Friday, April 24, 2009 11:24 AM/EST
With the Microsoft earnings report this week, the big news was the first ever year-over-year decline in quarterly revenue for the software giant.
But to me the interesting news in the report was the fact that the company's servers and tools unit surpassed the client unit (which includes the Windows OS) to become the biggest profit area for Microsoft. Servers and tools was also the only unit to post a revenue gain over the same quarter last year.
Thursday, March 12, 2009 11:30 AM/EST
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When it comes to demoing a new piece of software, training users on a new application or teaching employees how to follow a business process, there's no substitute for showing them how to do these things directly.
But it isn't always feasible to be face to face in all of these situations. So the next best thing is to be able to create a video of how to use an application, Web service or process and make that available to anyone who needs to see it.
There have long been products, such as Adobe Captivate and Camtasia, that can capture a recording of an application session, record voiceovers, and add educational icons and directions to videos that can then be distributed to anyone who needs them. But these products aren't inexpensive and, since they are geared toward high-end training and testing, can be a little too complex for staff just looking to make a quick application recording.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009 1:08 PM/EST
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In this special eWEEK video, I take a look at the new JavaFX RIA platform from Sun.
While one can easily make the argument that Sun's Java was one of the first examples of a rich internet application platform, Sun hasn't been a big player in the recent rise of RIAs.
But with the release of JavaFX 1.0, Sun hopes to change that. JavaFX takes advantage of many of the benefits of Java while adding the ease of development and deployment common to most RIAs.
In this video I walk through some of the key components and features of JavaFX. Click here to watch my video walkthrough of JavaFX.
And click here to read my full review of JavaFX 1.0.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009 1:48 PM/EST
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It was a little less than a year ago that rich Internet application technology finally matured enough to become a usable tool, although it was still very much in the early stages of development.
At the time, eWEEK Labs took a look at the RIA sector and reviewed four RIA platforms, coming to the conclusion that the technology had reached the point where it could be called RIA 1.0.
Now, I'm taking another look at RIAs, evaluating the maturation of the platforms reviewed last year and testing out a new--and old--player.
The RIA platforms I looked at last year were Adobe Systems' AIR, Microsoft's Silverlight, Mozilla's Prism, and Curl. The new/old player I'm reviewing in this package is Sun Microsystems' JavaFX 1.0.
Monday, January 12, 2009 3:31 PM/EST
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Less than one month after Google released Version 1.0 of its Google Chrome Web browser, the company is providing an early peek at what Version 2.0 of Chrome will offer.
On. Jan. 8 a developer's release (which is basically pre-beta) of Chrome 2.0 became available from Google. Most of the new features and changes are fairly modest and in many cases simply add capabilities that are already found in other browsers. If this is all that the final version of Chrome 2.0 will offer, then it will be more in line with point releases from competing browsers rather than a big, full new version release. However, I expect that when Google Chrome 2.0 is eventually fully released there will be more new features and capabilities than are showcased in the current release.
Monday, January 05, 2009 4:56 PM/EST
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The National Hockey League has performed a hat trick: scoring new video, content management and analytics capabilities at NHL.com.
Just about a year ago, video on NHL.com was, by the organization's own admission, not thoughtfully implemented, and user information was widely dispersed and not well-leveraged. In a very short time, using a homegrown content management system and a video player built by NeuLion, and with the assistance of design company AQKA, the NHL.com site is running as smooth as, well, ice.
According to many pundits, one of the keys to the future of the Web is video. However, based on much of the current use of video on the Web, this future seems to be a ways off.
True, many businesses today are using video on their sites, for everything from spreading news and company information to handling product demos and walk-throughs. But, typically, there is little or no integration with these videos. They basically live in their own siloed areas of a site, with no connection to other content or online commerce.
This was the situation the National Hockey League found itself in more than a year ago. At that time, the NHL.com Web site had plenty of video content, and intrepid fans could search for videos of their favorite teams and players, but the content wasn't very well-structured.
Indeed, most video was just thrown onto the site, according to André Mika, NHL senior vice president and executive in charge of programming new media.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008 12:29 PM/EST
While in some ways 2008 has been an exciting and historic year, in other ways it has been a year that many people would like to forget, especially those who have seen their businesses, job prospects and retirement savings shrink or disappear altogether.
But when it comes to emerging technologies, 2008 wasn't just a good year, it was a very good year. The past year saw the rise of many new exciting products and technologies and also saw renewed growth in some areas that had become stale.
Best of all, these technologies of 2008 aren't just limited to this year. Many of them are the building blocks that will be used to create and grow the technologies that will be important in 2009.
Friday, November 07, 2008 11:08 AM/EST
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With company budgets tightening up everywhere, more then a few common expenses are disappearing from plans. Typical casualties include employee training, product demo road shows and face-to-face briefings.
But the need to train employees to use new applications and products isn't going away, nor is the need to give detailed demonstrations of products to partners and potential customers. This, of course, makes screen recording products that can create rich demonstration and training videos more important than ever.
A longtime player in screen recording products is TechSmith, which recently released version 6 of their Camtasia Studio. Camtasia Studio 6 builds on the product's already good usability and functionality by adding several interesting new features, including the ability to create high-definition video presentations. And at a $299 pricepoint, Camtasia Studio comes in at less than half the cost of main competitor Adobe Captivate.
Camtasia Studio 6 includes several presets to help users create a video presentation geared for a specific format. These presets include options such as DVD, YouTube, iPhone and TechSmith's screencast.com service.
Friday, October 10, 2008 4:20 PM/EST
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In the eWEEK special report "Technology in 2009", I look at many of the new product and company announcements of recent months and use this information to predict some of the key emerging technology trends that we should expect to see for 2009.
To go along with this special report, I've also compiled this slideshow showing some of the recent and recently announced products that are good examples of the technologies expected to gain prominence in 2009. These products should help, or are already helping, to push these important technologies forward.
So take a look at this slideshow of The Important Technologies of 2009. And also read the Tech Most Likely to be Ignored in 2009, in which I look at some technologies that should be important and receive attention in 2009 but will likely be mostly ignored.
Monday, June 09, 2008 12:05 PM/EST
 The Web is a mess; it's an unsound and broken hodgepodge of standards, tools and browsers that all kinda work together, except of course when they don't.
This isn't an uncommon position. Everyone from major software vendors to government figures to standards bodies has at one time or another held this opinion. In Daryl Taft's interview with Brendan Eich of Mozilla, Eich makes pretty much this exact point about the Web being a mess.
So we can all agree that the Web is a broken mess, to which I think we should all also add that this is also a good thing, because if the Web weren't such a mess, it probably wouldn't exist in anything like the powerful and disruptive form that it has today.
Think about it. When Tim Berners-Lee created the Web he broke many of the classic rules of scripting and development. The Web is supremely flexible (aka messy), highly forgiving of bad links, lousy code and incompatible applications (aka broken), and compatible with a wide variety of browsers, operating systems and applications (formally unsound). And this is why the Web succeeded where similar efforts had failed.
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