Google Apps grows more commercial, adding scripting to 'Premier'
By far the strongest feature of any operating system or applications suite -- when its architects bother to include it -- is the ability for its own users to program new and unique features into it. It's also the least appreciated feature on the marketing list; but businesses that have invested heavily in Microsoft Office over the years typically have an extensive library of Excel macros, a war chest of VBA functions built into their Word templates, and a spaghetti tangle of Outlook rules.
Today, Google premiered its approach to user-designed extensibility for its online Apps suite, and so far it's exactly what you might expect from Google: Its Apps Script language doesn't reinvent the wheel, leveraging its grammar completely from JavaScript, which many developers already know. It uses a basic set of terms for representing the graphical objects in the system, and a simple array of methods for making things happen and applying functions to menus. And as for how it can actually improve your work, Google pretty much leaves that up to you.
First PowerBuilder 12 public beta adds Visual Studio IDE, fully embraces .NET
Sign up for Sybase PowerBuilder 12 Beta 1 through Fileforum now.
In the early 1990s, before the introduction of the Web application upended the entire programming model, and businesses' local networks had yet to be connected to the Internet, a very serious battle took place in the emerging market of high-level client/server development systems. Microsoft helped legitimize that market with the introduction of Visual Basic, originally pushed toward businesses as a rapid business app development tool; and Borland helped blow the market wide open by devoting its Turbo Pascal expertise in a product called Delphi. But the seed product for this market had taken root the previous decade: a high-level interpreter with object-oriented foundation from Powersoft, called PowerBuilder.
ComScore: Bing the only search to gain US share in July
Usually when a new online product unveils an upgrade, its audience numbers see a bump for the first month, before subsiding and evening out. Last month, Bing's first usage share numbers from analysis firm comScore showed a little bump, but not much of one -- yet Microsoft made as much out of it as it could.
The news this month -- the first to show month-by-month progress since the changeover from Windows Live -- may actually be more encouraging for Microsoft: It gained half a point of usage share among US users for the month of July over June, at the same time when Google and Yahoo combined lost about as much.
Step one in the process: Microsoft files appeal of Word injunction
Almost everyone who has been observing the patent infringement case in US District Court in Eastern Texas surrounding Microsoft Word (Betanews correspondents included) have predicted that this is the opening round in a very long dance whose steps are pretty much pre-determined: The merits of Canadian software firm i4i's case seem questionable at the very least, and cases like this are typically either overturned on appeal or settled out of court. But one can't help feeling that there's an ever-so-slight chance of this being not really a dance but a train wreck in progress, the slim possibility that the ironically named i4i has found the one loophole in US patent law just waiting to be exploited: the notion that a heretofore unclaimed function that should seem obvious on its face, may not qualify as prior art for the sake of a patent challenge.
Yesterday, as first reported by the Seattle P-I, Microsoft filed its emergency motion for a stay of injunction, with the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. It could have filed a boilerplate appeal, simply saying the company has a viable case but needs time to present it. It didn't. Instead, it gave everyone including i4i a peek at the big cards it's willing to play, an advance look at the Supreme Court argument it's willing to make if the case should go that far.
HP fumbles its recovery as economic complexion changes
After CEO Mark Hurd led Hewlett-Packard through the aftermath of Carly Fiorina and then the boardroom scandals, you'd think it would have been prepared for the downturn in the global economy. But more than one factor surprised analysts today, in reading the early numbers from HP, the first one being this: Shipments of personal systems in the company's fiscal third quarter, ending last July, increased by 2% over Q3 2008, but revenue fell 18% in the same interval to $8.4 billion.
Conceivably, shipment rates overall should be permitted to slip between 8% and 10% this year. But that's for the overall market, which includes servers. In Enterprise and Servers, a key revenue category, revenue was down 23% to $3.7 billion. But you can see from the disparity between the two revenue figures that HP these days does more than two-thirds of its systems business with consumers, not businesses individual unit sales as opposed to volume business sales [an HP spokesperson asked Betanews for that clarification]. While HP omitted server shipment figures from its early numbers (those will probably have been squeezed out of the company by tomorrow morning), server shipments would have to have fallen by as much as 10%, we estimate, for HP's performance to be in keeping with the average overall shipment decline that analysts expect, assuming costs stay flat (and they're not -- they declined a bit in this last quarter).
First Google Chrome 4 reveals the beginnings of cloud synchronization
Download Google Chrome Dev channel build 4.0.201.1 from Fileforum now.
With Google, one tends to learn the meanings and intentions behind the many events in its development programs pretty much as they happen. For example, the distinctions between what goes on in the Chrome browser's development channel ("Dev") and what happens in the beta channel, have frequently been explained to us after the fact.
Microsoft sets out new model for its 'Oslo' modeling language
Since September of last year, Betanews could barely do a story about one or two specific, related Microsoft technologies, code named "Oslo" and "Dublin," without getting a call or comment from the department responsible for the other technology saying our perspective was all wrong. This despite, at one point, providing the transcript of most of a complete interview with the product manager responsible for Oslo, which includes Microsoft's very innovative M modeling language, and which will become a core component of Visual Studio 2010.
Yesterday morning, company engineer Douglas Purdy, a product unit manager on the Oslo project, acknowledged all the confusion that had been generated over associating the modeling language with Dublin, arguably a very different technology for Windows Server, giving it the ability to deploy cloud services. In a blog post, Purdy explained that the company now intends to treat these separate technologies as separate, and to stop extending the boundaries of Oslo into Ireland and Dublin into Norway.
Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate available today
Download Exchange Server 2010 x64 Release Candidate from Fileforum now.
This morning, a Microsoft spokesperson told Betanews that the company will be making available the first public release candidate for its Exchange Server 2010 e-mail server today. As of late Tuesday morning, the links still pointed to the last ES 2010 public beta.
Sky not falling after the latest Firefox 3.5.2 dust-up with .NET plug-in
Mozilla Firefox users awoke this morning to the news in their RSS feeds that the organization had dared to send push notes to its users urging them to upgrade to a Web browser version that was, as the report put it, ".NET incompatible." Hopefully, Firefox veterans knew what was really going on.
Users who upgrade their Firefox versions a few times per month anyway have seen this all before, and have long since discovered there's no need to panic: Microsoft's .NET Framework Assistant add-on has a habit of showing up in users' Firefox plug-ins list without them even asking for it. Its purpose is not to make Firefox compatible with .NET -- anyone who's installed Silverlight 3 in Firefox knows that. What it does is give .NET apps designed to be run through the browser a kind of hook to the .NET runtime -- a hook that Internet Explorer includes by design -- so that these apps can check their servers and update themselves.
Moonlight 2.0 beta tries to show off Silverlight 2.0 compatibility
Though it's been in private testing for some time, the Silverlight 2.0 work-alike system for Linux built by the open source Mono Project is now ready to present itself to the general public. This afternoon (after a few fits and starts), Moonlight 2.0 Beta 1 was released for general testing, with one of the runtime module's ambitious new features being the enablement of different media codecs, including Mono's own rendition of open-source Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, and BBC Dirac.
Although multiple video codec support is slated for inclusion by Microsoft in Silverlight 3, Mono team lead developer Miguel de Icaza said today that he decided to implement the media pipeline feature from Silverlight 3 into the 2.0 specifically "to play back media files that use the open codecs or to plug your own media codecs." De Icaza only expressed his interest in tackling this bit of functionality just last March.
Dell denies Chinese smartphone makes its official debut
For some time now, Chinese engineers have been working on an offshoot of the Android smartphone OS that uses a proprietary front-end, with the intention of creating a network for functions and applications that will rival that of Apple's iPhone. It's being called the Open Mobile System (OMS), and the app platform is now being referred to as Ophone.
This morning overseas, China Mobile showed off its newly completed Mobile Market applications store, the country's first competitive online market for Ophone apps. Since there is no single Ophone unit for China, multiple manufacturers may be involved in producing the phones themselves; and as attendees of this morning's event learned to their surprise, Dell -- the company that has long been hesitant to enter this market -- was one of them.
Sony takes more control of Sony Ericsson, appoints Stringer to chair
It's difficult to say which company has suffered most from the bad global economic climate -- Nokia, Motorola, or Sony Ericsson -- but if you ask any of their executives candidly, they'll probably point to their own firms. Last quarter, Sony Ericsson reported shipping 43% fewer phones than in the same quarter of 2008; and in terms of income, the company is bleeding at the rate of a third of a billion euro per quarter.
At the time, company president Dick Komiyama promised he would continue focusing on a return to profitability. This morning, it was learned that Sony has told the division president he can start thinking about focusing someplace else -- preferably, retirement. Effective immediately, Ericsson Executive Vice President Bert Norberg will scoot Komiyama to just a part of the president's chair, until the last quarter of the year when Komiyama will be out altogether. Though Komiyama will officially be sharing the presidency with Norberg until then, no one's under any illusion that this sharing will be anything more than official.
Bing vs. Google rematch: Who's getting better, quicker?
Two months ago, Microsoft unveiled its revamped Bing search service, touting it as a "decision engine." There were some genuine new advantages which we did discover, but not everything appeared ready for Bing's first outing, and we were told to expect improvements to some features "in the coming weeks." Not months, weeks.
So this is August, and (do forgive me) what hath Bing brung? In our June series of Face-offs, the final score was Google (4), Bing (3) -- not necessarily a runaway, but good enough for the champion to not feel immediately threatened. With Google testing improvements to its search engine, we wondered if we'd find any evidence of tweaking on Bing's side as well. We've decided to put both services through the same paces a second time to see which service is the one that's really gunning for a rematch.
Office vs. Web apps: Breaking the 0-0 tie
The story so far: We're in the initial phase of the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview, a period of private and public testing that could last for the better part of a year. So far, the biggest complaint we're seeing emerge is that so little is changing, that it's becoming more difficult for Microsoft to make the value proposition for why businesses and individuals should upgrade from Office 2007 or even 2003. In the absence of viable, existing reasons why the new Office will be better than the old one, a couple of Microsoft employees launched a Web site this week, asking people to come up with their own reasons and vote up each other's best responses.
Right now, the number one suggestion users have for "making Office better" is the restoration of an old feature that existed in Office XP. The #3 suggestion for Word: Give users the option to bring back the Office 2003 menu bar. (You can just hear Carmi Levy cheering that suggestion.) So to recap, from both Microsoft and its users, nothing new yet, but plenty of pleas to bring back old stuff that was just fine.
EU study: Web users think they're being charged enough for online content
One of the stated goals of the European Commission over the past few years has been the fostering of a healthy and vital creative community, a kind of second or third Renaissance brought about by the rapid growth of digital media. But the key fuel for growing the content community as rapidly as the technology community will be the same fuel that tech requires: money. And online content creators aren't getting much of it, a continent-wide EU survey concludes this week, because a sizable plurality, if not a majority, of consumers there believe they're already paying for "free" content -- some too much so.
According to data compiled from member nations by the European Union's statistics and record-keeping agency Eurostat, which sampled survey responses from 211,651 individuals in 148,604 households, only 5% of Europeans reported having paid above and beyond their Internet service charges, for any kind of online content within the last three months of having received the survey. (For individuals 16-24 years of age, the number was closer to 10%.) Among the remainder who had not paid extra, about 49% said they would be unwilling to pay any extra for Internet content, regardless of whatever incentives they may be offered or whatever laws may be passed or enforced.
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.