The fifth horseman never gets invited to the good parties Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

This article was originally posted on Google+.

Yesterday +MG Siegler argued on +TechCrunch that Samsung is the fifth horseman of technology, filling in for the ailing Microsoft, when the four horsemen: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google go riding.

I have to disagree with the underlying assumptions. We're at yet another tipping point in technology. A few years ago we moved from the beige box to the black rectangle, but the black rectangle won't be with us for as long as the beige box.

That black rectangle, the ubiquitous form factor of today's smart phone, is a transition device and it's going to disappear quickly as the speed of technological change is accelerating rapidly. Of the four horsemen only Google seems to be working on alternatives with +Project Glass. It's possible the others, including Samsung, have working hardware, but the successor to today's smart phone is going to be all about context and user interaction.

I've stood up in front of audiences before and argued that our smart phones have our lives on them, the next generation of mobile technology is going to stand between us and our lives and add context. It's hard to do that without a lot of information about the user.

It's also going to be a big leap for the horsemen to make. Despite getting into hardware recently Amazon is about selling content, Facebook has never done hardware and I don't think have this sort of paradigm shift in their corporate bones, Apple has, but without Steve Jobs I don't think they'll have the guts to kill the iPhone and innovate. Samsung, the fifth horsemen that never gets invited to the good parties, is a box shifter. They know hardware, but they don't know design, and they don't know anything about their end users. Their customers are other companies, like Amazon, not you and me, the eventual consumers.

So out of all of them Google  seems to be the only one positioned to move forward, and it'll be a big leap for them even so. The developer release of +Project Glass later this year is going to be crucial. If I had the money to lose making a wager, I'd wager that it'll be some startup you or I haven't heard of yet that makes the leap to the next ubiquitous form factor.

Either way, it's going to be an interesting year...

The (lost?) Android Opportunity Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

At the time Apple initially released the native SDK for the iPhone some people argued that Objective-C was a poor choice as a development language. I'd now argue that either they picked the right language, or more probably (at least within reason) the platform was good enough, attractive enough to developers, that the language they chose didn't matter all that much. Developers were willing to spend the time learning Objective-C just so they could write code for the iPhone.

I wasn't a long time Mac developer when the iPhone appeared. I learned Objective-C because I wanted to develop for the iPhone, not because it was widespread, or particular popular.

What's the difference between a Cocoa developer and a large pizza? A large pizza can still feed a family of four. - Mike Lee

Although its popularity is now on the rise; the language jumped 22 places in the TIOBE index in the last year, entering the top 20 "most popular" languages for the first time.


The popularity of Objective-C as measured by its TIOBE index. Climbing from 40th position in the rankings in 2002 to 19th position this month, with almost all of that growth in popularity being since the release of the iPhone.
After learning the language I found I actually quite liked it, it was powerful, and because it allows dynamic typing and binding it was flexible. Something I'd grown used to after years of using loosely-typed languages to get things done.

The development environment Apple provide, Xcode and Interface Builder, is the best I've come across. Perhaps not the most powerful, but they're the easiest to use, and because of the late object binding that Objective-C allows the heavy integration of Interface Builder into the development process hugely simplifies creating user interfaces. It also removes large chunks of glue code that, in other languages, you'd have to sit down and write yourself.

However while I downloaded the Android SDK from Google, I've done little with it. Despite the fact that Google picked Java as their development language for Android, a language I already knew fairly well. I even had a couple of ideas for the first Android Developer Challenge, and a couple of people were interested in working on them with me, but in the end I didn't bother.

The Android platform isn't that exciting, and until recently I couldn't pin down why. John Gruber writes in the Daring Fireball about the Android Opportunity complaining that the Android state-of-the-art is even further behind the iPhone than when the G1 was announced back in 2008.

The reason I wanted to develop for the iPhone was that is was so much better than the competition. Regretfully the Android handsets that the manufacturers have produced so far just, well, aren't.

Sky Map for Android Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

So I've been much remiss in not mentioning the official release of John Taylor's Sky Map. Yet another of those funky Google products that started off as someone's 20% project and end up with an official Google launch and a less interesting name. What is it with Google and dull product names?


Kevin Serafini introducing Google Sky Map
John's new SkyMap application for Android does stuff that you're not going to get your iPhone to do because of hardware, rather than software, limitations. It makes use of the phone's GPS, accelerometer, and compass to create a window in the sky that moves with your hand.


John Taylor's demo at Google's Searchology Event
John and I actually had a discussion way back when about using the iPhone's GPS to simulate the G1's compass. The iPhone knows your position, so if you walk for a small distance in the direction you're facing, it should be to able to work that out as well...

Of course the question we couldn't resolve was "how far" in the direction you're facing you'd have to go, and in the end we figured it probably wouldn't work all that well. Just one of the reasons I'm looking forward to WWDC, which for once I'm actually going to be at, and the possibility of getting my hands on some new iPhone hardware.


Searching for the Moon
Well done John, very cool. Now, how do I get my hands on a G1 again?

New for the iPhone, App Engine Manager Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Following on from my previous iPhone applications, Cloud Status and AWS Calc, and continuing with the Cloud Computing theme. I'd like to announce the release of my next iPhone application onto the App Store.


App Engine Manager for the iPhone 3G and iPod touch.
Want to manage your Google App Engine applications from your iPhone? There's an app for that...

The App Engine Manger application allows you to to monitor the status of Google App Engine in real time, estimate your monthly costs based on your current usage levels, then lets you estimate how much a sudden usage spike could cost.

It also allows you to look at the performance of each of your applications individually and examine requests per second, upload and download bandwidth and CPU.

The dark side of the cloud Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

More than ever these days I'm living in the cloud. Google has my mail, Apple has my calendar, del.icio.us has my bookmarks, Flickr has my photographs, and Amazon S3 has my files.

Day-to-day I rely on a lot of cloud infrastructure, and while I'm old enough to remember having to wade though card catalogues, and still know five fun things to do with microfiche, I no longer go to the library when I need a journal article. NASA's ADS and Cornell's pre-print archive provide instant semantically tagged access to both the historic and latest literature. I haven't physically set foot in a library in several years now.

I've moved away from my old arrangement, where I had a desktop machine in the office, and then a laptop for traveling. My main machine is now one of the new 13-inch Aluminium Macbooks, when I'm in the office I hook this up to one of Apple's new LED displays; off of which hangs several 500GB disks for backup and scratch space, a full sized keyboard, and a mouse. So whether I'm on a plane, a train, or siting in my office, everything is just the same. The screen gets a bit bigger or smaller, and my desktop background changes, but that's about it.

That said when I'm travelling long haul, rather than lugging my Macbook around, I've even started to leave that behind. I'm using my Dell mini 9 netbook as a thin client to the cloud and, at least for short trips, this seems to be going fairly well.

I'm on tender-hooks to see whether Apple is going to venture into the netbook territory, after all, I've been waiting for a replacement for my old 12-inch Powerbook for a long time now. However if an officially sanctioned Apple netbook doesn't show up in the next few months I might get round to installing OSX on my mini9. Then again, I might not. It's surprising how tolerable Windows XP turns out to be, at least if all you're using it as is a platform to run Google Chrome and some web applications.

But there is a dark side of the cloud, it isn't always there, and here I'm not talking about the offline problem. After all, that what Gears is there to fix...

Recently I had my AdSense account shut down. Totally ignoring the loss in future revenue, Google also locked me away from my data. The information about what ads sold, on which page, when. I'm paranoid about backups, and expect other people to be too, but that isn't data I had elsewhere. While I could have exported it, I didn't. Mainly because it would be fairly hard to analyse outside of Google's own infrastructure.

Google also hosts my email and my blog, and its RSS feed now that they've acquired Feedburner. Which puts them locking me away from my own data in a very different light. Blogger doesn't have an export function, and it's not alone. With Yahoo in trouble I've started to worry about all the pictures I have hosted on Flickr. They also don't have any way to back up your content.

To be clear, I'm not just talking about the raw content. Especially in the case of Flickr the meta-data attached to the content; the date, time, geo-location and associated tags are as equally important as the content itself. If you can't export the content with the meta-data attached, it's hardly worth doing. Even worse, there are services where taking your own data out of the context of the service makes it worthless. Exporting my data from Twitter, taking it out of the Twitter timeline, is fairly pointless.

Which of course brings me to the well trodden path of data portability. My calendar, address book and email are all portable because they are in standard formats. I can easily migrate between services, and some of those services even encourage me to do so...

Other content is not as portable, and that is of course because there aren't any standards to make it portable. How would you go about writing the export service for Flickr, or Blogger? Especially one that made sure it exported all the meta-data in a decently digestible format. Who would implement code to read from the format. Could the network even support thousands of users making a run on Flickr, for instance, and grabbing all their archived pictures?

This is a problem we're all going to face as our lives, and the data trail we generate, move into the cloud. Because that's our data I'm talking about. It doesn't belong to the companies that host it. They may be providing the services that display it, but the data is ours. They really need to remember that...

Missing Google ads? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

So if you follow the blog by actually going to the website rather than getting posts via my RSS feed, which actually accounts for most of my readership anyway, you'll have noticed something over the last few days. No advertisements, my AdSense account has been disabled.

At this stage I'm not entirely sure what's going on, I'm presuming it's something to do with out of the ordinary click activity originating on the site, and considering Google's track record about such things I don't really anticipating finding out either way, even if I do by some sort of miracle get my account reactivated.

So, for now at least, enjoy your Daily ACK advert free...

Update: ...and that, is very much, that,

...after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we have re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we are unable to reinstate your account.

This is the Earth I was looking for... Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Well I wasn't waiting all that long as today Google released Google Earth for the iPhone.


Sure enough there is geo-location support and the controls are fairly intuitive, including the use of the accelerometer to control your viewing angle which is a fairly neat trick.

Disappointingly, at least from my point of view, there isn't any support for Google Sky. Or at least there isn't any support yet, I'm still hopeful. Time to start lobbying the people I know in Google. I guess the Google Sky and MS WWT tutorial at ADASS will be a good place to start. I'm already talking there anyway.

To get Google Earth on your iPhone, visit the App Store in iTunes...

An ADS to KML mashup Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

The idea of ADS to KML came up over morning coffee on the last day of the .astronomy meeting, and by the close of the conference I had most of it hacked together...

Publications for Allan, A. as KML

What am I talking about? A lot of papers on ADS now have links to the SIMBAD database for further information on the objects they discuss. For instance I was recently a co-author on an exo-planet paper which links to the relevant objects in SIMBAD...

The mashup at that point was obvious. Do an ADS query and look for all the papers with links into SIMBAD, then do a series of follow-up queries on SIMBAD and grab all of the objects mentioned in the papers. Then generate a KML file of your publication history, which you can either display directly in Google Sky, or embed into a Google Maps for Sky as I've done above.

Of course not all papers reference objects, and not all papers with objects have SIMBAD links, especially older papers. None the less, having run my script to generate a KML file for several colleagues now it actually gives a fairly good representation of their research interests.

You can grab the perl source code and have a play around with it yourself, you'll need my Astro::ADS module which you can grab from CPAN.

You could imagine several ways to extend my quick hack. If you had a large enough group of astronomers, and therefore a large enough number of papers, you could produce heat maps of the sky instead of using simple push pins. You could cross-correlate your own publications with that of a group or institute where you're thinking of applying for a job, or the publication output of a survey team with the footprint of their survey...

Comments welcome, but yes, I already know it's an interesting but essentially pointless hack. I mean other comments...

GDD08: Wrapping Up Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

After picking up my free Google t-shirt, I'm back downstairs in Space Invaders wrapping up the day with the closing keynote...


Closing keynote...
After announcing the launch of the UK Developer Blog, we're turning around and heading back upstairs for beer, food and random fun...


Developer Day Wrap-up Video
We're done for the day, another year, and another Google Developer Day. Pictures from throughout the day can be found on my Flickr photo-stream...

GDD08: The Google Web Toolkit Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I was a bit undecided about the last session, in the end I decided to go to the Google Web Toolkit: The Technical Advantage given by Sumit Chandel.


Sumit Chandel talking about GWT
What are the advantages of GWT? Firstly you get faster AJAX applications, it's faster than write-by-hand code, because the compiler takes care of cross-browser issues for you. You get free optimization, but of course that doesn't mean that you can throw general good programming practices out of the window, so in-efficient algorithms in GWT are still going to be in-efficient after optimization.

The next advantage is deferred binding. Why give the user more than they asked for? Users only download what they need to run your application. The compiler makes different bindings for your application at compile-time and choose the right one later.

Another advantage is that, with deferred binding in place you get to skip the browser quirks, you only need to code the abstraction of a given widget rather than having to handle them by hand.

Next, no more memory leaks. It's almost impossible to trace memory leaks in Javascript because there are so many ways to cause them. So provided you only code in GWT, this shouldn't happen to you.

GWT also means that your application gets history support, an implementation of the RSH protocol...

You also get code reuse though design patterns, something as a Perl person I'm not sure I believe in all that much. Although possibly that's just because I think loosely typed languages are a good idea and have never really understood Java programmer's obsession with the Gang of Four and patterns.

Another advantage is (supposedly?) faster development with IDE's and code support. Now here again, I'm not sure. I've never really been sold on development environments in general. I know good people who swear by them, and good people that think they're horrible. Perhaps I'm getting old?

Next advantage is proper testing of your AJAX application, and debugging with hosted mode. This is a definite advantage, testing AJAX applications, or Javascript code in the browser, is really hard.

Moving on, we're talking about what's new in GWT 1.5. Released at the end of August it includes Java 5 support, easier interoperability with JavaScript using JSO overlays, enhanced DOM class for full specification compliance and better application performance.

...and we're done.

GDD08: What's New in Geo Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

After lunch, and I decided to skip the code labs and head for What's new in Geo with Jean-Laurent Wotton and Russell Middleton. Which means, oddly enough, I'm back in Donkey Kong...


Jean-Laurent Wotton and Russell Middleton
Russell kicked the session off with a Google Maps introduction to get everyone up to speed with the API. Handing over to Jean-Laurent we're being shown how to use the Maps geocoding service.

Moving on from the introductory Maps material we're talking about cool new features. First up, is the AJAX Search API, which has actually been around for a while...

Next up is Static Maps API, which lets you embed a Google Maps image on your webpage without requiring JavaScript or any dynamic page loading, and last week started serving satellite imagery as well as the normal map type. Interestingly there is also a Static Map Wizard to allow you to build a (moderately) sophisticated map without any knowledge of coding.

Now Russell is talking about the Flash API, which lets you write the code in ActionScript 3, compile it against the Google interface library and output a SWF containing the Map. I'm not a Flash guy, no pun intended, but it looks fairly solid.


Jean-Laurent and the Google Earth API
Back to Jean-Laurent and the Google Earth API which was introduced a few months ago. Although of course, as a Mac user, I still can't get at the Earth API, and there doesn't seem to be any news on the arrival of Linux and Mac versions of the plug-in as yet. Cool demo though...

Next is Google's Street View Service and how to display these both in and outside the Maps interface. Also pretty cool, although it's not yet possible to overlay anything on top of the panorama as yet.

Moving on, the final new feature is location detection. Until recently the user had to centre/zoom in their location themselves, the solution is automatic detect the user's location using the Maps AJAX API. The Maps API now automatically tries to geocode the user's IP address, and if successful it will make this location available to the application. If successful you can also capture the city, country, country code and region.

Next up is image overlays, and how the Google Maps interface can be used to navigate custom images by defining a custom overlay.

Finally, we're moving on to KML and network links, where as it happens, I'm on fairly solid ground so to speak...

...and we're done.

Update: Except we're not. Jean-Laurent and Russell have handed over to Angela Rele from the Met Office about using Google Earth to show the global impacts of climate change and the Google Outreach project.

GDD08: What's New in Gears Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

After the break I'm back in Donkey Kong and listening to What's new in Gears with Aaron Boodman.


Aaron Boodman talking about Gears
The point of Gears is to add functionality to web applications, but Gears isn't just about "offline", what Google is trying to do is expose the capabilities of the local machine, whether that's your desktop of your mobile phone, to your web applications.

Every Google Chrome installation has Gears pre-installed, but Gears now supports IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari as well as Chrome. Although the Safari port was only launched yesterday. However the latest Android build also comes with a Gears stub, not full support, but it is coming soon.

We're spending some time talking about Gears' Desktop API and shortcut icons, and the File System API. The file system allows multi-file selection, fitering my extension or mime-type, native OS look-and-feel and makes sure the user has full control...

Obviously what you want to be able to do when you select a file, you want to do something with the contents of the file, and web applications can't. Which is what the Blob is for, it's a generic interchange format.

Next up is the Resumable Upload API which sits onto of the Blob API, which is apparently now live on YouTube. You can in theory parallelize the upload, but most browsers have a fairly low connection limit per-domain, so you can parallelize uploads up to that limit.

I'm going to use Chrome, because they told us to use Chrome as much as possible. But it does work on the other browsers...

Perhaps one of the coolest of the new APIs is the GeoLocation API, which can make use of on-board GPS, cell-phone tower and Wi-Fi access point triangulation. But developers can implement plug-ins to provide more methods of location. It should degrade cleanly, the API will provide the best guess of the user's location to your code.

What's next for Gears? More of the same, continue to unlock the capabilities of the host system.

...we're out of slides, and the floor is open for questions.

is there any plans to allow applications to share data between domains? This is a problem Google has, and initially they thought about sharing databases together, but that seems like a recipie for disaster. What Gears has is Cross-origin Workers, a secure solution to the cross-origin restriction policy of the browser.

...and we're breaking for lunch. Still not sure whether I'll end up in a code lab or the main tracks for the rest of the afternoon.

GDD08: A Deeper Look at Google App Engine Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

It was a long walk between the keynote room, dubbed Space Invaders, and the App Engine talk here in Donkey Kong, and Google has set up a number of feeding stations along the way for weary developers...


Mano Marks talking about App Engine
But I'm now in "A Deeper Look at Google App Engine" given by Mano Marks.

We've got the first estimate so how much App Engine is going to cost above and beyond the amount Google is giving away for free, about US$40 if you use double the amount of traffic in your preview allocation. There is also support for cron'd jobs, SSL and other languages, apart from Python and presumably the already semi-public effort to port Perl to App Engine, coming soon.

After a brief discussion about what Mano can't talk about, mostly when new languages are coming to App Engine and what those languages will be, we've dived directly into the code, and we're looking through the example that will be used in the App Engine code lab this afternoon. Which I still haven't decided whether I'll go to yet...

We're talking about Bigtable, the storage mechanism underlying App Engine, and Mano is really trying to emphasize that it's not a relational database, it's an object orientated (schema-less) database.

After running through request handlers and entities, we're now talking about counters. One major difference between relational database and a distributed datastore like Bigtable. Bigtable doesn't know counts by design, must scan every entity row. Google is encouraging developers to create a separate entity that you can increment every time a entity is inserted, and decremented every time one is removed. However if you're doing frequent updates you'll end up with a requests queuing up to update the counter. The solution is to use a sharded counter. You create a number of shards, and when you go to increment the counter you pick a entity at random. Mano is now running through how this works in practice...

Mano is showing an implementation of sharded counters using Bigtable and memcache, I'm wondering why this isn't available as a default Google library so is just becomes the way counters are done with Bigtable..?

...and we're out of slides, opening the floor to questions the first one is exactly that. Why aren't counters built into Bigtable? The answer is, "good question". They're trying to keep the environment as clean a Python environment as possible, but I'm not entirely convinced that answers the question?

Interestingly, the recommended work around for the lack of cron support is to set up a remote call that polls a known end point inside App Engine periodically. However you need to remember that every job on App Engine only has 10 seconds to run, and is killed after that time limit is reached, so if you're trying to do something periodically that might take a lot of time to complete (for instance re-indexing) you might have to split this request up into chunks.

...and we're done.

GDD08: The Opening Keynote Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

The keynote is apparently about what Google is doing for developers, and why we should care...


The opening keynote
The keynote is a hard sell for the "open web". Google believes that the browser is the client, but that modern web applications are pushing the limits of what is possible in the browser. We're getting a demo of some of the multi-process architecture of Google Chrome, and it's actually pretty impressive. I've already managed to test Chrome out, despite it currently being Windows only, and so far I must admit I'm pretty happy with it...

Next up is Gears, designed to allow you to extend the browser and enable richer web applications. The latest release has some interesting new APIs, the GeoLocation API, the Blob API and onprogress( ) events.

We're now talking about the cloud and, amougst other things, Google App Engine and the scalability advantages of using the Google infrastructure instead of your own.


Android running on mystery hardware
Moving on Mike Jennings is taking the stage, and demo'ing Android running on real hardware, amusingly with the vendor's logo taped over, although it looks like an HTC handset. The device has wireless, 3G, GPS touch-screen and accelerometers, looks good...


After the hardware demo we're back to talking to client, cloud and connectivity and GWT. A set of open source tools and libraries for writing really large scale AJAX applications. At a high level GWT is about writing your web applications in the Java programming language and cross-compiling to Javascript that is guaranteed to work on IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome.

The final topic in the keynote is Open Social, many sites, one API. But not, unfortunately, Facebook...

...and we're done. The rest of the day is devoted to more in-depth technical sessions.

Google Developer Day 2008 Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm currently holed up in "Space Invaders" waiting for the first keynote of Google Developer Day 2008.


Space Invaders
For those of you who didn't manage to talk your boss into letting you blow an entire day on this thing, the Google Developer YouTube channel should have all talks.

I'm currently intending to go to Deeper look at Google App Engine followed by Google Gears. Then after lunch I'll either be going to the Building a simple application using Google App Engine code lab or What's New in Geo and the Google Web Toolkit. Either way I'll try and keep blogging all day, and while unlike last year the wireless network is holding up under the strain remarkably well, we still don't have any power sockets.

This year's event is, at least so far, fairly light on free stuff. We've been given a gift wrapped, USB key drive, that's actually faintly unsettling when in use. No silly putty, t-shirts, or yo-yo's this year. You can't have it all...

Update: Posts from the Opening Keynote and Deeper look at Google App Engine session.

Update: Post from the What's new in Gears session.

Update: Posts from both the What's new in Geo and the Google Web Toolkit sessions.

Update: The closing keynote. Now time for beer, food and random fun...

Update: Pictures from throughout the day can be found on my Flickr photo-stream, and videos of most of the day will be uploaded to the Google YouTube channel real soon now...

This is not the Earth you are looking for... Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

After spending more time than I should hacking Sky support into Maps.app on my iPod touch I'm somewhat ambivalent about the arrival of Earthscape on the App Store (via the Google Earth Blog).


This is not the Earth I was looking for...

Earthscape has poor imagery outside of the continental United States, and the current version has no KML or accelerometer support and no search capability. Right now at least it's a cool toy. I've bought a copy because I quite like cool toys and I'm sure a bunch of other people will buy it for the same reason, and as a technical demonstrator it's impressive. But as a useful tool? Not at the moment.

At which point I guess I'm still waiting for Google Earth, and Google Sky, for my iPod touch. Of course I can't yet get Google Earth in a browser on my Mac, so I might be waiting a while...

Perl on Google App Engine Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I woke up this morning to some of the best news I've heard in a while, it looks like there is some progress with putting Perl onto Google App Engine.

More from Brad Fitzpatrick. If you'd like to discuss this or help out, join the perl-appengine mailing list, and submit code to the appengine-perl project on Google Code. For more information see the Perl-on-AppEngine FAQ.

Maybe I won't have to learn Python after all...

A giant like Google Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

An iPod killer never arrived, and it seems unlikely to do so until some new technology comes along to kill it as dead as the Sony Walkman. Despite that the industry is already looking for an iPhone killer, but I think they're looking in the wrong direction. Because the iPhone is not a phone, it just happens to be able to make phone calls.

A few weeks ago Google announced (via Hack A Day) the winners of the first round of the Android Developer Challenge. Perhaps somewhat interestingly, only four of the winners chose to withhold details of their applications from public view. I'm not entirely sure what that says about the winners, but I'd be interested in finding out how many of the losers wanted their ideas kept secret if they'd won.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats - Howard Aiken

This call was actually something I kicked around some ideas for, but in the end got side tracked into writing for the iPhone and playing with Arduinos. There are, after all, only so many hours in the day where you're not actually doing work you're paid to do.

However from the list of winners two applications stood out...

Jigsaw by Mikhail Ksenzov stood out because it's an application for something I do a lot. People with mobile phones taking pictures of the white board are pretty common during meetings.

Applying a geometric transform to the photograph

While I can't find a website for the application from the screen shots and description in the PDF it looks to scratch an itch I've been having for a while. It comes with edge detection, geometric transformation and image enhancements pre-canned to help you capture that vital architecture diagram. If I end up getting a 3G iPhone I might get round to doing a clean room implementation, just for fun.

I've actually done what BreadCrumbz does without the automation, or the sharing, or the mobile phone come to that. I'm not alone, if you go to the directions page for Liverpool ARI you'll see that the text is annotated with links through to pictures of useful landmarks [1, 2, 3] enroute. So while it's not an original idea, it looks to be a good implementation of a good idea. Which is probably better for them in the long run, they're helping people do stuff they already want to do rather than trying to convince them to do new stuff. The second one is always harder than the first.


Of course what stands out for you depends on what you do, I'm fairly sure an application to take pictures of white boards doesn't have a mass market appeal, you have to be a geek like me...

What's the point? Well the winners were applications that you'd find on a smart phone. But the iPhone isn't a smart phone, it's an ultra-portable that can make phone calls. Google Android has the potential to unseat the iPhone, if that's the market they push it towards, but Google has to make a decision. Whether to go for the smart phone market, or to go for the iPhone. Of course, maybe smart phones are just about to become as dead as the Sony Walkman? They were never a good compromise ergonomically speaking anyway. Maybe the iPhone killed them?

Google Earth in a Browser Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Google Earth, meet the browser...


Unfortunately, for now at least, the browser plug-in is Windows only. While I've been promised that Mac OSX and Linux versions are coming soon, I'm really hoping that OSX support isn't limited to Firefox. For once, I'd like to see a Safari support out of the gate.

Update: Brady Forrest has a good overview over on the O'Reilly Radar, while Dann Catt is poking around the internals over on Geobloggers.

MS WorldWide Telescope for Mac? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Earlier this morning I spotted (via Twitter) that Microsoft's World Wide Telescope had finally been released...


After wading through their flash based website to get to the download page I found out that the "Mac version" is a version that runs under Windows in Boot Camp. Which isn't exactly a Mac version at all, a bit of false advertising there I think...

At which point I was really interested to see Roy Williams quoted as saying,

...a beautiful platform for explaining and getting people excited about astronomy, and I think the professional astronomers will come to use it as well - Roy Williams

While it is more common in the US, I don't think I know a single British astronomer that owns a Windows box outside of the VO community. In fact someone else here at Exeter said that Roy's quote caused them an "...ironic chuckle". Which is pretty much how WWT has been received. Nobody here can try it because nobody has a Windows machine, we either run Linux or OSX.

Since the release this morning I've seen conflicting reports about WWT. The Register, which admittedly isn't generally acknowledged to be particularly pro-Microsoft, just couldn't get it to work while Stefan Geens over on Ogle Earth liked it a lot. So your milage may vary, but mine won't. It'll stay firmly at zero. I don't own a Windows machine, and I'm unlikely to go through the pain of installing Windows on my Mac to try it out...

Update: Reports of problems under Vista...

Update: Looks like I'm not the only one a bit underwhelmed by the "Mac version" of WWT.