Google Gears

The latest entry among the candidate RIA technologies is Google Gears.



Still in version 0.3 at the time of this writing, its obvious that a lot of work needs to be done.

However, Google Gears (GG) has a couple of neat features...

* Database based on SQLLite.
* WorkerPool (JavaScript MultiThreading).
* Desktop Module to interact with the OS.

The Database module provides browser-local relational data storage to your JavaScript web application. Gears uses the open source SQLite database system. Ergo exactly as we have grown accustomed with Adobe AIR.

The WorkerPool module allows web applications to run JavaScript code in the background, without blocking the main page's script execution.
In web browsers a single time-intensive operation, such as I/O or heavy computation, can make the UI unresponsive. The WorkerPool module runs operations in the background, without blocking the UI. Scripts executing in the WorkerPool will not trigger the browser's "unresponsive script" dialog.
Nevertheless, since the browser's XmlHttpRequest object is not available in the context of a worker, Gears provides its own HttpRequest object to fill that need. Gears HttpRequest provides most of the features of XmlHttpRequest except for the ability to access the response as an XML DOM object and the ability to send a request synchronously.

Check it out...
http://gears.google.com/

A couple of more cool features are scheduled, but lets see which ideas actually make it out of the labs alive.

Some reasons to consider GG are that it does not require an explicit installation, just that you allow a specific site to run Gears enabled and that its open source in contrast to e.g. Adobe AIR and there a couple of more pretty interesting features of GG, but I will not get into that now.

When this is said, in my very humble graphical understanding - I think there exist a striking resemblance between Adobe AIR logo and the Google Gears logo and to be totally honest, the feature set if we disregard the very promising multi-threaded Javacsript... do you see what I mean ?

Google Trends of XAML and MXML

Despite the huge momentum Adobe Flex have gained the last year or so, its clear that XAML still have more momentum overall, according to Google Trends.

XAML is the markup language from Microsoft to create RIA's and one of the cornerstones in Silverlight, MS's "new" primary RIA platform. MXML is the markup language used in Adobe Flex, Adobe's primary RIA platform and has been around for quite a shorter time than XAML.

Here is a direct link to the comparison I did:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=xaml%2Cmxml



An interesting observation is related to the geographical distribution of the searches, seeing that India is top-ranking in regards to Country, however in regards to City its Redmond, VA (The home of Microsoft).

Another interesting point is that Denmark and Danish is at the time of this comparison (it's off course subject to change, partly due to the dynamics of the Google indexing system based on statistically enhanced numbers and off course due to the fact that the numbers eventually do change over the course of time) ranked 10 and 6 respectively, positioning the Danish RIA community high on the international rank.
Combine this with the positions of our brothering countries, Sweden and Norway, Scandinavia is definitely in the super-liga of RIA regions.

Xoopit turns your Gmail into a multimedia heaven

Firefox extension Xoopit turns Gmail into a robust, searchable media management tool for every piece of media that comes through your inbox. By indexing every attachment as well as every link to photos and videos from sites like Flickr, Picasa and YouTube, Xoopit allows you to easily search for and find any picture or video and view it from directly inside Gmail.

Imagine this: You're looking for a YouTube video that you were sent a link to recently, but you really don't know where to begin your search. With Xoopit installed, you can just click the Videos tab and you'll see this:



Check it out...
http://www.xoopit.com/

Google Social Graph API

The public web is made up of linked pages that represent both documents and people.

Google Search helps make this information more accessible and useful. If you take away the documents, you're left with the connections between people.

Information about the public connections between people is really useful -- as a user, you might want to see who else you're connected to, and as a developer of social applications, you can provide better features for your users if you know who their public friends are.

For long there hasn't been a good way to access this information, however now The Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the Web, expressed by XFN and FOAF markup and other publicly declared connections, easily available and useful for developers.



How does the Social Graph API find these connections ?
The Social Graph API looks for two types of publicly declared connections:

1. It looks for all public URLs that belong to you and are interconnected. This could be your blog (a1), your LiveJournal page (a2), and your Twitter account (a3).
2. It looks for publicly declared connections between people. For example, a1 may link to b's blog while a1 and c link to each other.

Google Browser Sync Discontinued in FF 3

If you are as sad as I am that Google have decided to discontinue further development of the Google Browser Sync, please dont hesitate to sign the petition...

You can read about Google's decision here...
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-browser-sync-to-be-discontinued.html

And sign here...
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/googlebrowsersyncff3/