find Linux Online’s application page. Or, if you’re running Ubuntu, there’s Get Deb, which not only lists Ubuntu software, but also makes it really simple to install them.
1. You have to learn command line/terminal
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told people that I’m running Linux, and they immediately cringe at the idea of the terminal. Somewhere along the line, Linux got the reputation that it’s only usable by coders, or those who know a decent bit of code.
The same people that cringe are the same people that are surprised when I show them Ubuntu Eee. It’s possibly even more simple than Windows with the netbook remix UI, but Linux is easy even without that.
Some distributions such as openSUSE have a Windows-like start menu, some, like Ubuntu, have an applications drop menu that lists all your applications, making for an environment that should be easy for anyone. Most also use GNOME or KDE file browsers which are just as easy to navigate as Windows Explorer.
If you can possibly get past these scary ideas, I would recommend Ubuntu, or Ubuntu Eee for your Eee PC (soon to be Easy Peasy, with more netbooks supported). Also look for my article on useful applications for Linux that can replace your Windows or Mac Apps.
Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced plans to overhaul desktop notifications. The project is part of a broader initiative that the company launched earlier this year to boost the usability of the Linux software ecosystem.
Transient visual notifications are employed extensively in desktop applications to provide users with passive updates about application status or system events. Some typical usage scenarios include notifying users when they receive new e-mail, when an instant messaging buddy signs online, or when a CD finishes burning.
The current status of notifications on Linux
The most widely-used notification system on the Linux desktop today is based on the FreeDesktop.org (FDO) notification specification. The spec, which was authored by the developers behind the Galago project, describes a standardized API that can be accessed through the desktop-neutral D-Bus interprocess communication protocol to display visual notifications on the user's desktop. The authors of the spec supply a reference implementation called notification-daemon that is shipped with the GNOME desktop environment in many popular Linux distributions. An accompanying library, called libnotify, provides a lightweight abstraction layer that helps applications interact with the daemon.
Although notification-daemon is included in many distros and is used heavily by GNOME applications and many components of the desktop environment itself, the GNOME community has consistently rejected proposals to formally include it as a core dependency of the environment because it still has some technical limitations and usability issues that need to be addressed. The lead notification-daemon developer, Christian Hammond, is very busy with other projects and doesn't have much time to work on the notification system.
In October, following the release of GNOME 2.24, the GNOME community began the process of nominating modules for inclusion in the next major version of the desktop environment. Developer Colin Walters proposed notification-daemon once again and started a new discussion about its suitability. The outcome of this discussion was productive on several levels. Hammond acknowledged the need for additional maintainers to help apply patches and also proposed migrating the source code over to GNOME's subversion repository.
Last month, he announced the first new libnotify and notification-daemon release since 2007. It contains several much-needed bug fixes and a new preference tool for configuring the default notification bubble theme and position.
Canonical's vision for better notifications
As the notification-daemon project is regaining some of its lost momentum, there is a very clear need for strong technical leadership and usability expertise to help accelerate development and make notifications shine on the desktop. Canonical has identified this task as an ideal starting point for its new desktop experience engineering team.
In a blog entry written Monday, Ubuntu overlord Mark Shuttleworth has outlined some ideas for a next-generation notification system. These ideas, which are based on collaborative design discussions that took place during the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit in California, include some controversial concepts that will subtly alter the way that visual notifications are used. Although the changes will create challenges for application developers, the new approach also promises to reduce the intrusiveness of notifications and increase usability in a number of compelling ways.
Shuttleworth says that notifications should be simplified to completely eliminate the need for user interaction. To accommodate that goal, the new notification system will not support response buttons or any other interactive elements. This change is intended to reduce the disruption caused by notifications. He says that applications which require persistent notifications should use panel notification area icons and that conventional popups and other mechanisms can be used for messages that require an interactive response.
The new notification system will leverage modern compositing functionality to increase the aesthetic quality of the notification bubbles and reduce their detrimental impact on usability. On systems that support compositing, the notifications will be displayed with a translucent background so that it will be possible to see what is behind them when they obscure content on the screen. When the user moves the mouse cursor over a bubble, the level of opacity will adjust so that the bubble is barely visible. Users will be able to click through and interact with the elements behind the bubbles as if the notifications don't even exist.
These visual effects, which are demonstrated in a mockup video that Shuttleworth published this morning, are impressive and could make notifications feel like a more natural part of the desktop.
Video courtesy of Mark Shuttleworth A full size version is available from his web site.
Implementation details
To make these features a reality, Canonical will be creating a new implementation of the notification specification. It will be compatible with the existing notification-daemon in many ways and will support the same basic D-Bus API. This means that libnotify will still work with the new daemon and some applications will be able to function properly with the new system without requiring any modifications.
It will not be 100 percent compatible, however, and some applications will have to be modified. The notification spec defines several sets of capabilities and provides applications with a method for querying the daemon to determine what capabilities are supported. Unfortunately, very few applications actually take that step and many programs are designed with the assumption that the ubiquitous reference implementation is the one in use. Those applications will not work properly with the new system and will have to be changed in order to be fully compatible.
The Ubuntu developers plan to update the applications in the main Ubuntu software repositories so that they will work with the new notification system. During the transition period, a fallback mechanism will also be included to prevent users from losing functionality in applications that currently require buttons on notifications.
I discussed these plans with Canonical developers Ted Gould and Mathew Paul Thomas who are working on the notification system. They have several ideas about how to encourage application developers to make their software compatible with the new system. They also shared with me several of the technical challenges that they expect to face during the transition.
They think that getting major desktop applications to support the new system will be relatively easy, but where they foresee difficulty is in getting independent developers to update the countless one-off utilities that leverage notifications for various specialized purposes. It's very easy to write simple scripts that tie together various platform services via D-Bus and use notifications as an interface. We demonstrated how to do this in our review of Pidgin last year. Those kinds of scripts will be the hardest to accommodate and will depend heavily on the fallback mechanism until individual developers convert all of them. These kinds of custom utilities are used at some large Ubuntu deployments, including some at universities and other similar facilities.
Another challenge will be providing an adequate user experience on systems that don't support compositing. Translucency is a fundamental aspect of the design for the new notification system, but this feature requires Compiz or some other compositing window manager. Not all users can or will run a compositing window manager. On a lot of conventional hardware, this requires proprietary binary drivers, which makes it ideologically unpalatable to free software purists. The notification system will likely be designed to degrade gracefully in such scenarios but will only provide the full scope of functionality when compositing is available.
Cross-desktop interoperability
I also learned about Canonical's plans to bring this new notification system to KDE. Gould says that Canonical is actively seeking a KDE developer to join the company's interaction and design team. He suspects that the new notification system will be ready for preliminary testing in Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope, which is scheduled for release in April. The KDE version, however, will probably require an extra release cycle after Jaunty. Shuttleworth says that, ideally, he would like to have both the KDE and GNOME versions delivered simultaneously.
KDE developer Aaron Seigo has written a blog entry commenting on Canonical's plans. KDE 4.2 introduces its own notification system that integrates with the Plasma desktop layer and is based loosely on the FDO spec. The KDE developers had to deviate from the spec in several ways in order to meet the needs of their desktop environment. Canonical has an opportunity here to work with the KDE community to help bridge the gaps and build a solution that will be fully interoperable between the two desktop environments.
"I'm hopeful that soon all FOSS desktop apps (KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, etc) will be able to show their visual notifications in a way that integrates well with whatever the host desktop shell is. The rough goal we talked about on IRC is by the releases in the second half of 2009 to be sharing something, with the possibility of even making it happen in the spring releases," Seigo wrote.
Shuttleworth speaks
Shuttleworth addresses many of the potential technical challenges in his blog entry and also provides some insight into the philosophical basis for the new changes. He acknowledges that many of the new ideas are unproven and will require testing and experimentation before they are ready to be adopted upstream. Using the Ubuntu audience as test subjects will allow for the system to be refined and evaluated before it is adopted more broadly. He plans to work closely with upstream developers to make sure that it will serve the needs of the developer community and end users.
"Some of these ideas are unproven, they boil down to matters of opinion, but since our commitment to them is based on a desire to learn more I think of them as constructive experiments. Experiments are just that—experiments. They may succeed and they may fail. We should judge them carefully, after we have data," he wrote. "We are putting new ideas into the free desktop without ego. We know those ideas could be better or worse than similar work being done in other communities, and we want to gather real user feedback to help find the best mix for everyone."
He also encourages users to keep an open mind and be patient with a deviation from what is shipped by upstream projects. Many users tend to dislike when distributions include experimental components that are significantly different and perhaps less functional than the stock components. Shuttleworth hopes that users will understand the need for experimentation and will provide constructive feedback to help improve the new notification system so that it can be adopted universally.
"So, for those folks who were upset that we might ship something other than a GNOME or KDE default, I would ask for your patience and support—we want to contribute new ideas and new code, and that means having some delta which can be used as a basis for discussions about the future direction of upstream," he wrote.
He also reveals that the new notification system will probably be shipped during the 9.04 cycle on netbook products by at least one major hardware vendor.
Conclusion
There is considerable room for skepticism about several of the changes proposed by Canonical—particularly the decision to abandon action buttons on notifications—but the ideas are very intriguing and it's clear that the proposal was crafted with immense care and impeccable attention to detail. It will be a fascinating experiment and it could provide valuable insight into potential solutions for a variety of related usability problems.
I was also very impressed with Shuttleworth's honesty and the thoroughness with which his blog entry addressed a multitude of foreseeable issues and concerns. This demonstrates a laudable willingness to supply the transparency that will be needed to make the project a success. Although I think that this is a very good start, there are also some areas where Canonical needs to improve its collaboration skills.
Seigo points out in his blog entry that Canonical should have brought its thoughts about desktop notifications to the FDO mailing lists from the very start before assembling a grand vision for sweeping changes. Similarly, it's disappointing that Canonical hasn't been participating in the ongoing discussions about the future of notification-daemon on GNOME's desktop developer list.
All things considered, I think that Canonical's plans for a desktop notification overhaul will be very positive in the long run. Even if some of the specific ideas don't work out, a lot of valuable things could be learned along the way. This is definitely a good area for Canonical to be contributing and it will be fascinating to see the end result.
LG Display may have one of the more interesting LCD innovations at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, which will open its doors in early January. The company said it will demonstrate a new TFT LCD for notebooks that is specifically designed for outdoor use: The 14.1” panel is illuminated by sunlight instead of the standard backlight unit when used outside.
What makes this panel special is the integration of selective reflection plates in existing backlight panels, which enable the switch from reflective mode in a high luminance setting (sunlight) to transmissive mode in a low luminance setting (indoors and at night). LG claims that the display achieves an outdoor contrast ratio that is up to four times higher than what regular LCDs can provide in a similar setting. The switch from sunlight to backlight mode is simply done “with the touch of a button”, LG said.
Running a notebook LCD with the help of sunlight sharply cuts the power consumption of the most power hungry hardware in today’s notebooks as well. In sunlight mode, the display will use only 25% of the power used in backlight mode, LG promises. Since LCDs consume considerable amounts - typical 14.1” LCDs can consume somewhere between 50 and 70 watts – a power reduction of about 75% is significant.
There was no information when this new display may become available.
Transferring electricity through the air to power an electronic gadget seems impossible. Nikola Tesla, the radio pioneer, tried unsuccessfully to do it in the early 1900s. Technical hurdles have plagued the attempts to do the same thing ever since.
But PowerBeam, a small Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company that I first came across in April, 2007, says it is making progress on a technology that can transfer electricity — or more accurately generate electricity — across a room. It does so by focusing a laser on a solar cell, which converts the energy into electricity.
Grier Graham, vice president of product development, said the company can use a laser to generate about 1.5 watts of power to a solar cell as far away as 10 meters. That’s enough to power an electronic speaker or small low-wattage light-emitting diode (LED) lights. It can also charge the battery in a digital picture frame. But it’s not enough to operate a laptop (which requires maybe 30 watts to 50 watts).
But down the road, this product and others like it could create an enormous market for wireless devices that need power but are handicapped if they are tethered to a cord. These are devices that can’t get enough energy from direct sunlight to power them.
The current prototype’s receiver (left) is smaller than a fist and its transmitter (pictured at top) is about the size of half a brick. That’s a lot smaller than the original prototype I saw. The company still says it is about 18 months from having the products in the market. These folks have a long way to go, but they are making progress.
Graham, the brother of co-founder David Graham, says that the company needs to raise money to create a low-cost, fully customized version of the product. PowerBeam needs about $5 million to $6 million to do that.
The company raised $600,000 in a seed round from European venture capitalist I2BF. The company is one of perhaps a handful that will show some kind of wireless electricity technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Competitors include Witricity and Powercast. But both of those aren’t transmitting electricity as far as PowerBeam is trying to do. Other competitors are focusing on transferring electricity a very short distance from a charging pad to a cell phone. The idea is to use inductive coupling (or other methods) to charge multiple cell phones on one charging pad. The companies in this market include Powermat, eCoupled, WiPower and WildCharge.
PowerBeam was started a couple of years ago by co-founders David Graham and Xiaobing Luo. They point a laser at a solar cell, which takes the light and converts it into electricity. The problem with using a powerful laser to do this is you could slice somebody in half. So the company uses lasers that are powerful enough to do the job, but are safe. For instance, a safety system cuts the laser power if something interrupts the beam.
In future versions, Grier Graham thinks people can use this technology to power laptops without power cords. They could, for instance, sit at a cafe or a hotel ballroom and draw power from a light fixture above the room. The laser can seek out a solar receptor and concentrate its energy on that spot when it finds one.
You could also use it to power a security camera that doesn’t get enough light from a solar cell alone. In the near term, the company is focusing on getting a small amount of electricity across a room to power the digital picture frames, speakers, and lights. The company has four full-time employees and three contractors.
The Vatican has lent its approval to an iPhone application – with the iBreviary bringing the book of daily prayers to Apple's handset.
The Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications has given its seal of approval to the application, which was created by Italian priest Reverend Paolo Padrini with a little help from a web designer.
So what does iBreviary give (aside from a better chance of salvation)? Well it's available in Italian, English, Spanish, French and, of course, Latin with Portuguese and German likely be included in version 1.1.
On a wing and a prayer
A free trial period in Italian saw 10,000 downloads, but the application will now cost 74p with Padrini's proceeds going to charity.
Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications praised the new application, stating that the church "is learning to use the new technologies primarily as a tool or as a mean of evangelising."
The Vatican has long been an early adopter of technology – embracing the web, SMS and DVDs early in their life cycles.
This past summer Apple revamped its online suite of applications changing its name from dot-mac to Mobile Me. The transition was painstaking and users that were most affected suffered months of email being lost or deleted. One question we’ve been wondering ourselves is, was it worth it?
Nearly 5 months have gone by since Apple launched Mobile Me. In the first months of Mobile Me being live, the service was plagued with downtime, lost messages, syncing issues and an overall stability meltdown. So much so that Apple launched a Mobile Me status blog and assigned a blogger named “David G.” to directly communicate with its customers.
Apple went through a series of public apologies, and ultimately offered Mobile Me customers a few months of free service. A few weeks after Mobile Me officially launched, an internal email from CEO Steve Jobs was leaked to Ars Technica. After some ethical debates over at Ars they posted the entire email verbatim. This came roughly two weeks after Walt Mossberg laid the hammer down calling Mobile Me “far too flawed to recommend.” By this point, most users who had attempted to make it through the Mobile Me transition were left stunned, frustrated and worse of all, had lost vital messages due to technical failures on Apple’s end.
A couple of comments from some MacBlogz readers during the transition:
“Seriously, a company with a market capitalization of about $150 BILLION dollars, with more than $10 BILLION available in cash/short term assets, should be able to provide a service to what, a few hundred thousand users, that doesn’t go down every couple of weeks.”
“It was Tuesday, July 29th when my email stopped working completely. Now it’s late Wednesday and it’s still not working. Signing on to the support site for an update and having them tell me everything is great is more than annoying. And now it’s too late for any chat support and they appear to have eliminated any kind of email support. If you are having a problem they don’t want to hear from you.”
“Well, I lost nearly 3 days worth of emails. Who can I complain to? How can they put a value on these emails?”
Looking back on the Mobile Me launch, it’s easy to say that Apple was over-ambitious. They launched the iPhone 3G, the App Store and Mobile Me on the same day. For a company that doesn’t launch many products or services throughout the year, was there really a reason to unveil all three things on the same day? After all, the Mobile Me issues were only a portion of the overall disaster. iTunes servers went down, people were sent home with bricked iPhones, and the new iPhone Firmware 2.0 was shaky to say the least. Not Apple’s brightest moment.
The problems with Mobile Me however, stem much deeper than what lies on the surface. Apple employees were fired over the meltdown, and iTunes service guru Eddy Cue was brought in to head Mobile Me’s team while reporting directly to Steve Jobs. It was evident that Apple was not happy with Mobile Me’s launch. After putting so much time into revamping dot-mac, when they finally thought they “got it right,” the new service didn’t work.
Apple should make it a point and take a serious lesson from its mistakes here. Internet services are not the same as downloaded desktop clients like iTunes. They require a much more scalable infrastructure, and when slammed to capacity, a backup plan (or five), should be in place. Considering Apple’s close relationship with Google, they should have reached out to the internet giant for some help.
The eternal battle between Apple’s priorities with form over function played a major role in this summer’s past Mobile Me meltdown. Apple puts so much emphasis on making sure every millimeter of the screen is pixel perfect, and that the User Interface is so shiny that you want to lick it. But when it comes to the core infrastructure of the service, or the back-end functionality holding up in critical times, it seemed like an after thought. Perhaps in the future they’ll spend less time on perfecting that gradient, and more time making sure their servers scale.
Mozilla has announced the availability of Fennec alpha 2, a new prerelease of the organization's evolving mobile browser. This version includes some much-needed performance optimizations that improve the responsiveness of the program.
Shuttleworth addresses many of the potential technical challenges in his blog entry and also provides some insight into the philosophical basis for the new changes. He acknowledges that many of the new ideas are unproven and will require testing and experimentation before they are ready to be adopted upstream. Using the Ubuntu audience as test subjects will allow for the system to be refined and evaluated before it is adopted more broadly. He plans to work closely with upstream developers to make sure that it will serve the needs of the developer community and end users. 
Nearly 5 months have gone by since Apple launched 
