Apple’s Magic Mouse and now Microsoft’s Touch Mouse

Apple was the company that made the GUI and the use of the mouse popular back in the old days. But ever since, Apple hasn’t been the best designers of the mouse and Apple has been often been criticized for not being able to make ergonomic pointing devices. Apple has tried numerous times to redefine the mouse with different shapes, design, button positions over the years, but the simple two/three button with scroll mouse has nearly been the market favorite including those who swear by Apple devices.

Last year Apple came out with what was another attempt to redesign the mouse. They called it the Magic Mouse. It was a failure at ergonomics and not many people loved it. Today at CES 2011, Microsoft Research presented what it hopes to be Mouse 2.0. It is a mouse without buttons, similar to a laptop trackpad. It does not have scroll or buttons and works based on the touch of the fingers. Thus you can swipe your fingers, perform pinch and zoom gestures etc. on the mouse surface. "One finger lets people manage individual documents or pages by flicking to quickly scroll, pan and tilt, and one thumb lets people move back or forward through a Web browser. Two fingers manage windows, letting people maximise, minimise, snap and restore them. Three fingers let people navigate their whole desktop, showing instant viewer or clearing their desktop."

Apple’s Mighty Mouse	Microsoft’s Touch Mouse

I am of the opinion that both the mice do not have what it takes to be called a revolution. There is already an installed base of users who are used to the two buttons and scroll and will not see any real benefit to move to these new gadgets. These do not have special features that are extremely important to computer users. If you have a laptop, you already have the trackpad do it for you.

Microsoft coming back to ARM

ARM, the processor manufacturer that powers 90% of the mobile phones, digital media and music players, hand-held game consoles, calculators and computer peripherals such as hard drives and routers is a super-power these days and Microsoft realizes this more than ever. That’s the reason why there is talk that Microsoft is going back to release a OS for the ARM processors.

Back in the old days of Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft has a release of Windows that ran on the ARM architecture, but due to pressure from Intel and the growing market of IBM-compatible PCs Microsoft stopped release OS running on ARM. Thus, Microsoft only released Windows for x86 architecture (…and sometimes for Itanium). Microsoft has had WindowsCE running on ARM, but it is not the Windows that is popularized. The latest buzz means that Windows 8, the next version of Windows will be able to run on ARM processors

The reason why this news is interesting is because Windows Mobile 7 was just released and is a different architecture than the desktop Windows. If this means anything, then it shows Microsoft’s idea that a common platform can be moved across different sizes of devices, similar to what Apple has been doing with the iPhoneOS, iPadOS, iPod Touch and OSX. The idea is that the OS can be stripped off services and run on smaller devices. Today as more and more devices became part of our lives, we want to have similar experiences on all these devices… probably through different interfaces, but want the way data is looked at through a common way. Especially as developers, it is frustrating that the same applications cannot be ported easily across processors and platforms. The web is definitely the future of data, but rich client applications are important for the experience and the browser is still not everything that the devices/PCs can do.

Hoping that we can move towards converging platforms… especially easy ways to port client applications across platforms

OpenOffice Moving to Microsoft’s “Ribbon” Interface

Although a host of online word processors have come up, OpenOffice has been the only real competitor to Microsoft’s Office Productivity Suite. It is widely regarded as “one day will beat Microsoft” dream for most open-source evangelists. It supports Microsoft Office formats and provides great compatibility to edit documents and presentations in Linux. Infact, its been one of the goals of OpenOffice to be like Microsoft Office so that people can easily switch to it and get the same features for “free”.

And moving in that direction, in the next release, they are planning to copy the Ribbon interface of Office 2007. The Ribbon Interface has been one of the most talked about UI changes, some people hate it while others love it. In Windows 7, Microsoft has moved some basic applications like Paint, Notepad to the Ribbon interface. May be OpenOffice is just trying to get ready for Windows 7.

 

Try the new interface demo for Impress (Powerpoint alternative) with the new ribbon-like interface.

Google Vs Bing, Squared Vs WolframAlpha. Google’s Got Competition

All of a sudden, Google has got competition that it never has had to face before. Microsoft’s new search “Bing” was launched last month with some fanfare and why not?? It is probably Google biggest search competition till date. If that was not all, today Google released somewhat of a second thought to Wolfram Alpha called Google Squared.

If you have never heard of these new products, hold your horses. You can read about these below and then play with them.

Google Vs Bing

Microsoft has always been on the loosing end of the battle on the web. Be it search or online advertising, Google has ruled the roost. With no competition on the horizon and Google incrementally improving search and ads, I was thinking Google was unbeatable. But Microsoft has other plans. A revamp of the Live search and a new name “Bing”, Microsoft’s search engine does for the first time give some serious competition to Google. Its been over a week now and I have been ‘binging’ (as googling) on Bing as my default search engine and I seem to quite like it. Its easily better than what Live Search was and as accurate as Google, if not better. And Bing’s not just plain-old search. Microsoft has presented Bing as a nice little query engine. Like Flight Search, Shopping Decisions, Fitness, Traffic and much more as you can see from “The Demo Tour” of Bing. Even Apple’s co-Founder Steve Wozniak, who is generally skeptical of Microsoft feels great about Bing!!

  

Now Google’s homepage is really simple, whereas Bing shows a nice little “wallpaper” as the background with some random interesting knowledge hidden in the wallpaper. And that Bing Wallpaper changes everyday with some new knowledge and interesting facts. Go try and find out for yourself!!

Google Squared Vs Wolfram Alpha

While the world is in love with Wikipedia and clicking on all those links in Google search results for finding relevant information about a topic, WolframAlpha is released as a semantic search to gather all that information and show you most common information on a single page. Now as simply as WolframAlpha presents the information, its a real tough computational problem to solve. Google has released Google Squared as an attempt to do a semantic search and present relevant information in a similar fashion. The output of the results do wary greatly and for me WolframAlpha has nearly every time been more relevant. As an example, I searched “India” as the keyword and WolframAlpha presented a real encyclopedia style information with the maps and the stats. Google Squared on the other hand was too generic (like Google Search) and expected me to do more reading/searching on each of the squares (as you can see from the screenshots below):

 

Then while a friend of mine and I were discussing about Nazi Germany and SS, I decided to do a search with “Schutzstaffel” as my keyword and below are the results:

 

I would surely say Google’s got some serious competition. Google’s Web is going to change after all!!

Windows Vista SP2 to be Delayed by a Month

As everyone including Ubuntu’s king Mark Shuttleworth are eagerly waiting for Windows 7,   comes news that Microsoft has delayed the released of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista by a month. Microsoft now states that Vista SP2 will be available only in the second-half of 2009.

Microsoft was supposed to deliver its first release candidate to beta testers in February, but now has plans to release it in March. This Release Candidate (RC) is now being referred to as “escrow build” (also means frozen and only bug fixes will be done). Showstopper bugs are supposed to be only fixed and regression is to be avoided. Microsoft has in the past indicated that SP2 is very much an optional install to the OEMs and it wants OEMs to instead move to Windows 7 directly, when its released.

Windows 7 is running pretty much on schedule and we expect it release by early next-year. The RTM for Windows 7 may be out from the Microsoft stable even by the end of this year.

By the way for those wondering what changes SP2 will be bringing to Windows Vista, following are some of the known changes in SP2:

• Windows Search 4.0 for faster and improved search
• Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack, the latest Bluetooth spec
• Blu-Ray support to write discs directly for explorer
• Windows Connect Now (WCN) for simpler WiFi configuration
• Content Protection in Windows Media Center

Also on the blocks with Vista SP2 is Windows Server 2008 SP2 which was released with the label SP1. Hoping to see another Windows 7 beta before the Vista SP2 then!!??

Microsoft Songsmith is Apple Garageband Competition

Everyone and anyone who has used a Mac off late is sure to have seen Garageband – Apple powerful yet simple audio mixing, editing, recording, instrument tutoring application that’s part of the iLife suite. Its simplicity is simply superb! At CES 2009, Microsoft showed Songsmith as a competitor to Garageband.

While Microsoft has done all kinds of software applications, audio is one place where in my knowledge Microsoft has never stepped in. Songsmith is one application that is going to change that all. Here’s a youtube video showing some of its features in an advertisement for Songsmith (store link).

While Songsmith is relatively new, you will find a few loopholes and it’s audio detection isn’t perfect… But from what I’ve tested, it is quite good for the Garageband!!

Microsoft will be on a publicity drive for Songsmith over the next few months. Watch out for the new Windows musician in your neighborhood… It might just be better than the Apple-pwn’d band!!

Microsoft to bring IE8 through automatic updates

Microsoft will be bringing some respite to web developers, but some anger and controversy from Google, Apple and Mozilla Foundation by releasing Internet   Explorer 8 through automatic updates.  IE8 has been under development for quite sometime now and Microsoft have released some betas which have shown promising behavior towards web standards.

The reason why I say some respite to web developers because IE8 has been showing healthy improvement in web standards compliance compared to earlier version of IE. Automatic updates allows Microsoft to put important and critical updates to PCs, if users have opted to turn them on. This would mean that lots of Windows computers will be updated to IE8 and web developers will be able to avoid some of the quirks that were until now required for Internet Explorer.

But just like Google, Apple and Mozilla were angry during the previous automatic update of Internet Explorer 7, this time also there will be some noise from these companies. Google now has Chrome in the market and will be more fiercely revolting to this update from Microsoft. But with all the other browsers claiming to be so much better than Internet explorer, they still hold less than 30% of the browser market. Thus, if we look at the reality of the internet, developers still have to majorly develop web applications for Internet Explorer and any improvement in Internet Explorer is surely great news for everyone.

Indian Sues Google, Yahoo & Microsoft For Sex-Selection Ads

While India is celebrating its 61st Independence Day today, among other problems, Gender Inequality and Gender Imbalance is a major problem for the future of  India. And somewhere between the lines of the so-called non-intrusive ads that you see on web pages, techniques for sex-selection for an unborn child is being promoted. Or so thinks Sabu Mathew George, the petitioner in a case filed in Supreme Court of India against web advertising and search companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Gender Imbalance is a major problem that faces India in the next few decades. Although the Indian society at large is still unaware of the problem, from the statistics and ground work that I’ve seen while working with Men Against Violence & Abuse, the problem is a severe one and could become adverse in the coming decades. Gender Imbalance is a man-made phenomenon in India where an unborn child’s sex is determined before birth and if the child is a female, the pregnancy is aborted. It is this ruthless murder of unborn females that in some states the sex ratio for males to females is less than 0.7

But that is not what we are here to talk. Sabu Mathew George has filed a petition in the Supreme Court of India that certain ads displayed on search results and web advertise the process of sex-selection. The Supreme Court has sent notices in this regard to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in this regard and would like to hear their side of the story. The Indian law’s on Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act. states that advertisement of products and techniques to aid in the selection of an unborn child's sex is an offense. Thus, advertisement of such products are not shown in Print-media,  TV and Radio ads.

India’s Health Ministry and Ministry of Communications & IT have also been made respondents in the case because they have been non-responsive in stopping such ads. It should be interesting to see how these tech companies respond. If you look at it from a technical standpoint, such ads could have been easily spotted and not shown by these companies. There is already a procedure by which the content in ads is checked by these companies and can prevent such ads to be shown. Even the search results are moderated according to local laws and standards and it isn’t uncommon that the Chinese government have successfully changed the behavior of these companies.

May be these tech companies haven’t realized the magnitude of the problem or just ignored the law. But we are surely going to find out, if the Supreme Court holds them liable for such instances. Or can web companies just say that they are mediators and not content owners and get away.

Google had earlier stated in its Public Policy Blog that, “Think about the telephone system. We don't hold the telephone company liable when two callers use the phone lines to plan a crime. For the same reasons, it's a fundamental principle of the Internet that you don't blame the neutral intermediaries for the actions of their customers. Rather, the standard recognized worldwide is that Internet intermediaries are responsible to take action when they are put on notice of unlawful content through proper legal channels.”

Now that’s as awful analogy!! Telephone system is a one-to-one or conference system, where you don’t have your comments recorded for the entire world to look at. Neither can it be technically feasible nor morally acceptable to hear every call being made. Whereas content on the Internet, that is displayed as search results can very well be observed and banned, like has been done in China. In India, you have laws to stop it in other forms of media, then why should the Internet be any different?? There are obvious “report abuse” links to results and web displayed content. But the utter slowness in the response of such services is another reason why the system needs to be fixed on both the government side, tech-side and the users-side.

Blog About Windows Vista to Win Vista

Do you have a blog that primarily focuses on Windows Vista?? Do you write tips and tricks to improve Vista?? Do you love Vista and talk about its feature and usefulness on your blog?? Then here is an opportunity for you to win some prizes for your blog. WinVistaClub.com, in association with Windows Vista Magazine, is organizing a contest to recognize some of the best Windows Vista Blogs and Websites.

The Winner of the WinVistaClub Best Windows Vista Blog Contest 2008 will also get a Windows Vista Ultimate 32/64 bit DVD Box Pack, a Free 1 year license of ESET Smart Security Suite, a License of Magic Utilities, a License of MagicTweak, a one year subscription to the Windows Vista Magazine and a link for 3 months on the WinVistaClub HomePage.

You can find all the information about the contest here. I really haven’t come across many places on the blogosphere where people have talked good about Windows Vista. Obviously there are blogs that mention some tips and others from Vista developers who talk about new features and improvements, but there aren’t many good blogs that continuously blog about Vista. With all the rant about Vista over the interweb, that contest must be an interesting little idea to promote Vista.

Microsoft’s New Clubhouse and Windows Live

Microsoft has just launched a revamped website for Windows Live in hopes to make navigation simpler and easier access to all its services. Along with the revamped Windows Live website, Microsoft has also launched a new community website called Windows Live Clubhouse, a community for the most avid users of Windows Live products.

Windows Live Clubhouse is a place where users can share their experience of using Windows Live products. Users also share the best tricks and tips for using the Windows Live products and provide help in using Windows Live products. Currently Live Clubhouse is an invite-only service which Microsoft plans to open for all Windows Live users by the end of this year, if the first set of users are satisfied.

Microsoft off-late has been trying to improve its web services and has hopes that Windows Live will help catch up with Google. In the wake of Google’s success, Microsoft has been trying different things to compete. With the new Wave 3 of Live Services under development and testing, Microsoft is hoping to turn a new leaf in web services market... Surely the Yahoo fiasco has pumped up Microsoft to build better web services.

DirectX 11 Coming This Month

Whatever ATI thought as an advantage, when shipping DirectX 10.1 in 48xx generation of graphic cards will be short-lived. Microsoft will be announcing DirectX 11 in about 2 weeks at Gamefest 2008. The Gamefest conference will be held on 22nd-23rd of July, 2008 in Seattle where Microsoft plans to officially launch DirectX 11.

DirectX 11 has lots of new features and is a much more important update to DirectX than 10.1. NVidia has announced that it will skip DirectX 10.1 and will directly ship its next generation with DirectX 11 support. DirectX 11 brings Shader Model 5.0 (SM5), which has been closely developed with GPU manufacturers. NVidia has been having the SM5 profile in the Nvidia SDK for sometime now, but didn’t have any new functionality. Probably the Microsoft announcement is what Nvidia has been waiting for. Also another eagerly awaited feature in DirectX 11 is Tessellation/Displacement, which means that converting displacement map to object mesh is lot more faster and less intensive. There are also hopes that something for general purpose GPU computing (GPGPU) may be added in the DirectX11 API, but nothing is yet known. Multithreading Rendering and Compute Shaders are definitely there in the DirectX 11 API.

DirectX11 should also be a major programming step for game developers because DirectX 11 will be the base for the next-generation XBox console that Microsoft promised to release sometime next year. A lot research has been put into DirectX 11 and next-gen XBox already, and we can expect some release date for Microsoft’s next-gen console during Gamefest 2008.

Windows Beats Linux/OSX at Handwriting

Lately I’ve been trying to code an application which requires some form of natural handwriting recognition. Natural Handwriting is basically the way you write on your Tablet/Pocket PC/Palm/Mobile, either using a stylus on your touch-screen or on the desktop using mouse. And after looking at different options available for handwriting recognition, Windows beats every other operating system including Linux and Mac OSX hands down!!

For the last month or so I’ve tried every possible handwriting recognition software and API out there. Paid, free and open-source API or Programs for Windows, Linux and OSX. Out of all the ones I tried, only one seemed to be perfectly working and easy to develop upon and its from Microsoft. Microsoft has this ultra-amazing API called InkAnalysis, but obviously and sadly for me, works only on Windows. And sad because the application for which I’m developing this handwriting recognition module is a popular open-source kids software and mainly targeted towards Linux distros.

InkAnalysis is a powerful API that performs 2 complementary activities of handwriting recognition and layout classification. InkAnalysis API has very good Interfaces for detecting the layout of any  given document and based on the understanding of the layout it performs handwriting recognition. Even without training it amazingly detects a wide variety of handwriting that even I had a hard time reading as a professor when checking my students’ answer sheets. The API was earlier only available as part of the Windows Vista SDK, but Microsoft has also released the API through the Tablet PC Platform SDK. This means applications that use InkAnalysis API can be run on not only Windows Vista but also Windows XP SP2, SP3 and the future... And the best showcase of the accuracy and strength of the API is through the built-in Windows Vista app called Tablet PC Input (check below screenshot)

 

During the trials of all the different APIs and programs, I had high expectations of finding something from Apple that “just works”. With the iPhone they seemed to me like the “touch” geniuses and handwriting would definitely be in touch category. But alas! OSX InkWell isn’t good enough. It makes too many mistakes and correcting them doesn’t work very well. Training or no training it had hard time recognizing natural cursive handwriting. Even the API was pretty complex to use and the didn’t have enough explanation.

Finally I came back to where I started... Looking for a API that would work with Linux, preferably was open-source licensed. I tried a few and none were close to useable. HRE from Sun was archiac and complex, Tomoe is for Japanese and Chinese script only, LipiTK from HP Labs doesn’t work like advertised and support won’t reply back to emails. Google’s revived Tesseract is only a OCR-engine, good for typed text and not handwriting. OCRopus is also work-in-progress and not working at the moment. With all my hopes down on the project, I finally reached CellWriter. CellWriter seems to be a good working handwriting recognition, but doesn’t work as modestly as InkWell or perfectly as InkAnalysis. CellWriter uses a cell-based, single-character recognizer. It requires training without which it can’t understand much, but once trained is pretty accurate at character recognition. But I tried applying it to multiple cells and it doesn’t quite work. May be a good character recognizer, but not handwriting recognition.

I thus concluded Microsoft is way ahead of the competition on handwriting recognition. Handwritten input system is useful for a lot of people and developers from the open-source community have yet to realize this fact. After all the Vista rant is popular on the web, someone should have seen its good side!!

Office 2007 to Support ODF in SP2

According to News.com, Microsoft will be supporting ODF (Open Document Format) in Office 2007 through Service Pack 2 (SP2). Office 2007 SP2 is expected to be released in Q1 2009 and will be adding support for saving and opening ODF files, just like other competing office suites like OpenOffice has been doing.

Microsoft recently had been criticized widely for the ISO standardization of its OOXML format (docx, pptx...etc). The entire community of open-source document suites was against the standardization of OOXML. Thus, this announcement comes as a surprise after the recent tussle with the ODF community. Along with ODF, Microsoft will be increasing compatibility and support for Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS).

Tom Robertson, general manager of Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft, said:

"We have heard from customers and governments that they would like to see us do this. Now is the time to announce this support. It's also important to announce this now because we want to get involved in the maintenance of ODF. We have ongoing dialogue with the EC, so we will absolutely have a discussion with them about these steps [supporting ODF] and get whatever feedback they may have on it".

Microsoft also has plans to join the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, or OASIS, which is the primary body for the standardization and improvement of the ODF format. How Microsoft is going to affect the future of document standards is really an important question that everyone needs to be asking? We will really have to see how Microsoft is welcomed by others in the community after the recent clash between the two formats!

Netbeans 6.1 Vs Visual Studio 2008

Its been a while that Netbeans 6.1 has been released and I thought it would be a good time to update my previous comparison between Visual Studio 2008 and NetBeans 6.0. Netbeans 6.0 added major features and NetBeans 6.1 comparatively is a minor upgrade, but nonetheless added lots of new improvements. Visual Studio 2008 was also in beta at that time. In light of new improvements and changes, I thought it'd be good to have an updated comparison between the two IDEs.

We need to understand that each IDE has something better and makes the developer more productive. Also, please keep in mind that I'm not comparing .NET and Java here, but only 2 IDEs, so we discuss features that can be applied to both languages/platforms.

Feature	Netbeans 6.1	Visual Studio 2008	Comments
Supported Languages	C/C++, Java, Ruby, Php, Javascript, HTML/CSS, JSP, JavaFX, XSL, WSDL, UML, Groovy, Scala, Prolog, Tcl	C/C++, C#, VB.net, XAML, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, LINQ (Language INtegrated Query), ASP.net, XML/XSLT.	Both Visual Studio and Netbeans are extensible and can support new programming languages. VS2008 uses languages services through which VS supports languages like Ruby, Python and F#. These are not out-of-the-box though and are difficult to add to the IDE. You even have to pay some bucks to get those languages integrated with VS and different vendors sell configured IDEs for those languages. Netbeans on the other hand has an excellent plugin system and finding and installing new language support is simple and easy. The plugin manager shows available plugins that support the new languages and anyone can create/install these new plugins free of cost.
Supported OS/Platforms	Windows, Linux, Unix, Solaris (SPARC, x86/x64), Mac OSX (Intel, PowerPC)	Windows and different versions of Windows	Netbeans 6.1 can be installed and run on a host of different platforms. It's open-source and it's Java. So, it generally means it can run anywhere with the JRE installed. VS2008 on the other hand is only targeted towards the windows developer.
Code Completion	Excellent code completion for a host of different languages and understands lot more language docs.	Fast code completion, but less options at a time. Need to use arrow keys.	Visual Studio 2008 has a snappier code completion compared to Netbeans 6.1. Code completion and hints speed has improved in 6.1, over previous versions, but still slower than VS2008. VS2008 requires using the arrows to scroll through different parameters of methods while Netbeans shows all at one go. Thus, learning through Netbeans is better for newer programmers, who want to find the best method.
Source Code Editor	Editing code is simple and easy. Provides different events when you right-click on the component and code can be written for that specific event.	Editing is simple and easy. Switching between the designer and code screen is double-clicking the control	Source code editing is equally good in both. Netbeans 6.1 has a better feature where it can highlight a variable that used at different places. So you can easily identify the lines at which the variables are used when you are writing code. Refactoring code is slightly better in Netbeans and offers a lot more options compared to VS2008. Moving code is slightly better in Netbeans 6.1 than VS2008. Visual Studio's code editing is lot more integrated across different types of projects. Netbeans still seems to be separate IDE for Java EE and Java SE or Java ME development. Like #region works on all projects for code folding, but Netbeans doesn't have such a common code folding (i.e. <editor-fold> doesn't work in all projects).  Netbeans 6.1 has an excellent JavaScript Editor which is on par with VS2008's Intellisense JScript & AJAX Editor. The JavaScript docs integration in Netbeans 6.1 is better and code hints are better in Netbeans 6.1. Check this video to see the strength of the new JaavScript editor in Netbeans 6.1.
GUI and RAD Tools	Netbeans Matisse, JSF Components, Database Application, Beans Binding, Excellent UML design tools, Mobile Designer, BPEL designer are some RAD tools not found in VS2008. Java ME GUI development is excellent. Excellent device management in Netbeans 6.1. SVG support helps create great looking scalable mobile applications. Useful common components from Netbeans for MIDP.	WinForms, ASP Form designer are great. XAML visual designer, Database schema managers, VB-XML bindings, Vista UAC manager are some of the enhancements to the VS2008's RAD/GUI tools.	Both IDEs are probably the best GUI builders and RAD tools. VS2008 Team System Database Edition has excellent database-code integration tools. LINQ code generators are another excellent feature in VS, not found in Netbeans. Netbeans plans to add similar features in Netbeans 6.5 and it makes more sense to add these features, since MySQL is now part of Sun Microsystems. Visual Studio's VB designer was excellent and probably helped VB reach great popularity. Today Microsoft expects same with XAML designer which can import designs made in Microsoft Blend. Winforms and ASP forms are great as always, may be sometimes better than Netbeans. You can create the Ribbon UI of Office 2007 very easily using VS2008. Netbeans until version 4 not much of a RAD tool, but today is probably the best RAD Java IDE out-of-the-box. JSF web app designer is great, maybe not be better than ASP forms, but its not behind as more JSF components are added. Swing Application Framework and Database applications are awesome and you can build amazing dB driven apps in minutes. Check out the video and you'll realize how?? Netbeans 6.1 features an even better Mobile Application Designer for JavaME (J2ME), which can design screens and play with SVG menus. Haven't seen a simpler mobile app designer ever, with nice flow designer. RAD tools are something netBeans 6.1 scores higher than most other IDE
Compiler /Loader / Debugger	Newer Lexer makes faster runtime compilation, JavaScript debugger with Phobos support and jMaki. GWT is also supported.	Parallel compilation on multicore systems, Standard Template Library (STL) for C++ devs to use .net framework, Web Services hosting for WCF-based apps. Debugging AJAX scripts and AJAX components within ASP.net pages are excellent.	Multicore compilation in VS2008 does improve performance by a good 25-30% over previous versions on C# apps. I wonder how much of multi-processors or multicore, the java compiler uses. Really couldn't compare compiler benchmarks since they are different languages. Visual Studio 2008 brings integrates web services hosting, which earlier had to be done separately by the users. netBeans has tomcat 6 and glassfish v2 integrated, so VS2008 comes on par with netBeans 6.1. Netbeans 6.1 still takes about 30sec to start whereas VS2008 starts in 20sec. But for Netbeans it really depends on how many modules you've installed. I've seen Netbeans load within 20s with only the basic modules installed.
Profiling	NetBeans 6.1 has a profiler integrated and a really good one too.	VS2008 improves load testing capabilities by providing a multiple machine graph view that brings together the test results, performance, and health of all the machines under test.	A new area in VS2008 is the ability to drive system performance tuning and diagnostics through the VS test tools. This enables developers to run profiling during tests. Profiler is great addition to Netbeans. While coding you can experiment and choose the best algorithms/implementations by checking memory, processes through the profiler. A load analyzer like Mercury's LoadRunner is a highly specialized 3rd-party tool, but people who want simple stuff should really be happy with the Netbeans profiler.
Designing / UML	UML, BPEL, Flow Designers for Mobile apps and web apps.	Not much Designing tools, but Visual Studio 2008 Team System does have some improvements. Team System does have nice code tracking features.	Netbeans scores pretty high on this one. Although you can always use 3rd-party software, but its great to have it in the IDE itself. VS2008 is not much of a software designers tool, although the Visual Studio Team System is a great improvement. IBM's Rational is great, but then for the money-saver there's Netbeans UML tools. Code comparison and tracking isn't available in Netbeans. VS 2008's Code Metrics does an excellent job at analyzing code and reporting about code. Excellent stats can be found through Code Metrics
Testing/Maintenance & Collaboration	CVS, Subversion and Mercurial are integrated in Netbeans 6.1.	Unit Testing tools have slightly improved, Source Control System is added to Team System	Unit Testing is excellent in Netbeans compared to VS2008. Ant tools are useful, but VS2008 creates scripts in Team System that can do nearly similar things. CVS, Subversion and Mercurial make Collaboration Tools in Netbeans better than VS2008. Clearcase is also available as a plugin for Netbeans.
Installation Size & Price	Netbeans 6.1 has increased in size, but is very small compared to VS2008. Netbeans 6.1 available with different bundles. Netbeans can be downloaded free online or you can request a free DVD to be shipped.	Visual Studio installation size is huge and so is the size for the setup program. It is also costly. But developers can try Express Editions free of cost to get the basic IDE.	Not much here to say, but VS2008 has .Net Framework 3.5 integrated with it and is a requirement. Also SilverLight CLR is added. A lot of other required libraries for WPF and WCF, which makes it larger in size. After MySQL buy, we also have Netbeans 6.1 bundle available with MySQL. Netbeans 6.1 bundles are also available with JDK 6.
Misc Specialities	Visual Studio 2008 has a something called "Visual Studio 2008 Shell". Its just like the Netbeans RCP or Eclipse platform. It allows developers to create their own IDEs based on the platform and we know how successful eclipse has been to do that. Read here for the discussion Netbeans 6.1 also has Ruby on Rails Template for making quick blogs. Netbeans 6.1 has derby as an integrated database (since JDK 6 provides derby out-of-the-box). It means you can have databases embedded within your application and no requirement for an external database server like SQL Server or MySQL. Netbeans 6.1 is ideally suited for creating Web services. Axis2 is supported for Web Services in Netbeans 6.1. Netbeans also allows faster creation of apps that make use of web services. Developers can simply drag and drop operations under those services into a POJO, Servlet, JSP or RESTful web service and the IDE will generate all the plumbing code to access those services. VS 2008 does not include specific tools for editing WCF's XML configuration files. After Microsoft Blend import, web designs cannot be exported back to Blend.

The performance improvement in Netbeans 6.1 is a welcome change. Performance has improved as much as 40% in Netbeans 6.1 compared to Netbeans 6.0. Visual Studio on the other hand has slowed down over the years starting from VS.NET.

Both the IDEs still need to improve a lot more on RIA development with the focus slowly shifting towards a more desktop looking web. Expression Blend is moving pretty good for Microsoft and is an excellent tool for XAML/Silverlight designing. On the other hand, Netbeans isn't doing enough to support JavaFX Script yet. With all the talk about JavaFX at JavaOne 2008, we hope to see JavaFX come better in Netbeans 7!!

Microsoft's Seven Deadly Sins in Windows

I've seen a lot of Deadly Sins post from around the blogosphere and I've also seen the rants on Windows Vista. Both the stories somehow clicked and formed a connection in my head. There are a lot of other software/company that commits the sins, but we already have the eternal bash toy called Windows/Microsoft. So I take my cue at Windows and convey my anger on the BSOD, I just saw on my desktop!!

Introduction

For those who don't know much about "sin", its an act/feeling which is understood to degrade the human soul and distances oneself for serenity. Every culture/religion has a few norms and refer to these sins slightly differently. Thus, every developer/user may realize my views either as sin or as virtue. The following sins do not follow any specific order:

Lust (Latin: Luxuria; Hindu: Kaam)

Lust is when we work a lot to improve superficiality of software and that's good enough to lure a lot of people. Irrespective of how much hardware that lust requires, we are drawn towards good looks. Microsoft did just that and Windows Vista had DirectX 9 hardware as a requirement to view Aero. It got a lot of criticism for increased hardware requirement and more usage of RAM. In fact, Microsoft has to fight "Windows Vista Capable" and "Windows Vista Premium Ready" at the courts and even within its own walls!! All due to lust!!

Envy (Latin: Invadia; Hindu: Matsar ==> Jealousy)

If you know how Microsoft came up with the GUI, then probably you'll know something about it being related to Apple. When Bill Gates and friends, they saw the Mac's GUI, they got envious and jealous that the Mac looked better than Windows. It had better usability, better window management, better shortcuts... It was so good, MS copied and even named the damn things Windows 2.0... Windows 1.0 sucked at doing windowing and Microsoft only learned the game, when they really worked out their own ideas in Windows 3.0. They gave away the envy and got back to work!!

Wrath (Latin: Ira Hindu: Krodh)

Microsoft got very angry when it saw another company taking over the web. The other company was called Netscape and its browser was becoming more popular than Internet Explorer (IE). Netscape regularly criticized IE for its issues and Microsoft couldn't bear that it was being bullied by the underdog. Microsoft showered its wrath on the browsers, and bundled IE with Windows 95 OSR. The browser got stuck so much with Windows that Microsoft had a few legal lawsuits and Netscape dies with time. Even if someone thinks Microsoft wasn't to be blamed for Netscape's death, a sticker of a monopolist got stuck on Microsoft only because it got angry in the browsers war!! Now its always at a risk of trying to bundle something into the system

Greed (Latin: Avaritia Hindu: Lobh)

Microsoft could have easily sold Windows 2000 with some simple basic changes for home users. But it got greedy and continued to milk the 9x core. And they released something known as Windows Me. It was called by many other ugly names, but probably you can associated many other cardinal sins to this release.Primary it was a marketing reason why this version of Windows was released and its been a black spot in Microsoft's reputation forever. Greed never pays off!!

Sloth (Latin: Acedia Hindu: Moh ==> Attachment)

Microsoft's sloth with Windows XP was so much that it believed it has done the best it could and didn't want to do anymore than what is required. Thus, Microsoft was completely lost about what to do in next release. Even if they thought, they were thinking too many things. Even sending someone to the moon would have been cheaper than building Windows Vista that came after 5 yrs of XP. Sloth brought the downfall and people are so much attached to XP that Vista doesn't mean much to consumers.

Pride (Latin: Superbia)

With Windows XP's success of selling lots of copies quickly, Microsoft got proud of its success. Celebrating for too long and basking in the proud glory of Windows XP proved costly to the development of Vista.

Gluttony (Latin: gula)

Microsoft is currently working on Windows Seven (also Windows 7 or se7en). Gluttony is one sin I believe Microsoft could be doing with this version. Gluttony is the act of over-indulgence. Microsoft already released too many versions of Windows Vista. Windows 7 could just show the gluttony with Microsoft releasing even more versions. The "componentized" architecture could just be for selling different components of the OS at different prices. Although Microsoft promises Windows 7 to be leaner and consume less resources, it could very well be the basic version. Microsoft could be gluttonous by selling different versions at different times as well... Still there is time before Windows 7 will have a feature freeze and then we will really come to know what's inside Windows 7.

Conclusion

With this post I wanted to highlight some of the mistakes Microsoft has made with earlier versions of Windows. Hopefully none of these cardinal sins are repeated in Windows 7 or else the other alternative OS are really catching up and Windows may not have enough time to get back!!

I believe that its stupid to fanatically claim something to be the truth... So I may have completely misunderstood these sins or versions of Windows. But I just now remembered that the opposite of sin is faith, not virtue!!

Bill Gates Creates Hype For Windows 7

Not that I'm against Windows or Bill Gates, but then the recent speech from Bill Gates really feels more like marketing than anything else. Bill Gates has been recently traveling to different countries around the world, and is trying to make governments to use Windows. Bill Gates has also been offering software as a medium for change in society to developing countries for free.

At the Windows Digital Lifestyle Consortium in Tokyo last week, Gates talked a few times about Windows 7. Gates said that Microsoft will be shipping Windows 7 sometime in 2010 and highlighted the fact that it will use less power and have lesser memory requirement. Now both these claims are not very believable looking at Microsoft's track record. Vista really blew it off with the system requirements and we all know how much minimum RAM and graphics are required for the promised Windows Vista.

Windows 7 is supposed to be based on Windows Vista and the current builds of Windows 7 don't seem to be much different than Windows Vista. How Microsoft plans to make Windows 7 more energy efficient wasn't mentioned by Gates. He also promised that Microsoft will be shipping a new version of Windows every 3 years. Wasn't it Bill Gates who said IE would ship every 9-12 months... IE8 hasn't been released, even though IE7 was released way back in Nov 2006.

So, it seems Bill Gates is on a marketing spree for Windows these days. Philanthropy is something the guy's really good at, marketing should be left to someone else...

Download Windows XP SP3 Next Week

Actually you can download XP SP3 today with some leaks online. Searching on a Bittorrent site, will show that Windows XP SP3 5503 is available for download  and this is the build which seems to be the RTM for Service Pack 3 for XP.

After Vista SP1's release, all the people who don't want to leave XP were eagerly waiting for XP SP3. There were a few RC (Release Candidate) released before this one and hence everyone was anticipating a final release (RTM) sometime soon. Microsoft hasn't confirmed that the SP3 build 5503 is the RTM one and maintains the fact that it will be released in the first half of 2008.

And yes, it is the first half of 2008. Just like Vista SP1, this version could well be the RTM. During Vista SP1, Microsoft had released a build about 2 weeks old and given it to a lot of people. After testing when this build (specifically 1840 for Vista), it seemed to be stable enough and Microsoft called this the RTM build. Same could be the thing for XP SP3 and 5503 can be the RTM build, but don't take my word for it... Try it yourself and check back when the actual RTM is out!!

Flash Not Good Enough For Steve Jobs, But Windows Mobile Wants It

When Steve Jobs said that Flash wasn't good enough for the iPhone, it was kind of odd. Odd because a lot of devices from other handset manufacturer including Nokia, Sony Ericsson are easily able to display Flash using FlashLite. But here we are, Steve Jobs saying the iPhone needs a better, "special" version of Flash, just like YouTube site for iPhone.

Soon after that, I was speculating that Apple was going to use Silverlight on the iPhone and Microsoft was pitching a good deal to Apple. But today Microsoft's Windows Mobile team has a surprise for us!! Microsoft has licensed the latest version of Flashlite v3 from Adobe to be installed on handsets with Windows Mobile. The most current version of Flash Lite, which is developed on Adobe Flash CS3, can' display pages built using Flash 9, but it works with sites created using older versions of Flash.

The announcement comes as a surprise because Microsoft has been building its own version of a Flash competitor called Silverlight. Silverlight is under heavy development for the mobile devices, but Microsoft still managed to win Nokia to install Silverlight on its devices. I'm not sure how Nokia would be feeling with this development and I guess they must be thinking some delay in the shipping of a Silverlight for Mobiles.

Either ways, how can be Flashlite good enough for Windows Mobile when it isn't good enough for iPhone?? I guess Steve Jobs always needs special treatment!!

Win A Zune, Xbox 360 or Home Server For Evaluating Products

Microsoft has just released a program called Evalu'08, where you can evaluate Microsoft Server products and win a server for your home. All you need to do is download and evaluate any of the 3 products which Microsoft launched recently. Download a free trial of any of the launch products or take a virtual lab and be entered for a chance to win great prizes.

The program is educational in some sense if you consider marketing speak to be informative. You can attend the virtual labs for a host of products and win the prizes. Alas! the rules state that its open only to legal residents of the 50 U.S. (includes D.C.) 18+ employed in an IT or software development role.

The prizes for the lucky draw is either a Zune, if you evaluate 1 product; an Xbox360 if you evaluate 2 products or Windows Home Server if you evaluate 3 products. The contest page requires you to have Silverlight installed and you need a live ID to signin.

Microsoft's Next-Gen OS Research is Open-Source Now

Microsoft has been researching on operating systems for sometime now and manufacturers the most popular operating system in the form of Windows. But most of the research that goes into Windows is unknown to the rest of the world. Most people bash Microsoft of being very secretive and people from the open-source world often criticize Microsoft for this. But today Microsoft has done what many people believe is impossible. Microsoft has released their operating system research to be used in future as an open-source project. And the project is called Singularity.

The name Singularity does sound like some path-breaking theory in physics. In the world of operating systems, Microsoft's Singularity is sort of path-breaking. Microsoft announced Singularity about 2 years back and had started thinking about it 3 years before the announcement. After 5 years of research, today Microsoft released Singularity with source-code to codeplex, which is Microsoft's open-source community repository.

Singularity in theory looks to be very promising. It uses a microkernel architecture, which means the kernel is really very small and contains only very few services/managers. There was much long debate between Minix Vs Linux on microkernel Vs monolithic kernel without result. I side with Minix and this with PCs getting faster we need more stability than performance. But I guess that is part of a different discussion altogether. The following image shows the architecture of Singularity OS.

 

I have just finished downloading the Singularity RDK (Research Development Kit) from here, and will be installing it on Virtual PC.