Monday, March 10, 2008

A Chat with Ben and Pete - eposide 19

iPhone 2.0
This week we talk about:
  • About the podcast
    • Change of name?
    • Suggestions and Feedback? Perhaps we should talk in more depth about topics?
  • iPhone 2.0 software launch and SDK
    • Ben hasn't been able to get the SDK yet:
      • Friday signed up to get the SDK and all day the email link didn't work
      • Saturday email link worked, logged in to find a page without functionality
      • Hit a link to download SDK and got back to the register to download page again.
    • Engadget posts an excellent SDK comparison chart
  • Internet Explorer 8 beta
    • Supports CSS 2.1 and they have open sourced their CSS test suite
    • Mashups built in:
      • Activities. You can do things like select an address, right click and go straight to maps (or see a preview in the menu)
      • Web Slices. A good example is eBay where you can follow an item and place a bid directly from the toolbar
    • They're not going all out. SVG is still unsupported
    • It has a javascript debugger!
  • Google Sites
    • You need to have your own domain with a email account at that domain to get started
    • Features:
      • It uses a wiki style of editing of pages
      • Very simple “list” feature that can be used for simple database tables
      • Built in search
      • Navigation tree
      • Editable nav bar, logos etc
      • Create page: web page, dashboard, announcements, file cabinet, list
        • Dashboards are made up of “gadgets” such as image, calendar, document, picasa web slideshow, presentation, spreadsheet, video, recent items…
    • It certainly is designed to bring together all the Google Apps
  • Silverlight 2
    • We all saw the impressive World Wide telescope demo at Ted, and the intro to the technology at last year's Ted
    • The Hard Rock Cafe launched it's new memorabilia web site at the mix conference with a very impressive demo of Seadragon in Silverlight 2 (it's live here)
    • A good article about data and web services support in Silverlight 2 is on The Register
      • SOAP support by importing WSDL / generic XML support (like YUI?) / JSON support
      • No REST however.
      Download

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Enjoyed Eposide 19 very much.

I understand the difficulty of producing a weekly show, but FWIW I like the current format. I just like hearing about what you guys have been playing with this week, eg the iPhone SDK, EeePC, etc.

re: Flash/iPhone. Am I mistaken, or aren't most Flash webapps limited in form factor? In other words, aren't they laid out to fixed pixel dimensions? In which case, how on earth will this work on a smaller screen? Doesn't Apple have enough trouble with the regular HTML sites to fit them on the screen?

Peter Marks said...

Thanks Alastair.

Yes, flash is generally fixed size (but I don't think that's a requirement). A lot of the great features of the mobile Safari version is the way it can zoom in on elements of the html, I guess that benefit goes away if there is content in Flash or Silverlight.

I use an iPod Touch and find the browser very usable, just the thing for looking up the TV guide and such around the house.

Anonymous said...

You know, the frustrating thing about listening to podcasts on the way to work is that by the time you get there you forget what you wanted to say...

Anyway so you mentioned the Google Sites, err, site and how it's now basically a wiki without being called that. You were wondering how this interface would evolve to provide a more user-friendly way of doing things.

Fortunately one of the enabling technologies for this has become clear recently with the publication of RFC4287, otherwise known as AtomPub.

I really believe that this will revolutionise the way that content is published on the web, making it far more democratic by allowing contributions by people other than those who can work out the average content management system. I reckon that AtomPub will be built into browsers and good things will come about as a result.

I complained recently about the sorry state of web forums and was reminded about the potential for AtomPub in this area, and I see no reason why wikis, or stealth-wikis as the case may be, should be exempt from the potential benefits here.

Unknown said...

I love this show! You guys cover the most interesting aspects of geek tech.

iPhone and other mobile app subjects are great. Running linux on small things. Telco web apps, back ends.