Betanews - Software

Latest Firefox 3.6 beta fixes 133 bugs, promises faster page load times

Scott M. Fulton, III — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:39:04 -0500

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Windows from Fileforum now.

As Web users anticipate data from NetApplications and other services that could show Mozilla Firefox having eclipsed the 25% mark in global usage share for the month of November, the beta process for Firefox 3.6 has found an extra gear. Demonstrating that more user input can result in a faster turnover process for developers' builds, rather than the slower process some commercial software producers claim, the latest Beta 4 release addresses some 133 significant bugs, many uncovered by regular testers.

But this won't be all, as 33 more bugs remain on the docket. Contrary to reports, finding more bugs during the beta process is actually a good thing; it beats uncovering them afterward. A regular planning meeting set for tomorrow could set forth a roadmap for how many more public beta releases we could see before RTM, which is still anticipated for the first quarter of next year.

Two very significant additions to the Firefox engine were tried for the first time in the public beta process during the Beta 3 release just a few weeks ago, and they could kick that public release number higher still: First, the browser kicks in support for the async attribute in HTML 5 -- an attribute that enables an element of JavaScript to introduce itself to the browser's interpreter as capable of being executed asynchronously. Without browser support for this attribute, developers have been reluctant to enable support for it, as it will not be presumed by default. But with this attribute explicitly declared, a script can not only be set to run while other scripts are running, but more importantly, it can start before the page has been completely loaded, provided the necessary AJAX resources are free. This could change everything for page load times, but it won't change things instantaneously. Firefox 3.6 will probably have to be finalized and released before developers give this a shot.

Another very important addition to 3.6 is support for the first time for the W3C's File API -- actually a creation of Mozilla contributor Arun Ranganathan. Assuming the browser is capable of providing security, the API provides asynchronous access to local files, enabling Web apps that work on local documents stored on users' systems -- as opposed to stuff uploaded to "the cloud."

Conceivably, Web apps using this API could be much smarter about how they upload files to remote servers. The user of a Web app such as a word processor or photo editor might never have to upload entire documents or pictures to a server, to make the service useful. That will change the ballgame for Web apps architects in terms of design, as well as solve the most pressing security issue they presently face.

Testers noticing that their anti-virus or anti-malware apps are having trouble with the 3.6 beta, have in recent days learned why: Binary add-ons that anti-malware apps simply drop into Firefox's components directory without formal installation, are no longer allowed to run by Mozilla's engine, which is now checking to make sure only Mozilla's code runs from there. Third-party add-ons will continue to be installed separately, but only through direct Firefox user intervention and approval.

The change was actually announced last month on the blog of Mozilla contributor Vladimir Vukicevic: "Binary components have full access to the application and OS, and so can impact stability, security, and performance. What's worse, in a binary component, the line between supported/frozen and completely unfrozen internal Gecko interfaces is blurred, making it easy to create a binary component that works well against one very specific version of Firefox (potentially as specific as a minor security release), but causes serious problems with any other version."

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Linux from Fileforum now.

Confirmed: Office 2010 to ship in June

Scott M. Fulton, III — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:30:00 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

After several Web sites today claimed to having seen a possibly inadvertent notice from Microsoft claiming June as the release month for its forthcoming Office 2010 (we looked hard and couldn't find it ourselves), a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that June is indeed the ship month.

The news comes two weeks after the company's PDC 2009 conference in Los Angeles, where we had expected not only to see the final shipping date but to hear a lot more about Office and Office Web Apps. What was on many attendees minds even after leaving the last day of the show was, what will make Office 2010 worth the upgrade, and what will not be in Office Web Apps that will be in Office 2010? In an interview during the conference, company communications senior director Janice Kapner told Betanews that to some extent, the answers to those questions are still being determined by users.

"The key to what will and what won't be in the Web Apps is really based on customer feedback and usage scenarios," Kapner told us. "So if you think about it, we have 500 million users, we talk to them a lot about what it is they do and don't do, and will and won't do. This is our first shipment of the Web Apps, but we've been very realistic about how we think people will use these things, and try to supply features and functionality that will support those usage scenarios." As an example, Kapner cited a case of remote users being able to check the progress of a PowerPoint presentation being constructed by the team at home, via a Web browser on a PC or mobile phone.

That continues to suggest that Office Web Apps, while free for use by the general public, will not be intended for creative purposes above and beyond basic, simple documents. In fact, Microsoft now appears to be busy constructing legitimate use-case scenarios for preferring Office 2010 over Office Web Apps.

"There will be people who are not using Office who are out on the Web, who are able to embrace the Web applications through Windows Live and get the true Office experience, compared to whatever ad hoc [product] they may be using right now," Kapner explained, avoiding use of the "G" word. "That is true, but we also have built this so that people can expand their Office experience to the browser-based environment...People who use Word for rich writing aren't going to do it in a browser. They want the footnoting and they want the table of contents and the autoformatting, they want that rich functionality. If I'm doing a 50-some-odd-page document or a term paper, not only do I not want somebody editing my document, but I want full functionality, and my ability to work deeply. However, if I'm writing a quick letter and I want my husband to check it out before I send it to the insurance company, I can use it in a Web app and I can leave it up there and have him go take a look at it.

"It's very much [a case of], do we push all of the functionality of Word into the cloud when we know people aren't going to use it for things like a big, rich term paper? No. We'll continue to add functions and features as people's usage of cloud-based solutions evolve, [and] so will our Web Apps," she continued. "It's not going to be, 'Hey, we're done!' People are just starting to embrace this. Certainly, students are early, early adopters; but if you think about it from an industry perspective, it's a lot of discussion and roadmapping, and a lot of people wanting to know what they can do, but not married to all-or-nothing scenarios...That's what the hybrid approach is...If we build this into the Web Apps, will it be a great customer experience, and will customers use it? Those are the two big questions."

A case study in improving software: What Office 2010 can learn from Notion 3

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:08:59 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Download a 14-day trial of Notion 3 music composer, plus 10-day trials of IK Multimedia plug-ins, from Fileforum now.

On the surface, this is a review of a music composition product entitled Notion 3, from Notion Software, priced at $249 suggested retail, born out of the original VirtuosoWorks product produced in 2005 by music professor Dr. Jack Jarrett, and which produces realistic orchestral sound from precisely notated sheet music on a standard Windows-based PC or Mac. But if you've never composed music before, and even if you don't plan on doing so in the future, I urge you to read on anyway, because this is about the business that we are all engaged in.

This is a story about a software company managing the process of starting all over again, putting its past behind it and crafting a completely new product. Notion 3 is billed as an upgrade (Notion 2 owners can purchase it for $8), but it is entirely new.

When Microsoft first announced the tremendous changes it had planned for Office 2007, including the premiere of the innovative ribbon, it was turning its back on over a decade of adherence to the spirit -- though typically not the letter -- of the Common User Access guidelines. This meant retraining millions of users on a completely new way of working -- a process that is still going on in many enterprises, even now. Microsoft knew that to embrace the future, it needed to change. But managing the transition, to this day, has been difficult.

Hear an MP3 clip from the funk-symphonic score that Scott created with Notion 3.

Notion is not the dominant music composition product -- though market studies have yet to be made official, it's probably the #3 product in its category. The top two are bona fide professional music composition market leaders -- Sibelius and Finale -- trading off with one another like Coke and Pepsi. By contrast, the original Notion had been positioned as a beginner's product, a step up from something called "Music Printer Plus" that seemed about as likely to dethrone one or the other market leader as Print Shop Deluxe was to knocking off QuarkXPress.

What Notion had going for it was two things: a surprisingly agile sound reproduction system that reproduced a respectable sounding studio orchestra, and a front end that was not only easy to learn, but educational for those who wouldn't know a fermata from a marcato. But against these two giants -- the proton and neutron of the composer's world -- Notion 2's market penetration had pretty much run its course by the middle of this year.

Thus the bold decision to redo everything. Notion Music would replace the sound system and the user interface, and both would have to be worlds better. "It was a hard decision, to tell you the truth, that we didn't take lightly," said Lubo Astinov, Notion Music's product manager, in an interview with Betanews. "We pondered on it for a few months before we finally decided to go ahead and switch. But basically, we decided in one swift move to go to a new code base...and take everything that we could from Notion 2 in features, rebuild them onto the new code base, and on top of them, build an abundance of new features. We tell people that Notion 3 is indeed a new product; it's not an update, it's a new piece of software."

With Notion 3 only having been released late in September, the jury is still out as to whether the product has even begun to achieve the market penetration it needed. So it's premature to talk about the Notion 3 "success story." But just as the recent evolution of Microsoft Office has been about pulling off a successful remodeling job while keeping all its users comfortable -- a process which isn't over yet -- the Notion 3 story is about rethinking everything, and challenging old "notions" about how a very complex piece of software should work.

The people leading the discussion for Notion were musicians first who became developers later. Astinov is a studio guitarist skilled in many styles, including jazz and flamenco, though he's also composed production music for PBS programs. He was a graduate of the Berklee College of Music where Dr. Jarrett taught.

"Mostly the discussion was driven by, 'Where do we need to be?'" Astinov told us. "We had to lay out a plan of not only, 'How do we get there?' but, 'In what time can we get there?' We realized that those were the goals that we set two years ago...that we needed to embrace a code base that is more flexible, easily updatable, and easily manageable."

Lesson 1: Rebuild the code base to be taken apart

Years ago, a point release for software suggested a completely replaced code base. But as the "engines" of applications became precious intellectual property for their publishers, point releases eventually became new life support systems for old code. Sure, there were new feature sets, and sometimes a revised and updated look and feel. But under the hood, you'd often find a living, breathing, single-threaded creature of the pre-OO era, not so much a component as a mashup.

"We needed to have a more general way of controlling elements, a more...well, [Notion 2] was object-oriented before, but [we needed to] really utilize the power of generalized object-oriented languages to their extreme, making sure everything is nicely structured, utilizing best software development practices, to create an architecture that is easily updatable, easily changeable."

Sometimes, the problem with the "engine" mentality in a development shop is that it creates an artificial barrier between what can be changed and what cannot be touched, lest the ghost of past developers haunt their sleep. In the new reality of software, even past the RTM date, problems and bugs crop up that deserve to be addressed immediately. If those problems exist within an untouchable zone of software sanctity, customers come to view them as defects endemic to the code base rather than as unforeseen circumstances curable with minor surgery.

"Although we had a brilliant team working on Notion 2, and it achieved what it set out to achieve, developing a software product is always a learning in progress," remarked Astinov. "You learn as you do it, and a couple of months later, you come back and you say, 'You know, I wish we coded that differently.' Then little by little, we came to the realization that, it would be harder to update the Notion 2 code base, fix all the problems -- whether they're design problems or coding problems in the software -- and get to where we want to be at the same time with allowing us to quickly enhance the software for future features."

Next: Building the user experience down...

[FULL SEC DISCLOSURE:] Notion Music supplied Betanews with a not-for-resale copy of Notion 3 for our review, without pre-condition. Betanews also received an earlier copy of Notion 2 for comparison purposes. Scott M. Fulton, III is the author of this article, and as always, is solely responsible for his content. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Betanews or any of its other editors or contributors.

Download a 14-day trial of Notion 3 music composer, plus 10-day trials of IK Multimedia plug-ins, from Fileforum now.

Lesson 2: Build the user experience down

A more complex piece of software tends to become used in a more complex fashion. Years ago, CorelDraw was a miracle of software design, incorporating as many functions as possible into mouse gestures and shortcuts, enabling illustrators to develop streamlined methodologies for complex operations into natural, everyday practices. But in recent years, the need to tack features onto the side of the box or the Web site resulted in that product suffering from the "feature bloat" that has afflicted so much of installed software prior to the advent of Web apps. Dialog boxes have never been conducive to creativity.

Part of the inspiration for Microsoft's ribbon feature, which premiered in Office 2007 (and which nobody really calls the "Fluent UI" anymore), was the need to get complicated menus out of the user's way, and bring choices forward. That having been done, Office 2010 Beta 1 has a revised ribbon that contains palettes of choices occupying just as much space, if not more, than the old drop-down menus. And while the 2007 edition was focused around keeping you focused on your page, the new File menu (the new name for the BackStage button, which replaced the Office button, which replaced the File menu) completely encompasses the entire open window.

Maybe these features truly are improvements in some senses, but they are not exactly true to the original spirit of the Office 2007 redesign, and in some respects are actually backsliding towards Office 2003.

The original Notion UX was based on a well-received graphical feature called the Sidebar, which was positioned like sidebars in Office apps and Web browsers today. Here, the original Jack Jarrett design was clever for its time, gathering together only the tools necessary to change and develop the score (the active document) into categories, while keeping functions related to managing the program relegated to the menu bar and classic toolbars. Sidebar categories were not intuitive (Tools, Entries, Expressions, Properties), but their clusters were operated independently of one another so that you found yourself able to combine these functions like open pots of paint. "Tools" usually referred to things you do to or with notes, while "Entries" referred to things you do to the staff or to a measure. "Expressions" contained the articulations and accents you place on existing notes, especially with regard to particular sections of the orchestra; while "Properties" let you make adjustments to existing elements (and it was here that you converted notes in time with the current signature, into tuplets that were timed in thirds rather than halves or quarters).

The tried and tested user front-end of Notion 2, which was completely replaced in September 2009.

On paper, it was simple, direct, and effective. By no means did the Notion 2 sidebar feel outdated or outmoded, and in many ways, it actually achieved one of Office 2007's original objectives: getting clutter out of the way of the open document. But it wasn't always consistent -- for example, I never quite got the hang of time and key signatures being "Entries" but tempo markings being "Expressions." And when a score became complex, the steps one took to get things under control took way too long.

"In Notion 2, if the user wanted to insert an element into the score, he would go and navigate this tree structure, choose his element, and put it in. But what we realized was that, while that's certainly easy to do, it's also time consuming," explained Notion 3 product manager Lubo Astinov. "You basically have to take your eye away from the spot on the score that you were working on, move your eye towards the sidebar, choose the element there, then go back and find that place. It may not seem like a lot, but it really is a time-consuming, frustrating thing to do."

Hear an MP3 clip from the funk-symphonic score shown in this screenshot from Notion 3.

In Notion 3, the sidebar is completely gone. In its place is a unique, symbolic palette along the bottom, where categories of score elements are represented by the symbols themselves. Now, you have to know pretty much what these symbols mean, especially in the context of the other symbols around them. For example, that dot in the fourth category from the left doesn't mean "extend the duration of a note by one-half," but rather "apply a staccato to a note" to make it play more briskly; and that sweeping arc is a slur, not a tie -- although it looks exactly like a tie. But the division of palette categories is indeed more consistent: Notes and rests (including alternate notations) appear together, tremolos and arpeggios and glissandos are all together, and the accents you give an electric guitar (more on that later) are gathered together.

All of this does not immediately spell "easy." What it does is spill onto the table all of the elements of scoring in a one-level menu rather than a nested tree structure, like tokens in an old board game. The learning curve, as a result, is higher for a novice user, especially one who will find himself hovering over all the symbols and learning what they're called through their tooltips.

For most applications in the last decade, getting over the learning difficulties of configuring documents has been accomplished through wizards (series of dialogs which lead users by the hand through choices) and templates (blank documents whose styles are pre-set). Notion 2 was conventional in that regard. But the plethora of templates shipped with Notion 2 were replaced with just seven in Notion 3.

Removing this truckload of templates, Astinov told us, was a carefully reasoned design decision -- a counter-intuitive one reached after the team studied how composers of various levels of acumen used the product.

"We went through several notation applications, and we had user tests with people setting up a score," he said, "and what we realized was that while it certainly is aggressive to have 300 templates in your score wizard, it actually adds to the clutter and makes things far more difficult to navigate, search for, and create...than if you simply create a score from scratch the way we have it, the graphical way, in Notion 3."

Notion's designers tested two groups of users: professional musicians with notation software experience, and folks with no prior experience in any music application. Both groups were observed using Finale, Sibelius, and a beta of Notion 3. They were asked to set up a score for a small chamber orchestra, and both groups were twice as fast in accomplishing their goal in Notion 3 without any templates or wizards at all, than they were with Finale and Sibelius. Their discovery was this: In the interest of making the program seem easier, wizards and templates and other hand-holding tools have the side-effect of making users slower. They also fail to teach the user anything about the typical use of the product, by bypassing it the long way around. So even though the Notion 3 palette seemed steeper, climbing to that level and staying there was actually much faster and more productive.

Lesson 3: PC games are UX prototypes

If only applications were more like games. Seriously, the most innovative user input experiences have always come from games -- as time goes on, games only grow more and more ahead of the curve.

"Game interfaces were on the forefront of our discussion here, when we were designing things like the palette, for example," said Astinov. "We really liked some of the novel menu systems that some of the game designers were implementing in their games, and certainly that feel of one element controlling their menu inspired us to think about the main entry palette."

One of the design iterations considered by the team was circular, where the mouse movement zipped through a Rolodex-like presentation of options. "We didn't go with that because it turned out not to work very well on corners. Game design was one of the things that we considered...because oftentimes in games, people are trying to concentrate a lot of usage into one small area."

The designers eventually settled upon a simpler, perhaps less cool, but certainly functional palette design. It does achieve its objective of keeping your eyes focused on the score, the way a dashboard of a car keeps your attention fixed upon the road ahead. In practice, I've noticed some small difficulties, especially the palette's ability to obstruct the bottom-most staff of an open composition. I've also noticed a bit of a "dead zone" that exists just around the perimeter of the palette -- something that might not be so noticeable in a game where you're controlling troop movements, but certainly a hassle if you're programming those bass instruments that typically fall in the bottom of a grouping.

But while Notion 2's design was based around looking like a conventional application in the interest of not confusing users, Notion 3 went completely off the board, noting that games intentionally advance new designs in the interest of fun all the time, and players embrace them for doing so.

Next: Users' expectations change the nature of an application...

Download a 14-day trial of Notion 3 music composer, plus 10-day trials of IK Multimedia plug-ins, from Fileforum now.

Lesson 4: Completely separate text commands from visual inputs

Most applications, in the name of "accessibility," invoke keyboard "shortcuts" as an alternate means of maneuvering through the menu or control system. But perhaps you've noticed this but never fully appreciated it: Each keystroke is a token for where your mouse pointer would go, if you were using the mouse. So in many ways, commands are not truly alternatives or even really shortcuts -- you can visually follow the same menu and dialog box locations you would have clicked on anyway.

While Notion 3's designers were gleaning ideas from PC games, one member of the team ended up..."borrowing" a method from a dark corner of game design, literally by accident: the cheat code.

The result was a facility called Express Entry, which Lubo Astinov told us "was not actually done intentionally. There was never really a design discussion about it, or anything. [Our senior programmer, Ben Singer] just made that as a shortcut for quickly accessing elements while the code was being written, and more or less, this was kind of an accident. As we started using it, I said, 'You know what, let's keep that!'"

Although Notion 3 does carry over a number of single-keystroke shortcuts from version 2 -- such as the 3 key during note entry to bring up a sharp, or q for quarter notes and e for eighth notes and the like -- these shortcuts are independent of the palette. There are a few conventional Ctrl + menu bar commands for managing elements of the program, though you'll rarely use them.

In addition to these, Express Entry pretends that there's a little invisible command prompt open someplace. So rather than imagine the spot on the palette where something is located and try to recall the key that brings up that area, you type a whole command, which can often be all or part of a word. For example, to bring up notation on the cursor that lets you place a pizzicato marking on a string instrument staff (plucking the string rather than bowing it), you would type 'pi -- the apostrophe key, followed by the command. Nothing visual happens at all while you're doing this, but once the command is accepted, the pizz. marker appears over your cursor, so you can stamp it where you want it. The 'norm command lets you stamp the location where the pizzicato section ends.

By acting like a cheat code mode, Express Entry violates all the rules that typical users would expect. Personally, I don't use it much...not yet, at least. But I see where a professional composer may be more interested in getting his "pen" to work right, than perusing the palette in search for something he knows he needs now.

Lesson 5: Seize initiatives now -- don't wait for a Service Pack

Since Notion 3's release in late September, there have been four major fixes distributed through the application itself over the Net. It has needed these fixes -- Notion 3 was not perfect coming out of the gate. It's had obvious glitches, which I reported to Lubo and the team; and other users have asked for minor enhancements, especially to the user interface.

The team has responded to these glitches and requests not by gathering incident tickets until they accumulate to a big enough pile deserving of a Service Pack, but by issuing patches and additions immediately.

"What I wanted to do from the beginning was a very dynamic and very close QA cycle that is tightly related to development," Notion 3's Astinov told us. "This is something that Ben and Evan [Ruiz] wanted to do in their development process internally here...Almost every week, we will have a new build. But in testing that build, I will check out the revisions and start testing the new editions, new features, keep up with any possible regressions that might have occurred from the code."

Astinov calls this process parallel QA -- essentially, a much tighter cycle between committing a change to the code repository and deploying it in the field. In one sense, it's a workflow innovation; in another, it's an unfortunate necessity of modern business: "We used to have a really large QA department back in the Notion 2 days; we don't have that luxury right now. There's really not that many people who do testing, but that kind of forced us into that parallel QA process even more, so we are always on top of what is being changed and what is happening, and we have direct communication lines to the developers when something goes wrong."

Lesson 6: Trust the user

One of the major problems that marred the release of Notion 2 was when users discovered a rather aggressive third-party copy protection system for securing the instrument samples. Indeed, it was the power of those samples that made Notion 2 sound...pretty good. Better than "passable." But the persistence of this little scheme in memory proved to be a performance drain on the entire operating system.

It's gone for Notion 3, replaced with a modern key-driven software activation system. But the problems haven't exactly been eliminated, especially for folks like me who think they're being cautious and "modern" by installing their applications "As Administrator." While Notion itself is fine with that, it comes shipped with two outstanding add-ons from IK Multimedia -- one that provides a beautiful programmable reverb, and another called AmpliTube XGear (please forgive the naming) whose job is to accurately simulate a bastion of interconnected amplifiers for rock, jazz, and hip-hop musicians.

Since both IK Multimedia plug-ins are installed during the single setup process, they inherit the "As Administrator" permissions from Notion. But since their software activation is keyed to those permissions, it creates a situation where you if you installed Notion 3 as admin, you have to run it as admin also. If you don't, the AmpliTube plug-in will insert white noise into the soundtrack automatically every 10 seconds.

That pretty much negates the whole purpose of restricted user access -- keeping a potentially vulnerable application from becoming exploitable. I'm not the only user who encountered this little problem, which I'm told Notion and IK are currently working to eradicate.

As with Notion 2, the close-mic instrument samples in Notion 3 are particularly precious intellectual property. Without them, all of the hard work expended in making the user front-end workable, would go down in smoke. But the real key to protecting those samples is presenting them in a format that only Notion 3 can use, not by encasing them in a paranoid protection scheme that polices everything the user does. Unfortunately, the music software industry has historically been prone to piracy; so putting producers like IK Multimedia in a position where they can trust the user more, as we're suggesting, will require some more work on the users' end as well.

Next: The joy of composing...

Download a 14-day trial of Notion 3 music composer, plus 10-day trials of IK Multimedia plug-ins, from Fileforum now.

The joy of composing

I am not a professional musician, but I've always considered music a part of the artist side of my life. My most productive work in that arena was a wedding suite I composed in 1989, first for my friends and then revised for my own ceremony, using a composition program for the old Atari ST. It must actually have been somewhat good because my wife still thinks so -- and she was my editor before she was my wife.

There is a special place in my heart for symphonic music. An orchestra is, in itself, a unique and nuanced instrument, whose tonality and rhythm and timbre all exist over and above each of its individual instruments. So even though I've composed music for real and electronic instruments before -- small arrangements, jazzy ensembles, string quartets -- I never really had the personal opportunity until the advent of Notion to attempt a composition for anything that truly sounded, or even approximated, a full orchestra.

The beauty of Notion 3, therefore, is the ability to pick up an orchestra the way one picks up a guitar or a saxophone, or sits down to a piano. It's a way of handing an orchestra to someone and saying, "Hey, try this!" with the same carefree and eager gesture as my mother -- an art teacher who loved music -- would have handed someone an autoharp or an harmonica. Since so much of the music that has lived in my head for years has started out symphonic, Notion gives me the freedom to avoid boiling the melody and the rhythm down to something that will fit on four or six instruments, or however many the band or sound card can faithfully reproduce.

And yes, Notion contains parts for instruments you wouldn't normally find in a symphony orchestra, like a screaming electric guitar (screaming courtesy of AmpliTube XGear, which once you figure it out, is a scream in itself). But there have been any number of movies recently whose entire presentation to the audience, I feel, could have been enhanced with a complete rethink of the orchestration, courtesy of Carlos Santana.

A new type of cursor: Here in the composition screen, I'm about to replace a fortississimo (fff) with a fortissimo (ff). Everything in a symphonic score is synchronized vertically, so the shaded bars represent points in time. The olive-shaded bar is the area I'm about to change, and the yellow brick points to the specific instrument (Trumpet 1). The grey bar is my mouse pointer now, and the "ff" is the symbol that replaces my pointer arrow. When I click on the score, I move the olive bar to that point; if I click Play, that's the part I hear. And if I press the A key, I hear the note under the yellow brick. The grey bar shows me where I can move the olive bar, and where I'm about to insert my new ff dynamic.

Hear an MP3 clip from the funk-symphonic score that Scott created with Notion 3.

The sound snippet I've included here for download is about 30 seconds of a demo reel I produced using a score using pieces of a composition from Notion 2, that I spruced up using Notion 3. The first theme you hear is something I believe I started humming to myself one day while watching a piece of the PBS documentary "Carrier" with the sound turned down, on account of my wife talking on the phone. Months later, the theme crept up in my mind again as something I wished could have been used in a particular movie, the identity of which I'll keep secret for now, but which folks who know me well will be able to guess right away -- I was disappointed by the score, and used Notion to challenge myself to see whether I could replace it.

Since my work started in Notion 2, I was able to learn something valuable about not only musical scores, but any type of electronic document that has been tailored to suit the quirks and nuances of its native application. Because Notion 2 was also a sound system, managing the nuances of that sound system required "massaging" the score, if you will, to balance the instruments. That included over-weighting the dynamics of entire instrument sections just to make Notion 2 sound better than just "good," though if you were to print the resulting score, it would confuse a real-world conductor.

Notion 3's score format has also changed, so bringing over a Notion 2 project requires a file import. That import leaves the over-weighted balances exactly where they were -- so with respect to the printed output, it's a mostly accurate import (the new format was confused by the old fermatas, but such small adjustments are easy to fix). But the result sounded...perfectly horrible, as though the horn section were collectively suffering an asthma attack, and buzzsaws were tearing through the violas.

"That was one of the inherent problems in Notion 2," Lubo Astinov admitted, "the balance of the sounds was completely ridiculous. It hurt many scores and many users, because they were basically -- and we were doing it here -- over-exaggerating dynamics to get the desired sound, which should have never happened. You don't do that for a real orchestra; you shouldn't have to do that for a Notion score as well."

The first part of the solution involved going back through the project and toning down the dynamics to something more realistic, which in some cases literally meant bringing fortissississimo (ffff) back down to as low as forte (f). The entire piano range (soft) was suddenly opened up, because now it was actually audible.

The second part involved utilizing the new sound mixer panel, which replaces Notion 2's "mute/unmute" dialog with a completely graphical representation of a real studio channel mixer. Add-on effects such as AmpliTube, and VST effects plug-ins from the outside world, "attach" to this panel as though they were filter components. You can then route the sound from one instrument through one of these plug-ins, or group several instruments (for instance, the whole horn section) into a bus that leads through a filter.

This very tactile approach to sound mixing runs almost completely opposite of the wholly symbolic approach to composition presented by the Notion 3 palette, almost as though you're using a different program altogether. Nevertheless, the mixer provides very granular, explicit functionality, replacing Notion 2's generalized functionality, and matching N3's level of detail in scoring. If I were applying a more holistic approach to the application's design, I might have imagined an other-worldly "mixer palette" that works similar to the scoring palette. But a studio musician might have found such a device foreign.

To this day, Notion is not a "perfect" program, if there is such a thing. Lubo Astinov audibly winced when I told him I was using standard Realtek integrated audio on my test system; relying on ordinary components such as this has been the cause of many troubles. The most pressing problem I've encountered thus far has been the sound system tripping over the score and losing synchronization of measures, a problem we've traced back to AmpliTube set to "oversampling" by default -- a setting that's not obvious to a novice. Every so often, N3 still trips over the score even with this setting turned off, especially if it has to share memory with other applications (for example, this word processor I'm using now, or anything that relies heavily on the .NET Framework).

But the program itself amazes me so much that not even these problems have become headaches -- it still feels miraculous, at least to me, that Notion 3 is capable of doing as much as it does. If I were a professional musician, making a living from my score, I might need an aspirin or two. (I might also invest in a real sound card.) For now, I manage to find enough inspiration from the quality of what's possible that the act of using this program continues to be a joy.

One wonders how many people throughout the history of written music would have been able to bring themselves to an artistic par with Ludwig van Beethoven, or Jean Sibelius (the real one), or Dmitri Shostakovich, or Jerry Goldsmith, had they the same access to an orchestra that minds their commands the way Beethoven's orchestra-in-his-head minded him. How many untried artists with un-nurtured talents were left waiting, and how many such artists may become inspired today with such power at their control now?

Imagine what brilliance is possible when we hand the world an orchestra.

Will Firefox beat IE9 to Direct2D rendering?

Scott M. Fulton, III — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:47:14 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

It was a principal element of the Day 2 keynote at Microsoft's PDC 2009 conference last week in Los Angeles: an early demonstration of code being worked into Internet Explorer 9 that replaces the browser's outdated reliance upon the (very) old GDI rendering library, with new code utilizing Direct2D -- a library that borrows processing power from the GPU. But with the project only having begun last October, it could still be several months before Microsoft creates still more features to make IE9 worthy of a point-release.

By that time, Mozilla could very well have absorbed Direct2D capability into Firefox, if it accepts the contribution of engineer Bas Schouten. By modifying a recent daily build of the organization's "Minefield" track for Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 for Windows, Shouten was able to graft Direct2D support onto the browser, which also usually relies on the old GDI library. The results were Web pages that were as instantaneous to the eyes as the demos we saw of Direct2D rendering on IE9 test code last week.

In a personal blog post Sunday, Schouten discussed some of the difficulties he faced in working Direct2D rendering capabilities onto Mozilla's "Cairo" graphics engine -- difficulties peculiar to Firefox that IE9's developers may not be troubled with: "Direct2D has been implemented as a Cairo backend, meaning our work can eventually be used to facilitate Direct2D usage by all Cairo based software. We use Direct3D textures as backing store for all surfaces. This allows us to implement operations not supported by Direct2D using Direct3D, this will prevent software fallbacks being needed, which will require readbacks. Since a readback forces the GPU to transfer memory to the CPU before the CPU can read it, readbacks have significant performance penalties because of GPU-CPU synchronization being required. On Direct3D10+ hardware this should not negatively impact performance, it does mean it is harder to implement effective D2D software fallback. Although in that scenario we could continue using Cairo with GDI as our vector graphics rendering system."

Although the improvements in on-screen rendering are not something our Betanews CRPI JavaScript performance suite would be able to track, those performance hits Schouten mentioned are indeed something we could see. In tests this morning on Windows 7 RTM using last night's private build of Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1, versus Schouten's remodeled build, the Mozilla build posted a CRPI 2.2 score in Windows 7 of 13.88 -- the best score turned in by a Mozilla browser to date -- versus 12.31 for Schouten's version. At least for now, the rendering improvements come at a cost.

But can those improvements more than make up for the implementation cost, which at the moment Betanews estimates to be about 12.8%?

Betanews tests this morning revealed the answer, quite surprisingly, to be no. Compared to the current daily Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 build, timing the page loads for 28 major Web sites on Windows 7 RTM, the Schouten build with Direct2D installed only rendered pages about 5.2% faster than the Mozilla build, according to a geometric mean of the differences in render times. The Schouten build only renders 7.3% faster overall than Internet Explorer 8 by that same formula, which is not even close to the speed gains we saw on Microsoft's own in-house tests of Direct2D on IE9 code last week.

Where the Schouten build did see gains was on very content-rich sites such as the Chinese Web portals, such as qq.com and xunlei.com. But that build also crashed for one of those sites -- sina.com.cn -- and it also crashed for plain old, American aol.com, for reasons we couldn't ascertain. (Perhaps it doesn't like the new branding campaign either.) For content-light pages such as Google and Ask.com, the Schouten build was measurably slower than both the Mozilla build and IE8. It's worth noting here that IE8 is very competitive against Firefox in render times for sites with moderate content, and even on a few sites with heavy content (the Chinese portals, for instance). However, when the content load gets great or when content may be composited from multiple sources (as appears to be the case with Blogger.com), IE8 becomes exponentially slower, with some load times exceeding one minute.

Your eyes may tell you the Schouten build renders faster -- as ours did right at first -- but that conclusion may derive from the feeling of speed you see from a page appearing all at one time. The test build may actually be much faster at snappy rendering, but that's not the entire job; in fact, the page loading portions of our CRPI tests indicate that the test build may actually be slower at that part than the Mozilla build.

Integration is the key to making Direct2D work in place of GDI in the browser; and if this early test build is any indication, Microsoft could be further along in this process than Mozilla after all.

Microsoft's Bob Muglia and Ray Ozzie on Silverlight vs. standards

Scott M. Fulton, III — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:43:58 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Last week at Microsoft's Professional Developers' Conference, Betanews had the honor of being invited to join a small cadre of reporters -- including noted blogger Long Zheng; TechCrunch's Steve Gillmor; and our good friend from SD Times and Technologizer, David Worthington -- for a luncheon with Microsoft's President of Server and Tools, Bob Muglia; and Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. There, we discussed a handful of topics -- some of their comments were candid and off the record, and some were for the record.

The first issue on our plate Tuesday afternoon concerned Silverlight, and Microsoft's continuing efforts to entice developers to build Web sites around a platform that is not considered a "standard," and perhaps never will be. Some developers discount Adobe Flash as a "standard" for the same reason; while others suggest that Flash's ubiquity renders it a de facto standard. The questions for Web developers have centered around whether they can afford to evolve any portion of their forward-facing online assets around a proprietary standard (around Silverlight) and still have it be on "the Web," whose values are based around platform neutrality. Those questions do seem a bit more pronounced for Microsoft than for other platform developers. But how should Microsoft handle the delicate issue of developing for a platform that's "ours" versus one that is "yours?" (And what's the difference really?)

Bob Muglia took the lead on this question: "The thing we want to be careful of is, we're not trying to say Silverlight is an alternative standardization to HTML 5, and that part of the Web," he told us. "We're not saying, 'Hey, you should use this instead of that.' We're trying to provide people with an environment that has capabilities that you just simply can't do today in the standards-based world."

Ray Ozzie picked it up from there: "The way I view it, I know there's not a bright line. But when I'm thinking of Silverlight, I'm thinking a lot in terms of skills leverage for the people who have learned how to program, how to build things in C#, who have built-up assets...and it is the most seamless transition for people like that to build to things in the browser and build things that are hybrid, between the browser and the service. It's not intended to be disconnected from the Web; there's more and more integration between the things that you do in Silverlight [where] you don't have the browser. But we will build in both, and it just depends on where you come from, those skills."

This has been a major problem for Ozzie with respect to Web developers at large, and he made it very clear in his candid comments: Just who gets to say what the Web is, and where it ends? Technically, I've made it a point to explain the Web as the subset of Internet functions that utilize HTTP, which is how standards bodies might also explain it; but there are a growing number of protocols and technologies that are completely off the HTTP protocol and that rely, nonetheless, on the Web browser. Flash has been one of them; shouldn't Silverlight be another, posits Ozzie and Microsoft?

“We're trying to provide people with an environment that has capabilities that you just simply can't do today in the standards-based world.”

Bob Muglia, President, Server & Tools Division, Microsoft

Steve Gillmor noted that in a previous talk, Ozzie promised to "do the right thing" with regard to integrating Silverlight technologies down the road into the whole discussion of HTML 5 standards. He asked Ozzie what he meant by that; and Ozzie responded by saying that he's not always in the same position as those who are working directly on the problem itself, to say how much is being done and when it'll get done.

"We love the Web; we're not anti-Web, we're not going in a different direction," Ozzie continued. "And what I meant was, when we look at the various pieces of what we call HTML 5, as consensus emerges around different aspects of it, that we will do what people expect us to do in the spirit of the Web."

Bob Muglia then added this: "I think it's helpful to actually have a clear line that says, 'This is Silverlight, and then this is HTML,' and have both of them in existence, where we can step back and say, 'Okay, the standards process is evolving around HTML, and we very much want to participate in that and help drive it forward and build the world's best Web browser that does that.' [By that same token], it's nice to have something that's separate from that, it interact very seamlessly with that, it runs cross-platform, it does all these other things, but we can run like hell with it. And to be non-apologetic about running like hell with it."

Muglia drew a mental picture for us of a realm of clearly decided upon concepts called standards, a growing body of protocols that everyone agrees to follow. But customer demands run faster than standards organizations -- he cited Netflix as a critical example -- and companies like Microsoft and Adobe (here he wasn't ashamed to mention the Flash maker) have to run ahead of the pack, and in competition with one another, to meet that demand.

“As far as we can see, there will be a difference between the security context of running in a browser, and having a user make a decision to install (I use that word loosely) an application on their machine.”

Bob Muglia, President, Server & Tools Division, Microsoft

"The issue of rights management, for example...is interesting, and it matters. It matters to Netflix, it matters to a whole bunch of our customers," Muglia continued. "At some point, I suspect there will be standards-based implementations. Your guess is as good as mine as to when all those features will get into HTML, whether it's HTML 6 or whatever the heck it gets called. We know there's still all sorts of areas -- 3D as a whole example -- that we haven't touched with Silverlight; and there's a whole broad set of things that we know are areas where we'll want to invest.

"Our perspective on this is very simple: The standards-based world will advance, and continue to do more and more, and applications will be delivered in that way, and that's a critical thing. There will always be opportunities for people to build applications that take advantage of characteristics that go beyond what the standards do, and that's what we're trying to do with Silverlight. And we actually want to make it easy for developers to choose: You want to deliver something with JavaScript and HTML, great, we'll offer a world-class browser that does that, we'll enable that across our operating system and systems in different environments. If there's other things that you want to do in terms of delivering applications, we'll also have a world-class runtime to do that, and you can mix and match."

Next: Google Chrome Frame makes Ozzie very angry indeed...

With regard to the borderline between "proprietary" and "standard," there's something that has been sticking in Ray Ozzie's craw. He was well-behaved, for most of the afternoon, avoiding too much use of the "G" word. (Not "Gillmor.") But Google's recent behavior (the Chrome OS announcement event was still two days away at this point) clearly has Ozzie upset, especially with regard to how he perceives it tries to define "the Web" in its own image, moving the boundary between standards and proprietary protocols as it chooses.

"The thing that's tough is the thing in-between, and this is what really did surprise me about what Google did. The Chrome Frame thing is basically saying, 'Well, we believe in standards, but we're going to put our implementation that's beyond standards into someone else's frame.'"

Chrome Frame is the company's unsanctioned add-on to Internet Explorer that enables it to deliver designated Web pages through Chrome's browser engine rather than IE's. I asked Ozzie whether he believed Chrome Frame was just bluster on Google's part, a tactic to make folks like Ozzie upset. His answer indicated he did not believe so; he takes Chrome Frame quite seriously, as something designed to blur the line for Web developers who are legitimately trying to determine what their clients are running, and publish Web pages to that platform -- a kind of smokescreen.

The reason it's important for that dividing line to be clear, both Microsoft executives argued, is because applications need clear security boundaries, and Web applications must be more constrained about their security and permissions than "installed" apps on the user's system. "The two big differences between .NET Framework writ large and Silverlight are the execution model within which they operate, and the level of function," Ozzie explained.

Muglia took it from there: "As far as we can see, there will be a difference between the security context of running in a browser, and having a user make a decision to install (I use that word loosely) an application on their machine and provide access to physical resources...You can start to do that with Silverlight 3; you'll continue to see us do more there. For example, when we built Visual Studio 2010, almost all the new code and a very large part of the application is written in WPF. We're not to that point with Silverlight; there's no question about it, we can't build that application today with Silverlight. The day may come when we may continue to build more services and capabilities into Silverlight where you can build an application of that level of complexity, and that's true because all these environments continue to evolve."

“We love the Web; we're not anti-Web, we're not going in a different direction.”

Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect, Microsoft

Surprisingly, Ozzie's later comment bordered on contradicting Muglia: He sees an evolution of the development model where, in his words, "over time, both Silverlight and the browser get closer and closer to the OS.

"Whether it's the accelerometer or compass or whatever I/O devices, over time, all of these things are going to end up having to be permissioned...by the user to do extended things, and those will be used for installed apps probably first, but maybe even for Web-based apps, I have no idea. And I think therein lies some of the biggest challenge that we have moving forward. In AIR and Silverlight, you're going to see us pushing at the edge on what Web apps are just now doing with OAuth, where the user has permissioned a site to do something. Well, we're also going to have to have the application permissioning the client to do something, to have access to my local data, to my microphone or speaker; and that permissioning on the Web is done at the Web site level. I'm not sure yet what the right granularity is for the client. Is the client just a signed piece of the Web site that you're permissioning; once you permission the Web site, [does] the client have the permission to do these things? We're in new territory here."

More of our Lunch with Bob & Ray later this week in Betanews.

Microsoft's .NET Micro Framework is now free and open source

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:38:33 -0500

By Jack M. Germain, LinuxInsider

Microsoft announced at its Professional Developer Conference on Tuesday the release of version 4.0 under the Apache 2.0 license. The license transfer makes good on a longstanding promise from Redmond that it would make the popular .NET code base available as open source.

The gift to the open source community, however, does come with some strings attached -- or, rather, removed from the gift wrapping. Microsoft reduced some of the framework's functionality in making the Software Developer's Kit open source, according to Peter Galli, the Open Source Community Manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group. In his blog post last Tuesday, Galli revealed details about the code release.

Microsoft pulled the framework's cryptography libraries and also stripped out its TCP/IP stack because it contains third-party software licensed from EBSnet, wrote Galli.

"While the Micro Framework constitutes only a small part of the total .Net corpus, it is a significant step forward in making Redmond's ubiquitous framework more available and interoperable with other FOSS code," Bill Weinberg, principal analyst at LinuxPundit.com, told LinuxInsider.

The .NET Micro Framework is a development and execution environment for resource-constrained devices, according to Galli. It is well-used in embedded devices with low-powered processors that have a limited amount of RAM.

The framework was initially developed inside the Microsoft Startup Business Accelerator but was recently moved to the Developer Division to be more closely aligned with the overall direction of Microsoft development efforts, he noted.

"The result of this is that the .NET Micro Framework has become a seamless development experience, bringing a single programming model and tool chain for the breadth of developer solutions, all the way from small intelligent devices to servers and the cloud. There are also no more time-limited versions," wrote Galli.

Microsoft's decision to include the source code for almost all of the product ensures that developers now get access to the Base Class Libraries that were implemented for .NET Micro Framework and the Common Language Runtime (CLR) code itself, he added. CLR is a core component of Microsoft's .NET initiative.

The TCP/IP stack is third party software that Microsoft licenses from EBSNet. Thus, Microsoft did not have the rights to distribute that source code.

Microsoft did not include the cryptography libraries in the source code because they are used outside of the scope of the .Net Micro Framework. Customers who need access to the code in the cryptography functions can get that functionality in other sources.

Microsoft plans to remain active as a community partner to continue developing the framework. While the license allows customers to develop their own specialized versions of the framework, Microsoft intends to stay involved to avoid any possible fragmentation of the platform, Galli explained.

"As such, we are planning on establishing a core technology team that is made up of both Microsoft and non-Microsoft contributors that continues the goals of producing a high-quality product for very small devices. This group will act as the gateway to community contributions while, at the same time, Microsoft Developers will continue [to] add functionality and coordinate with the overall .NET team," Galli said.

Microsoft also plans to form a community of involved members to help shape the future direction of the framework product. This will include a core technology team composed of Microsoft and external partners. People will be encouraged to propose projects, which will be vetted before they are accepted, he noted.

"The site will also support people building extensions that exist alongside the platform rather than being integrated into it," Program Manager Colin Miller told Galli, according to the blog.

In the short term, the Micro Framework will only aid developers and integrators of resource-constrained embedded systems and not the larger communities building more robust intelligent devices, desktop and enterprise applications, according to Weinberg. More crucial is the potential for pressure from other other source projects to spur .NET uses.

"I find the release more interesting for its use of the permissive Apache license. By licensing the Micro Framework under Apache, the release throws down a gauntlet to open source .Net work-alike Mono, which is licensed under GNU GPL and LGPL. What used to be a stark choice between highly proprietary and closed source .NET vs. open and free Mono is now more clouded," Weinberg said.

Embedded developers and others could find Redmond's code and terms more attractive for the flexibility conferred by Apache licensing. The key is that Apache 2.0 demands minimal reciprocity for code licensed under it. The license requires only preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer, he explained.

"Unlike GNU, GPL and LGPL employed by Mono, Apache is not a copyleft license and allows use of source code for both proprietary and FOSS derivation and deployment. While OEMs, integrators and others are today mostly comfortable with the disclosure requirements imposed by GNU licenses, their legal departments still cleave to closely held IPR, potentially giving .NET Micro Framework advantage over its traditional FOSS rival, Mono," concluded Weinberg.

Originally published on LinuxInsider

PDC 2009: What have we learned this week?

Scott M. Fulton, III — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:17:47 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

It ended up being a somewhat different PDC conference than we had anticipated, and even to a certain extent, than we were led to believe. Maybe this was due in part to a little intentional misdirection to help generate surprise, but in the end, the big stories here in Los Angeles this week were more evolutionary than revolutionary. That was actually quite all right with attendees I spoke with this week, most of whom are just fine with one less thing to turn their worlds upside down. It's tough enough for many of these good people to hold onto their jobs every week.

We'll start our conference wrap-up with a look at the flashpoints (remind me to call Score Productions for a jingle to go with that) we talked about at the beginning of the week, and we'll follow up with the topic that crept in under the radar when we weren't expecting.

Making up for UAC, or, making Windows 7 seem less like Vista. This was absolutely the theme of "Day 0," which featured the day-long workshops. At this point, Windows engineers have absolutely no problem with the notion of disowning Vista, disavowing it, even though it was technically a stairstep toward making Windows 7 possible. But it is now perfectly permissible to acknowledge the performance hardships Vista faced, and let go of the past in order to move forward.

Mark Russinovich leads the way in this department, and the fact that he's appreciated leads others to follow suit. During his annual talk on "Kernel Improvements" -- which he expanded this year to a two-parter -- Russinovich spoke about the way that the timing of Windows' response to user interactions was adjusted to give the user more reassurance that something was happening, rather than the sinking suspicion that nothing was happening.

In an explanation of a user telemetry service he helped get off the ground called PerfTrack, he told attendees, "We went through and found roughly 300 places in the system where you interact with something, and there's a beginning and then an end where you go, 'Okay, that's done,' and optimized the performance of those user-visible interactions. We instrumented those begin-and-ends with data points, which collects timing information and sends that up to a Web service...and for each one of these interactions, we define what's considered 'great' performance, what's considered 'okay' performance, and what's considered Vista -- I mean, uh, 'bad,'" he explained, with a little grin afterward that appeared borrowed from Jay Leno. "And then if we end up in that 'okay' or 'bad,' what we do is, selectively turn on more instrumentation using ETW [Event Tracing for Windows] -- instrumentation of file accesses, Registry activity, context switches, page faults -- and then we collect that information from a sampling of customer machines that are showing that kind of behavior. "We feed that back to the product teams, they go analyze those and figure out, 'Why is their component sluggish in those scenarios?' and optimize that."

One of the results he demonstrated, shown here in this pair of charts, shows the number of user-reported instances of Start menu lag time leaning more toward the quick side than the slow side of the chart, between two builds of the Windows 7 beta.

The fact that performance matters was one of the key themes of PDC 2009, and attendees greeted that message with enthusiasm -- or, maybe more accurately, with appreciation that the company had finally received the message. But there are still lessons to be learned here that can be applied to other product areas, if anybody out there is listening.

Why Windows Azure? The major theme of Day 1 was the ability to scale services up -- scaling local services up to the data center, and data center services up (or down, depending on your application) to Microsoft's cloud provider, Windows Azure.

Last year at this time, Microsoft went to bat with essentially nothing -- no real definition of an Azure application, no clear understanding of who the customers will be, and absolutely no clue as to the business model. But now we know that services will be rendered on a utility basis like Amazon EC2, and we have a much clearer concept of the customer groups Azure will address. One is the small business that has never before considered data center applications; another is the class of customer that needs to plan for exceptional capacity traffic during unusual situations, but can't afford to maintain that high capacity 24/7; and the third is the big customer building a new class of application that has never before been considered on any platform.

Channeling customers to Microsoft's cloud will be "Dallas," its code name for large-capacity data bank services typically open for mining by the general public, which should eventually be given a typically Microsoft-sounding name; and AppFabric, the company's new mix-and-match component applications system built on the IIS 7 platform. But in neither of these cases is Microsoft particularly inventing the wheel; and as I heard from a plurality of attendees this week, Microsoft's entering another crowded field of contenders (including SalesForce.com and IBM) where competition has already been saturated. Success in this venture is by no means assured.

Next: Office takes a backseat...

What will Office Web Apps do? Less than we once thought, apparently. The extent to which you can view "rich content" created with real Office applications, in Office Web Apps, apparently remains strong. But since O Web will be free to everyone (for sensible reasons) the ability to create the same depth of rich content online will be artificially limited.

Since many businesses utilize Excel as a type of database, or as a window into their databases elsewhere, this means the utility of that product online will be most restricted. Word may suffer the least, however, as the need to compose respectable looking correspondence from anywhere one happens to be, is a pressing need that Word Web App can easily fulfill.

Making the case for Office 2010. We expected Microsoft Office to be the star of Wednesday's keynote, with demos of new functionality that, if it wasn't major, would at least have been advertised as fresh and new. It was not to be. Although we did have an opportunity to speak with an Office product manager (more on that in the coming days), the message Microsoft was sending this year was very different.

In the past, folks used to ask why a consumer applications suite was being prominently featured at a conference geared towards developers. The answer from Microsoft typically was, because Office is a platform, and developers build to platforms. The message Microsoft sent this year was that Office was not a platform. And that's a problem, because if that's true, there's no conference for Office. The excuse for the lack of Windows Mobile news was that it was a topic for MIX, the conference for Web developers set for next spring in Las Vegas.

So does Office wait for TechEd? All of a sudden, this major profit center seems homeless.

There was a little buzz devoted to something called the Outlook Social Connector plug-in, a new tool for integrating individuals' social media contacts within Office's communications app. Deals with social network hosts such as LinkedIn were announced. In one respect, that does address consumer concerns; in another, it's a little ironic. Here we have a situation where people take the time to broadcast their identities over multiple social services on purposes as a way to spread out...only to discover the need for a kind of "identity vacuum" to pull them back in again to one cohesive chord.

What we did see from the Office 2010 public beta (released Monday, then released Tuesday, then "launched" Wednesday) let us know that if Microsoft truly is listening to its customers and acting on their telemetry, then the word they're saying most often must be, "Whoa!"

During the Technical Preview phase, Microsoft unveiled its BackStage concept -- a way of organizing all the preparatory content of an application, such as print preview and preferences, in a more dimly-lit, cooler arrangement, making you almost want to whisper when you talk about it. The screenshot above shows BackStage in the Excel 2010 Technical Preview.

This is the same BackStage in Excel 2010 Beta 1. It's more conservative in several obvious regards, including the staging. But notice also something very important: The "Office button," which premiered in Office 2007 and which flattened down to become an icon menu tab in the Tech Preview, has now returned to being the File menu. If customers have been asking, "Where's File/Save?" then you have to wonder when they started asking, and how long they've been at it.

The new flavor of Visual Studio is already the old flavor. When you're dealing with a development platform unto itself, the beta version is often, unofficially but certainly, the working edition for many developers. And VS 2010 is already on Beta 2 now. More than one session presenter this week asked for shows of hands as to how many folks were already using Beta 2 as their development platform -- and in each case, a majority of everyone's hands were raised.

Will virtualization envelop Windows? Hell if I know. One of the hottest topics of prior conferences was something of a dud this year, and that's not good for a company that is actually behind in its ability to virtualize 64-bit platforms on 32-bit systems -- a feature Sun's VirtualBox and VMware already provide. But once the problem of absence of live migration in Hyper-V was kicked, virtualization took something of a breather this year, though it wasn't off the radar altogether.

The push toward online identity. Indeed, this ended up being the wildcard topic of the show. The principal security and architectural problem faced not only by developers but administrators as well, is enabling a secure single sign-on platform for local and remote applications. With multiple vendors supporting even more authentication protocols than there are vendors -- or so it appears -- this goal would seem impossible to achieve.

Microsoft is working to address this in its upcoming Windows Identity Foundation library, which will require the push of Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 -- a way to get AD out there to servers that aren't Windows. But just getting all hosted apps vendors on-board with AD is a colossal task, made more difficult by a "competitive" spirit among application and security vendors that works against the very spirit of communication and federation they need to accomplish the goal of common identity. We will be talking more about this in the coming days, because we learned a lot about this from PDC.

Now, there's something I'm missing. Yes, Scott Guthrie, I know I missed you in my list of headliners...and I'm sorry, it was inadvertent, and I apologize. Though I do know Brian Goldfarb gave you heck about it. But there's something else, let's see, I'm trying to recall...help me out, Brian...

Oh thank you, Scott, much obliged. Silverlight 4. This one should have been on our radar for certain. Silverlight stole the show on Wednesday, and was much of the talk among developers on Thursday. The new version will provide 1080p video, which everyone wanted. And it will provide authenticated access to system services outside the sandbox, which everyone wants.

If Office Web Apps were to run on Silverlight 4, you would get access to the right-click context menu -- a critical feature of regular Office 2007 and Office 2010 that's difficult to make up for with the ribbon alone. S4's access to system devices will make it feasible for developers to craft iTunes-like smartphone applications for devices that are tethered to PCs...and maybe even devices running on smartphones themselves, and not just Windows Phones.

Which reminds me, there was that one Guthrie demo Wednesday that bit the bottom of the bit bucket, with that cool looking phone. Did anyone ever make that work...Brian Goldfarb to the rescue once again. Yes, it is indeed possible to perform adaptive streaming of movies to the iPhone using Silverlight. We talked at length with Goldfarb (more on that too in coming days), and here's a preview of coming attractions:

"We've worked with Apple to create a server-side-based solution with IIS Media Services; and what we're doing is taking content that's encoded for smooth streaming and enabling the content owner to say, 'I want to enable the iPhone.'"

It was certainly more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary tone at this year's PDC, but attendees seemed comfortable with that this time around. Here was one strange phenomenon we've never noticed before: Attendance increased with later days. Wednesday attendance was noticeably higher for sessions and the keynote than for the previous day, and that was despite news of the big laptop giveaway being kept under lock and key. And Thursday -- which has often been a day for "leftovers" -- ended up being packed as well, including with attendees who brought those shiny new Acer multitouch laptops with them.

Now, there's something that hasn't been touched on: Acer. Think about that for a moment. This is the same company that publicly dissed Vista in 2006 for being a non-event for consumers, practically leading the wave for the complaints that were to follow. And here it is lending its name to an event that not only promotes Windows 7, but prototypes its proper use (from Microsoft's perspective) in all computing. Microsoft let Acer show everyone else how quick bootup and clean performance are supposed to be done.

That's the biggest indicator of Lessons Learned we saw all week.

Live report: Will Google Chrome OS change Linux?

Tim Conneally — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:02:59 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Google announced its open source Chrome OS last July and it has been a little more than a mystery to the wondering public since that time. Now, an official first look is mere hours away.

At 10:00 am PST (1:00 pm EST), Google will present a live webcast of Chrome OS, the search giant's attempt to "rethink what operating systems should be." Speakers this afternoon will include Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS.

Besides finally getting to see just how Chrome will be laid out, we will get an overview of the underlying technology and find out about the operating system's 2010 launch schedule.

What we know about Chrome OS already:

It will be free and open source
It is built on the Linux Kernel but has a totally new windowing system.
It will support both x86 and ARM architecture.
It will run Web apps as if they're native desktop apps.
It is not a handset OS like Android, but there will be "overlap" in functionality
Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba have all voiced support for Chrome OS.
Chrome OS Director Matthew Papakipos is director of the HTML 5 Open Web Platform efforts at Google.
The underlying security architecture of "standard" operating systems is being completely redesigned.

Until today, these facts have only raised more questions. Far too many to even list here. Hopefully, once the Webcast gets rolling, we'll be able to finally put the most basic of these questions to rest.

11:23am PT: The Q&A session has ended, and now it's time to go download the source code!

11:20am PT: It currently doesn't support printing, but locally pluggable devices are recognized, and more are being added. (Nobody in the Q&A session is asking about local network presence/file sharing, etc...that's disappointing.)

11:18am PT: "We're trying to make the core boot operating system boot wicked fast...we're really focused on making a lean and mean netbook that runs really fast." --Matthew Papakipos

11:16am PT: Sergey Brin has joined the discussion.

11:13am PT: "If the cloud goes down, you're going to be affected no matter what machine you're on; Chrome OS or not." -Sundar Pichai

11:13am PT: Though most of what is going on in Chrome OS can be accessed simply through any other browser...Verified Boot/malware prevention/fast boot/file system security are all benefits to the OS.

11:10am PT: "It's very hard to build and ship an OS in a year, but that's what we're trying to do." -Sundar Pichai

11:09am PT: Chrome Native Client will run on ARM chips eventually.

11:07am PT: To reiterate, the current plan is to ONLY SUPPORT WEB APPS in Chrome OS, period.

11:06am PT: Will Android Apps run on Chrome OS? Since they're not Web apps...no.

11:05am PT: Media can be cached locally for offline access, and 802.11n is the focus wireless standard for connectivity.

11:03am PT: "We are working very, very, very hard to have a simple code stack." -Sundar Pichai

11:02am PT: Chrome OS-based devices will be in the market by the middle of 2010.

11:00am PT: Working to support plugins. Asked if they're working with Microsoft to develop a Chrome/OS Silverlight plugin, the answer was "no comment."

10:58am PT: Everything that works in Chrome the browser, including Codecs, will also work in Chrome OS...Flash, Codec hardware acceleration, and Chrome native client.

10:57am PT: The archetypal Chrome OS device is going to be a companion device.

10:56am PT: Q: Will there be an application store? A: There are hundreds of millions of web apps, so we're working to solve the problem. Q: What about driver certification? A: Open source drivers whenever possible, but working closely with OEMs...

10:54am PT: With Web standards, many of those are still evolving, and the Device APIs are all still evolving too. Google is "working closely" with the big standards groups.

10:52am PT: Demo model running this build of Chrome OS is an "off the shelf Eee PC" (Asus)

10:51am PT: Q: What's a Chrome OS netbook going to cost? A: It will be up to the OEMs, and it's too early to say.

10:49am PT: Google Chrome will ultimately be a "stateless computer"

10:47am PT: watching this video:

10:43am PT: How Chrome OS is going to go to market: Chrome OS image is being built against hardware profiles rather than generically. No support for HDDs, only Solid state drives. Wireless card support will be announced on a case by case basis. You won't be able to just install Chrome. It's pre-install only. (Kinda like OS X?)

10:40am PT: System is continuously auto-updated. Most of the system is in a writable partition, and that's scary. System settings are stored separately, and user data is always encrypted. One benefit is safety of data; you can be assured that if some bad guy gets your machine with a screwdriver, he'll have a hard time reading those bits.

10:38am PT: In the security model of the conventional application, apps run as you. (Impersonation). This is a big deal because it enables hackers to impersonate you. This makes it hard for users to make decisions.

Chrome OS applications are all Web apps, so you have a different security model. Apps are treated at the system level as fundamentally hostile by default. Web apps can't change files on the hard disk, can't change the power setting. (Evidently something does, but that's not being discussed.)

All apps run in secure namespaces. "Every tab that you run in Chrome OS is run completely separate from other tabs in the OS -- we've protected tabs from other tabs, apps from each other."

10:35am PT: Talking now about the security model, and how the operating system will update itself continually. Components of the operating system must pass a cryptographic signature check before running. Malware protection enables the system to declare certain components of the operating system "wrong," which apparently may be due to either malware or system updates. "We're taking what used to be a painful imaging process, and we've made it transparent, saving your system settings."

10:24am PT: Instead of browser tabs, they have become "application tabs," and the far left tab is a menu of Web apps, there are also dedicated tabs for gmail, Google Docs, etc. "Panels" pop up from the bottom which can lay Web apps on top of one another.

10:21am PT: The UI is meant to feel like a browser, so it looks like the Chrome Browser. (as TechCrunch found out several weeks ago.) Bear in mind, this is a whole year ahead of release, so code is still being checked in right now.

10:19am PT: Chrome OS promises a 7 second cold boot. (though I counted 12 seconds in the demo...)

10:18am PT: Chrome OS is a "better model for personal computing," focused on: speed ("we want it to be blazingly fast, like a TV") simplicity (every application is a web application, nothing to maintain, all data is cloud data...sort of like a dumb terminal without the "dumbness") and security ("we run completely within the browser security model")

10:14am PT: Trends that Google is excited about: Growth of Netbooks, Growth of cloud usage, Convergence of phone and computer functionality.

PDC 2009: Microsoft cares about Web browser performance

Scott M. Fulton, III — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:21:08 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

I know when I've hurt a man's feelings. In a segment of the technology business that has recently become fiercely competitive, it's difficult to report bad news about a team that tries very hard to build a good Web browser. It was very apparent from our interview today at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles that Microsoft Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch has an emotional and personal investment in the product he's building.

"If I had a script engine that was twice as fast as the one before, the Web should be twice as fast," said Hatchamovitch today. "But if JavaScript is 10 percent of my site, at most, I'll shave 5 percent off; and if the site was 1.8 seconds, yea, I'm not going to be able to tell...Yes, we understand that there's a microscope on JavaScript performance. We've made progress on JavaScript performance -- we're all in the same neighborhood now."

He was referring to the first news of development of Internet Explorer 9, which he confirmed only began weeks ago, but whose early builds -- according to both Hatchamovitch and Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky today -- were producing JavaScript performance numbers that were comparable to its competition for the first time since Mozilla released Firefox 3.5.

"That's just going to re-emphasize that it's the systems that come together. Because as all the JavaScript engines converge on their performance, people are going to notice the other 90 percent [of Web components] a lot more significantly."

Betanews' reporting on Internet Explorer in the past few months has not been kind. The October Patch Tuesday round of fixes included one for all versions of Internet Explorer that addressed a very serious, possibly exploitable issue. While we feel addressing this issue is absolutely necessary, we also noticed that applying the patch resulted in a noticeable slowdown in IE performance. At least, noticeable to us.

The most vocal reader response to our reporting could be grouped into three categories: One group vocalized that it did not care about Internet Explorer performance as a factor in computing, since it's mainly a way to read news articles anyway, and voiced their opinion that we shouldn't care either. Another group of readers took Microsoft to task for, in their opinion, not caring about IE performance, but added that it shouldn't be expected to care because nobody else does (or at least, nobody of importance) and that we should drop the subject for that reason. A third group applauded our efforts to, in their opinion, expose Microsoft for not caring about browser performance.

None of these are groups that anyone at Microsoft would want to appear publicly aligned with. So perhaps part of Dean Hachamovitch was interested in speaking with me today, and another part -- for absolutely understandable reasons -- was dreading the thought.

But bravely, he made his company's case, a valiant effort to split the difference: JavaScript isn't the Web, he asserted, but just one of many subsystems. A multitude of other factors will contribute to users' decisions. "There's performance, there's interoperable standards, and there's graphics," said Hatchamovitch. Each component strikes a different chord with different groups of users, he said. Since the Day 2 keynote's conclusion, he and his press handler had opportunities to ask individuals what they thought of the presentation -- or more specifically, what did they remember from it?

"I asked some folks what they heard, and some just said, 'Yea, you guys are doing a lot of compliance and interop.' 'Did you hear anything else?' 'No, not really.' Talked to someone else, 'So what did you hear?' 'You guys are doing some stuff around making the script engine faster.' 'Huh. Anything else?' 'No, not really.' So what I'm finding is that this is the classic game of Telephone."

What resonates with various attendees is essentially aligned with what they want to hear, Hatchamovitch went on...perhaps to illustrate the point that when he asked me the very same question at the start of our interview, I dove right into the performance aspect.

Rendering is another critical aspect, and we saw demonstrations of the changes IE9 will make in the rendering department. Specifically, the next edition of Microsoft's browser will move away from GDI, the graphics library favored by Windows during the late 1980s, and toward the new Direct2D library which takes fuller advantages of the capabilities of the underlying hardware, including the GPU. In response to my request for a video that showed this performance, Microsoft asked us to include in our story the video you see embedded above, which is as close as the Web can come to approximating the speed and fluidity improvements attainable through Direct2D.

There is absolutely no question that, if IE9's rendering improvements were to simply stay on the same level as they appear from these early demonstrations, through to the end of the product's development, the result will be a perceptible qualitative difference that could be the deciding factor in whether Firefox or Chrome or Safari users switch back to IE -- as important a factor as computational performance.

Hachamovitch showed us up close the map rendering demonstration seen from a distance during the Day 2 keynote. Shifting the same road map across the screen on a small Dell XPS laptop produced typical, perceptible jitters using IE8's GDI graphics methodology, compared to a smooth, even flow using IE9's Direct2D.

Some folks were confused by the meaning of the number in the demo, and why the slower, jittery-er graphic produced the higher value. This represented the number of milliseconds between frames -- a number that plummeted from 130.2 ms as in this photo, or even much higher on occasion, to as low as 8 ms for Direct2D. Actual frames per second rises from around 7 (or lower) for GDI, to about 60 for Direct2D on the same machine.

"Now, that kind of difference -- somebody said, 'Oh, it's like game-level animation!' Yea, you can call it like it's a Pixar movie or an Xbox game. But then they said, 'But what does that have to do with the Web?' It has everything to do with the Web. When you're using Web mail or this mapping site, or you're previewing photos -- imagine going to a photo site, and you want to have 1,000 thumbnails up on the screen. Now we're using the graphics card, so you're not waiting on every piece of graphics that way. That's a huge gain for performance, that's a huge gain for developers because they can use all their old patterns -- they didn't have to rewrite their sites."

So graphics does strike the performance chord with users and developers after all.

During the Day 2 keynote, Sinofsky said the IE9 team has been working for all of three weeks, and we were skeptical. Didn't IE9 development really start after IE8 was released to general availability in March? What was going on all these months?

"There's a lot of work that went into IE8 for sure," Hachamovitch responded. "But realize, on March 19 we released IE8 in a few dozen languages. After March 19, we had several waves of languages for IE8 to get out, because it's worldwide. There's more than a few dozen languages of IE8. Then we had to finish Windows 7, and all the languages of Windows 7. So we're three weeks past the general availability of Windows 7. In some ways, we've all been on call, ready, working through...well, several Patch Tuesdays since March 19."

As Microsoft tries for a valiant comeback attempt for IE in the realm of qualitative measures, expect the company to demonstrate any number of various other aspects where the browser makes gains, and say this, too, is the Web.

And if those gains in one or two departments aren't as significant, expect the message to be, "But that's not all of the Web."

We've asked Dean Hatchamovitch to join us in responding to your comments to this article.

Next: A word about Dean's comments about our performance measurements...

A word about Dean's comments about our performance measurements

It is no secret to the dozens of you who have followed my work over the past few decades that I am a speed fanatic. I give a damn about the performance of my automobile, my coffee maker, my wristwatch, and my Web browser, and my wife knows it doesn't stop there. It might have something to do with why I edit a publication called Betanews.

The other reason I care is that I'm in the business of improvement, and you can't improve until you're ready to accept your own shortcomings. That goes for myself as well as everyone else. It is never fun to be on the losing side of a fair and competitive battle. It may even seem unfair when the reasons have to do with a legitimate effort to address a serious concern.

But as a high school journalism teacher I knew used to tell her students in the sports department covering one of the worst teams ever to take the field, if you can't do the simplest job in the world -- reporting the score -- then you shouldn't be a journalist but a cheerleader. Your heart may want you to change the score; but if you then do it, you've lost more than a game.

Click here for a comprehensive explanation of the Betanews CRPI index version 2.2.

Dean Hachamovitch raised a few concerns about Betanews' testing methodology, and I think they're fair concerns that are worth discussing. First, he contended that it may be confusing to him and others, for us to use Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista as a relativity index. I told him I did not want to do as some readers suggested I do -- use IE8 as the index browser -- because that would be unfair to IE8, disabling its ability to be measured for performance at all. I also could not use any older series of browsers (for example, IE6 or Firefox 2) because they could not even run the tests in our performance battery. I know, I've tried.

He also suggested something else: that we go back to using clean installs of operating systems on virtual machines for our test systems, so long as those VMs were running on the same hardware. I explained to him why I changed to testing on physical platforms, mainly in response to reader requests. But I also explained that during our test of IE8 performance after the October Patch Tuesday fix, to validate the numbers I was seeing, I uninstalled the patch and tested again, and reinstalled it and tested again, to verify the values -- they were spot on after the validation.

Hatchamovitch winced at this. He said that by uninstalling and reapplying the patch, I may have reduced the "signal-to-noise ratio," to use his phrase, for IE7 and IE8 on Vista. In other words, I may have polluted the platform and hindered performance. The test results did not suggest that; but my methodology, he argued, could still produce doubt as to the authenticity of my results. This is a fair argument which I will put to the test myself.

Hatchamovitch also suggested we introduce the factor of variability into the test, a plus-or-minus factor, which is often seen in many other scientific measurements of performance. Of course, that's not a bad idea either; on the other hand, I only want to report numbers that make sense to readers. If I'm "fuzzifying" the meaning of a result, I may not be giving readers data that they can use. It would be like putting a plus-or-minus estimate on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I stand behind my current methodology, but as you've already seen, I'm open to suggestions for improvement, and I have made improvements based on suggestions. But as I told BASIC interpreter vendors during the 1980s, who for years had seen their performance numbers in my tests slammed again and again and again by Microsoft -- which dominated the interpreter market for as long as it was important -- winning is not a relative state. Ask anyone who's improved and come back to win the next round.

The moment IE9 marks a comeback for Microsoft's Web browser in performance, you'll read about it here. Yes, performance isn't the entire Web just as the drivetrain isn't the entire car. Maybe you don't think much about the drivetrain every day, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just try riding in a car without one.

Don't forget to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 beta 3 today

Tim Conneally — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:35:34 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 3 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Here's what happens when our beloved Scott M. Fulton, III is away from his test machine while covering PDC 2009: you get a Firefox beta announcement with none of the scores, charts, or metrics you're accustomed to getting. Instead you just a plain old "Go download this!" message from yours truly.

Mozilla pushed out the latest beta last night, just a little over a week after we checked out beta 2. Mozilla says more than 80 changes have taken place since the last version came out, and they include the ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load time, and a feature called "component directory lockdown."

Well, it's not really a feature so much as a loose end that was tied up. Component directory lockdown is an extremely simple concept: third party applications no longer have access to the "components" directory, and can only extend Firefox through traditional add-ons and plug-ins.

Johnathan Nightingale explained "component" extensions in the Mozilla Developer Blog this week, "There are no special abilities that come from doing things this way, but there are some significant disadvantages. For one thing, components installed in this way aren't user-visible, meaning that users can't manage them through the add-ons manager, or disable them if they're encountering difficulties. What's worse, components dropped blindly into Firefox in this way don't carry version information with them, which means that when users upgrade Firefox and these components become incompatible, there's no way to tell Firefox to disable them. This can lead to all kinds of unfortunate behaviour: lost functionality, performance woes, and outright crashing ??" often immediately on startup."

If you are running 3.6 beta 2, you can simply go to Help > Check for Updates... to upgrade to beta 3. It can also be downloaded directly from Mozilla.

PDC 2009 Post-keynote Day 2: What are we learning today?

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:20:43 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The Day 2 keynote is actually still ongoing at the time I'm writing this -- it's run 20 minutes over schedule, and the SharePoint demos are still going on. But here's an assessment of the information we've received thus far today: First of all, the first news on Internet Explorer 9. If you weren't listening closely to Windows Division president Steven Sinofsky, you might have missed this little fact: The team is only three weeks into the project, having just started after the Windows 7 launch. Now, think about that for a bit: The implication here is that the development team cannot work on the operating system and the Web browser at the same time. This from the company that used to argue that the two components were inseparable.

Then there is the whole "three weeks in" news...It's difficult to believe that Microsoft hasn't really been working on a Web browser since last March, and I actually expect Dean Hachamovitch, who leads IE8 design, to contradict that bit of information. He and his team haven't been lying dormant.

But assuming that's true, why should the idea that it has done nothing with IE9 until three weeks ago, not come to the surprise and shock of Steven Sinofsky?

Obviously performance is an issue, and the fact that IE9 is crawling back from the brink is something that developers are taking note of. The proud disclosure that IE9 posted a 32% score on the Acid3 test score, elicited a tremendous groan...a bit like telling the audience that Chris Rock couldn't make it but Carrot Top could.

So the demonstration of Internet Explorer 9 rendering functionality -- specifically, moving the rendering engine from the decades-old GDI over to Direct2D -- ended up falling a little flat. Even though the need for a smoother rendering engine is crystal clear to any user, especially in IE8, to the developers (a.k.a., the PDC audience), they want to be told what they can do to improve the Web user experience. Being told they don't have to do anything to improve the experience is no help to them; it's like telling a professional truck driver he doesn't have to drive a truck. Then how is he going to make his living? Developers want tools so they can be the ones responsible for improving the IE experience, especially since there's an obvious needs assessment that says it needs improving.

The IE9 news made the entire crowd unimpressed, which is why it was perfect (and obviously intentional) timing to take the bad taste out of developers' mouths with the news of the laptop giveaways. It was a palate cleanser ahead of Scott Guthrie and the Silverlight 4 news, all of which was received very positively.

More and more, Silverlight is becoming Microsoft's Web platform -- in effect, replacing Internet Explorer in that regard, at least with respect to the company's product line. Seeing Guthrie's demo of the HTML control being housed inside the Silverlight-based frame (so, for example, a custom Silverlight app could host a Bing search or a Facebook application) made it clear that not only developers outside Microsoft, but the ones inside Microsoft, are paying attention to the possibility of Silverlight becoming the Web apps host of choice as opposed to Internet Explorer.

Just as Betanews readers have been saying, IE is becoming old news. Trouble is, the older that news becomes, the more of it there is.

A long string of interviews is next for us here at the conference, and we'll report on what we've learned from them later tonight and throughout the week.

PDC 2009: Live from the Day 2 keynote

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:33:12 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Microsoft's Windows division president Steven Sinofsky is the headliner for today's Day 2 keynote at PDC 2009, and Betanews has its usual front-row seat.

11:04am PT: Promise of discussion on Windows Mobile at MIX '10 next March 15-17 in Las Vegas -- notice once again that the number "7" is omitted from the reference to this product. Keynote ends 35 minutes over schedule.

11:00am PT: Outlook Social Connector -- a plug-in involving Microsoft and partners including LinkedIn, enabling information from individuals' social organizations and networks to be displayed in a meaningful context in Outlook. "This is a general SDK," meaning developers will be expected to deploy it.

10:37am PT: Office Mobile Clients for Windows Mobile 6.5 betas available today in Windows Mobile Marketplace.

10:37am PT: Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 public betas go live now...today was apparently the original release date to begin with.

10:23am PT: SharePoint now taking the stage, this is where we'll see the only real Office 2010 information. A lot of talk first about what Microsoft is focused on, which is a little bit of a downer coming off of some very impressive Silverlight 4 demos.

10:18am PT: Final release of S4 shipped first half of next year.

10:17am PT: Sinofsky: How S4 will be shipped: Public beta will include all features demonstrated today, tooling support for VS 2010. Now available for download.

10:15am PT: Multitouch features with basic features, zoom in, zoom out.

10:14am PT: Photos dragged-and-dropped from the outside can be loaded into the application live, then tagged, prior to being sent to Facebook.

Photo of the audience, plugged into the system, app will ask whether to upload the photo to Facebook -- all within about 10 seconds.

10:10am PT: Brian Goldfarb is showing an S4 application that utilizes Facebook, but which uses its own chrome to develop a real, custom app on top of custom Facebook apps. Can also take advantage of COM automation to right-click data from Facebook, then add to the Outlook calendar. Access to the Outlook inbox, with virtual wall on the right "to contextualize who I'm talking to."

10:07am PT: Google Chrome being added to S4's list of supported browsers.

10:05am PT: Window "chrome" of the application can be customized with out-of-sandbox support, cross-site networking, keyboard support in full-screen mode, more hardware device access. Access to any COM automation object installed on the system, using the _dynamic_ keyword in C# to call new methods found on system. For example, Office 2010 calendar can be queried, PivotCharts brought up from Excel.

10:04am PT: S4: Ability to build trusted applications that run outside the sandbox on Windows and the Mac, user consent dialog is provided automatically.

9:48am PT: UDP multicast support enables P2P networking, improvements to support for WCF, including RIA services. Transfer data 600% faster using internal transfer protocols instead of HTTP.

9:47am PT: Brush demo can be used with live video -- a YouTube video can be jigsawed live, while video and sound are playing.

Sinofsky's been rick-rolled...but he gets his revenge! A "rick-roll" video from YouTube is sliced and diced into live jigsaw pieces using Silverlight 4.

Compile in assemblies once, run in both Silverlight and .NET 4 -- compile once, run in both places.

9:45am PT: Text can be dragged and dropped from a browser to the application. Print Preview works, including with custom Print Preview dialogs. S4 will now write directly to the printer, has a print API.

HTML control is hosted within Silverlight app. HTML image can be converted into a brush -- the entire HTML page can be used as a brush, so that the page can be converted into, say, a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of which can be juggled around the screen.

9:43am PT: "And _now_ the iPhone works," says Sinofsky.

Rich text control that ships in S4: Arabic, Hebrew, Kanji character sets all within the text editor. Custom context menu after right-click. Can paste and insert text, pictures, and DDE-like controls into a Silverlight app, such as a Data Grid control from Excel. Can cut and paste from Data Grid control back into Excel.

9:41am PT: HTML hosting support is coming, model/view development.

9:40am PT: IIS media tool, new version will enable streaming of media directly to Apple iPhone. Yes, you read that right. Video can be encoded once using smooth streaming, target clients using the iPhone.

Well, that could have gone a lot better. Brian Goldfarb rushed to the stage to give Steven a fourth iPhone. That one would link to the network, but once it accessed the Silverlight-based Vancouver Olympics site, the video would not load.

Demo tried using four different iPhones, the first three of which could not pull up the network using the router. The fourth did pull up the network, but the video from the Olympics Web site would not pull up in the Safari browser. Took several minutes, but Sinofsky refrained from making any silly Apple comment.

"We believe you, Scott!" yelled one attendee.

Printing / rich text / Clipboard access / right-click support for context menus / mouse wheel support are all coming to Silverlight 4.

9:34am PT: Demo of Vancouver Olympics site with Silverlight player, with instant seek.

9:33am PT: Open-source library for barcode reading, can immediately look up the prices of any object scanned from the barcode scanner, pulls up distributors or retail sellers.

9:32am PT: New Silverlight 4 will allow access to webcams and microphones on the user's machine. Demo now: Webcam application that captures live video, can do live effects with bulge, distortion. Integration with Twitter enables the result to be live-integrated into Twitter profile, so a picture just taken becomes the user's Twitter icon.

9:28am PT: Silverlight now installed on an estimated 45% of the world's Internet-connected devices. PDC is about Silverlight 4, first news.

9:25am PT: Corp. VP Scott Guthrie now takes the stage to talk Silverlight, now showing the video of Sketchflow feature in Expression Blend (not a particularly new video for many).

9:22am PT: The test distributions of "Microsoft PDC laptops" will likely come with promises that the users will be communicating telemetry with the company.

9:21am PT: Lot of new APIs in Windows 7, and IE will take advantage of these APIs. Videos of demos will soon be available on Microsoft Channel 9.

9:19am PT: Maps re-rendering will use 60 fps rather than 2 or 3, by moving to Direct2D from GDI.

9:18am PT: CSS selectors test, using CSS3.info -- passed 572 out of 578 (a variation of the SlickSpeed test) for CSS selectors used in rendering.

IE rendering engine will support rounded borders in CSS.

Rendering engine will use hardware-acceleration in DX9 mode (not DX10), using Direct2D. Highly resolved text with much resolved clarity.

Sub-pixel positioned text using DirectWrite. Zooms used to be jittery in GDI, nice and smooth as we move to Direct2D. Smooth realignments -- "changes without you having to do anything different with your site."

9:14am PT: Different Web sites have tremendous differences in how they handle JavaScript, CSS, and HTML parsing. Their profiles make everything different.

IE9 is getting close to Firefox 3.6 performance, not overtaken just yet. "It's getting really close to being a wash."

9:13am PT:

9:13am PT: JavaScript performance. IE9 is up to 32 on the Acid3 test, from 20. Audible groan from the audience.

9:12am PT: We continue to want to be responsible about building Internet Explorer.

First IE9 news: Three weeks into the project, we're focused on these areas:

Standards: Acid3, we're not ahead of that, we need to do a better job. There are new and emerging standards like HTML5, and we want to be responsible about how we support that, we don't want to generate a hype cycle among developers.

9:10am PT: Biggest applause of the day comes from this:

Sinofsky is now talking about a partnership project with Acer where it puts its own team through the process of actually building a laptop computer, just to see how one is built -- what laptop engineers actually go through. In learning the system that Acer goes through, Microsoft built its own limited run of PDC'09 laptops.

They will be giveaways to PDC attendees. About a minute of applause from that. "But please hang around for the rest of the talk," said Sinofsky. "We had a little problem, something like that, about four years ago, so please stay seated."

Folks realize they're being given free laptop computers. Yay. Applause, then what's the catch. No catch so far, so more applause. Then more. One of the longest stretches of applause in PDC keynote history.

9:04am PT: Everybody's jumping on the taskbar bandwagon, says Angiulo, and here again Microsoft gives credit to Mozilla for being quick to integrate previewing features into Firefox 3.6 (Beta 3 was just made available, by the way).

9:03am PT: Dell netbook uses an infrared data center to detect body heat, then powers itself back up when someone walks by.

Earlier, Angiulo demonstrated the differences between DirectX 11 processing power and DX10, mainly by means of offloading much of the computing power from the CPU to the GPU. Demos of moving thousands of "star" objects simultaneously in a simulated galaxy formation, with gravity and physical forces between them, all in a 40+ Gflops operation running on a $400 graphics card rather than a $15,000 computer.

8:58am PT: Windows engineer Michael Angiulo demonstrates how engineers of new small computers, such as netbooks, can do their part to accelerate Windows 7. After reminding everyone of the first generation UMPC (gagh!), he pulls out a pair of Windows 7 netbooks. But one has a bunch of branded background software loaded, and the other (by Sony) does not. The Sony model runs 30% faster, boots faster, and has 50% better battery life, simply by getting all that bloatware junk software out of the boot path.

8:53am PT: Moving now to examples of people trying to align their windows, one user talks about side-by-siding his windows, looking for where the window tiling feature is located...no, it's not that one...

Then another user snaps a window to the side using Aero Snap in Windows 7. "That is _way_ easier."

Aero Peek: "Hey, get all that!" says the user. "I can dig that! Good job, people."

8:50am PT: Discussion now about the UAC usability studies. We saw videos of some of these studies last year, but users are talking about not wanting things popping up in their faces constantly.

User is asked during an Adobe Flash installation what he just clicked on, and he made up a response about where the program is going on the drive. Another user is asked what the UAC prompt that he just received meant, and he answered, "It means that people...are happy with it now." [?]

8:43am PT: Video about how Microsoft programmers are held directly responsible for the errors of their ways, by way of a kind of "agony chair" that shocks, stuns, or stabs the individual developers discovered using the Watson logs to have been responsible for a specific problem.

Uh-huh.

8:40am PT: Anecdote about how Microsoft used to handle reliability problems in the Windows 3.x era using Dr. Watson (hands up if you remember that?), and how engineers pre-Internet developed the Watson system for "testosterone-based bug fixing" -- folks watching the Watson logs coming in over the BBS and responding to the most interesting and serious problems.

The sheer number of telemetry items returned from Windows 7 testers during the beta process.

8:38am PT: The value of the "Send Feedback" button, learning from clients what drivers were loaded, whether the installation of drivers and services were successful.

Software Quality Monitor ("squim") is designed to be opt-in for customers, but Sinofsky admits customers were "opted in automatically" during the preview and beta processes.

8:35am PT: At the moment, Sinofsky is going through a history of the Windows 7 launch, and lessons learned at Microsoft about being responsible about how to disclose information about the product. "You should expect us to have learned that lesson about responsible disclosure, and to continue as we move forward."

Beta of Opera 10 for Windows Mobile available now

Tim Conneally — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:07:29 -0500

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Today, Opera Software has released the beta version of Opera Mobile 10 for Windows Phones, with support for touchscreen- and keypad-driven Windows Mobile 5 (PPC), 6.0, 6.1, and 6.5 devices.

The keywords with this release are: speed, simplicity, and compatibility.

Speed: With the current generation of Opera products, speed has been one of the central talking points. Though we at Betanews have found that Opera's claims of speed boosts tend to be a little hyperbolical in the desktop versions, the company's mobile products tend to be a different story. Using Opera Turbo compression, the company claims this version will be 50% faster than the previous version of Opera Mobile.

Simplicity: Though navigation in each may vary, all of Opera's current browsers share some essential design elements: the "Speed Dial" home screen, browser tabs, and the multi-search engine bar. The navigation buttons in Opera Mobile 10 have gotten a bit simpler than they were in 9.7 and now simply represent Back, Forward, Reload, Tabs, and Tools. Tabs have been turned into easily scrollable thumbnails, and the Tools menu accesses in-page search, bookmarks, browsing history, saved pages, and settings as large, easy-to-identify icons.

Compatibility: "Opera Mobile is the most standards-compliant mobile browser available," the company says. And while all browsers have at least some degree of compatibility trouble, mobile browsers are still extremely limited in the content they can display. Opera Mobile 10, however, uses the same Presto browser engine that desktop Opera 10 uses, so rich applications are more likely to be compatible with your phone. Furthermore, Opera Mobile 10 offers "Mobile View" mode, where Web pages are reformatted into a single column for easier consumption.

PDC 2009: Windows Server's plan to move customers back off the cloud

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:21:47 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Much of the value proposition for Windows Azure -- the star of the show Tuesday at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles -- has been its ability to open up new business avenues for customers who had not been able to envision hosting high-intensity data center operations before. Azure could give these customers a leg up, a new and more affordable way to get off the ground.

But once they're off the ground, the question becomes, why stay up in the air? What's to keep those customers grounded -- to mix metaphors like an old editor of mine -- in the cloud? The surprise answer to that question is coming from a senior product manager for Windows Server, not Azure. Scott Ottaway told Betanews today that provisions are being planned for customers to move their deployed applications back off the Azure cloud, onto on-premises data center servers.

"Our goal is to provide a common application platform, just the way that we support ASP.NET in both places, PHP in both places. We want to supply a common platform so customers don't have to make the hard choice up front about where they're going to run something."

During the October 2008 PDC conference when Windows Azure was first introduced, it wasn't exactly clear who Microsoft was targeting as its customer. Thirteen months later, we have a much clearer picture of cloud services customers comprising three discrete classes: one that is made up of SMB businesses investing in affordable data center architecture for the first time, and building entirely new cloud applications that have never been tried; another made up of applications and services hosts that are simply mirroring their existing apps to the cloud space for affordability and scalability; and a third class in-between comprised of businesses of all sizes, who aren't looking to the cloud as a migration platform, but as a way to backup, complement, or augment their existing customer services as necessary.

The common factor between each of those classes is the need for a bridge -- perhaps now, perhaps later -- between their on-premise and off-premise cloud platforms. That's the reason for Microsoft's latest brand, announced Tuesday morning.

"If you write your code for Windows Server AppFabric, it should run on Windows Azure," said Ottaway, referring to the new mix-and-match composite applications system for the IIS platform. "What we are delivering in 2010 is a CTP [community technology preview] of AppFabric, called Windows Azure AppFabric, where you should be able to take the exact same code that you wrote for Windows Server AppFabric, and with zero or minimal refactoring, be able to put it up on Windows Azure and run it." AppFabric for now appears to include a methodology for customers to rapidly deploy applications and services based on common components. But for many of these components, there will be analogs between the on-Earth and off-Earth versions, if you will, such that all or part of these apps may be translated between locales as necessary.

"Right now, if I have an ASP.NET app running on Windows Azure, and it's using SQL Azure, I can pull that off with minimal refactoring, in most cases, and run it on premises on Windows Server, because Windows Server supports ASP.NET via IIS, and our .NET Framework, and it supports SQL Server," remarked Ottaway. "So I can move a certain class of apps that I have up there, off -- not all." Applications that utilize binary large object (BLOB) storage, and other Azure-specific features, would still require significant refactoring. "But if it's just an ASP.NET app through SQL Azure, you should be able to pull it back on-premises without much effort at all."

Some of the more recently deployed, non-Microsoft language platforms, including PHP and MySQL, will also aid customers in that transition.

"Whether there's a total cost-of-ownership advantage to being off-premises or on-premises, depends on so many factors. Are you highly virtualized? Do you have really good management tools? Do you have affordable staff? Regulatory concerns? Privacy, security concerns?" remarked the Windows Server senior product manager. "There's many, many factors that may indicate to you that...you want to keep it on-premises, or that it's okay to go all the way off-premises. But it's probably going to be more of a non-enterprise decision; it's going to be project by project and app-by-app."

Next: Virtual machines migrate to Azure...

Virtual machines migrate to Azure

One of the distinguishing factors between Microsoft's cloud platform and Amazon's has been the distinction in what's being served. Specifically, Amazon's EC2 gives customers a way to deploy entire server images on its cloud, while Azure provides an active cloud-based .NET runtime for the deployment of applications rather than servers. Still, that distinction will grow fuzzier, first with last week's announcement by Amazon of an SDK for cloud-based applications deployment, more similar to Windows Azure.

Then there's Microsoft's announcement Tuesday -- effectively made by Ottaway during an afternoon press conference -- of a system for deploying Windows Server virtual machines to its cloud.

"What we're announcing is that we will have what we're calling Windows Server Virtual Machine Roles on Windows Azure," Windows Server senior product manager Scott Ottaway told a press gathering Tuesday afternoon at PDC 2009. "What these will be, are pre-configured images of Windows Server -- one might have .NET [Framework] 3.5 on it, the next one might have .NET 4.0 when that's available. And you can bring your existing app, that you're running on-premises now on Windows Server, to Windows Azure, deploy it in this virtual machine image, and there you have existing applications support or migration -- you don't have to necessarily write new apps to take advantage of the Windows Azure service."

Notice the distinction still exists, if lessened a bit: VM Roles will provide Windows Server admins a way to deploy apps in the cloud as though they were being deployed on virtual machines locally. It's still not deploying servers, like the Amazon model, but it's closer. One big reason, Ottaway said: Customers already have applications that they paid for; they don't want them redeveloped.

But the other reason (and here's the basis for Microsoft's new value proposition for Azure) is that it makes less sense for customers to deploy servers in the cloud (including from a licensing perspective) when their goal is really to add scalability to their applications and public-facing services, not to Windows.

"Certain companies out there say everything's going to move off-premises, and everything's going to be a service. But there are two issues here: Network latency, the sweet nectar of having a big pipe and fast response time, is a big inhibitor for a lot of things moving off, that might make a lot of sense. And then, you want Print Server nearby, right? You don't want to send your print requests to Dublin [the Microsoft service, not the country] before it gets to your printer. Then for security servers and your management servers for managing all your clients, you're definitely going to want them to be on-premises."

Ottaway pointed to a compelling demonstration during the Tuesday morning keynote, of an online automobile shopping service provided by Kelley Blue Book using Silverlight. That service was devised to take advantage of a feature called cloudbursting -- using the cloud where necessary, such as in periods of heavy traffic, but not necessarily as a principal deployment platform.

"The scenario they were talking about on there was, in general, most of the time, their application and business presence runs on Windows Server and SQL Server and Silverlight. But currently, they've had to have a large amount of investment in server hardware, for a peak capacity that occurs very rarely across their year. And what they're essentially using Windows Azure for [instead] is for cloudbursting, so when they do have unexpected peak capacity, they can very quickly spin up a bunch of new instances of their Silverlight application and be able to meet the demand that's occurring.

"The key thing that's really interesting here -- and where Microsoft, again, is differentiated from other cloud providers -- is that Kelley Blue Book also wants to be able to scale down, and bring everything back on-premises when that demand isn't as great. It's a hybrid scenario; they're using off-premises Windows Azure to meet their increased capacity demands. That's a unique advantage of having a Microsoft infrastructure on-premises, as well as Windows Azure."

One reporter asked Ottaway today, is there a way for Azure customers to utilize any kind of capacity planning tool -- to estimate what it might cost to cloudburst under varying traffic circumstances? The long answer from Ottaway -- who seemed to take some inspiration from this question -- was no. Online calculators do exist to help customers set caps on their expenditures, and to turn off service once those caps are exceeded to avoid tremendous billing. Azure can also provide customers with warnings in advance of heavy charges. Even with those stopgaps in place, he acknowledged, it may become cheaper for certain customers to keep their applications on-premises.

Customers will need to consider those possibilities and scenarios for the future, Ottaway said. But for now, the templates and policies and best practices -- the "solution accelerator" for the cloud, to borrow a phrase -- is very much in the works.

PDC 2009 Day 1, post-keynote: What are we learning so far?

Scott M. Fulton, III — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:43:20 -0500

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

What we're seeing evidence of today is a kind of Microsoft restructuring in progress -- a slow shift toward a future revenue model that actually began about two years ago. Rather than alert Dow Jones as to the need for major structural change, the company did what its MVPs have always suggested enterprises do for themselves: Don't panic, plan, and take things slowly.

But this means juggling a lot of balls in the air in mid-transition, the move to a more global network-centric and license-based revenue model. So individuals who were looking for the launch of a boxed product today, something with a jazz theme and a celebrity to accompany it, were probably disappointed -- but that's no evidence of the lack of a strategy. We're seeing a framework shift, and if you look at Microsoft using the old frame, you don't see the whole picture.

That's not to say the shift toward Azure as a services platform isn't a huge gamble that could fail altogether. But with Amazon's announcement last week of a kind of applications development platform on top of its EC2 infrastructure, if Microsoft's gamble goes down in flames, at least it won't go down alone: There's a genuine market here with major players and real innovators, Microsoft among them. Keeping developers "in the family" is critical to keeping the first great services-based applications on the Windows platform that Microsoft already built.

Otherwise, if developers start playing the table and jumping ship elsewhere, Microsoft could end up surrendering the cloud...the way it appears it may be surrendering its market space in mobile.

When Vivek Kundra demonstrated the Azure-based mobile job finder application this morning running on an iPhone, there was an audible "O-o-o-h" from attendees at this morning's keynote; and although Kundra made certain never to invoke the word "iPhone" or refer to the phone, he did say the app was built and deployed in a matter of days -- an indication that Microsoft was thinking about reaching customers where they lived and worked, even if it's outside its platform.

I remember hearing "O-o-o-h" before, a quarter-century ago when Microsoft started creating its very first graphical applications for Macintosh. That gamble paid off.

The job of giving identity to the cloud concept has been left to Bob Muglia, whose annual funny video this morning wasn't too far off the mark from reality: In the video, he acts as a kind of personal, spiritual counselor for "the cloud," who in this case was an idea borrowed from a recent ad campaign for Bob Evans Restaurants. Here "The Cloud" is trying to find a purpose for itself, and Muglia's advice is that the cloud can be anything and everything it wants to be...whatever that is.

Then The Cloud takes Muglia's advice.

Good try there, cloud! Better luck next time.