Clazh » Web 2.0

Microsoft’s Secret Run Office 2007 in any Browser And Kill Google Docs, Zoho

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 01:48:25 +0000

Did you know you can test drive Office 2007(Excel,word, IE 7.0 etc) from the comfort of your browser. All you required to have is JAVA and install a small Java Plugin take a look here. Unfortunately this works only in IE, but believe me it can work on any Browser that supports Java. I know this because a while back I accidentally managed to get it to run on FireFox when I realised that it was a Java Applet and that the Plugin is not really required, but a few months back Microsoft closed this loophole and made it mandatory to install the Plugin so that it works only on IE(typical of Microsoft).

(Note: you require to have Java installed also in case you are testing the office 2007 demo you’ll need to install the plugin)

But I managed to get hold of another demo of Office 2003 which runs on any browser with support for java. These are not web based application think of them as remote desktop on a browser to access these applications with minimal overhead in terms of Bandwidth and memory (Considering that office 2007 is so huge and requires a lot of memory).

Below is the full Office 2007 suite running in IE 6.0. (You can even see IE 7.0 right at the back)

Office 2003 Outlook and PowerPoint Running inside FireFox on Ubuntu.

I am sure you have heard of desktop Virtualization (Vmware, Parallels, Virtual PC 2007, XEN source, Virtual Box) using which you can run a whole Operating System in a virtual environment on your computer. I already mentioned a year back that Virtualization is the future. Its one reason why Macs have started to become more popular since you can easily run multiple OS without the need to reboot the system.The full Ubuntu Linux OS running inside a window(Vmware Player) on Windows XP.

Application Virtualization

The Company called CITRIX is behind this technology. The company was started by an Ex-IBM developer there product called the CitrixÂ® Presentation Serverâ„¢ enables Applications Virtualization. This is the same company that recently acquire XenSource.

They are currently building XenDesktop which will take application Virtualization main stream.

I can think of a couple of reasons why Microsoft doesn’t want to put too much emphasis on this technology right now.

Its based on Java and Open Source Technologies.
Microsoft does not own this technology.
Scalability and performance Issues.
The Technology is too commercialized and only one company holds a monopoly over it.
Cost

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Microsoft, Software Tags: Microsoft, Web 2.0

OpenSocial, OpenBox, OpenMedia What the Hells Going On?

Arpit Jacob — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:26:23 +0000

A few days back google announced OpenSocial, its so called open API for social networks. Box.Net today annouced the launch of OpenBox, a platform for developers to integrate their web applications into Box.net. And Bebo announced Open Media platform, a way for media brands to build a presence in the community with music and video content.

Readwriteweb author Marshall Kirkpatrick rightly questions is Google Exercising Leadership or Control? I happen to think this is all about gaining control. Google, knew very well that they were incapable of creating a social-network that would become as big as MySpace or Facebook which is evident from the failure of Orkut which has mostly been dominated by Brazilians and Indians(take a look at the public stats page you need to be signed into Orkut to view it). The growth of facebook over the past months has show how opening up a platform to developers, can have a exponential/big impact on on how users use their services.

And suddenly we have API coming up every where. The fact is most of these API aren’t really open and are mostly tied up to their own platform or are severely restricted in terms of usage.

How about the recent announcement about Android

How Google Android Routes Around Java Restrictions.

Today Google released the Android code and I took a serious look at its internals… and found the solution for the licensing problem. Itâ€™s called Dalvik and itâ€™s the new name of Sunâ€™s worst nightmares.

Dalvik is a virtual machine, just like Javaâ€™s or .NETâ€™s.. but itâ€™s Googleâ€™s own and theyâ€™re making it open source without having to ask permission to anyone (well, for now, in the future expect a shit-load of IP-related lawsuits on this, especially since Sun and Microsoft signed a cross-IP licensing agreement on exactly such virtual machines technologies years ago… but donâ€™t forget IBM who has been writing emulation code for mainframes since the beginning of time).

OpenSource Fighting against OpenSource? I guess the GPL wasn’t open enough. Proof that GPL is not a solution for all opensource projects especially for commercial solutions. Google was smart enough to realise not many would invest or touch Android if it was released under a GPL licence. Heck they even have a FAQ about this. Why are you releasing the code under the Apache Software License instead of GPLv2?

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Web Tags: Google, Social-Networks, Web 2.0

Digg Users Go Nuts and Revolt, Kevin Submits

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 03 May 2007 16:31:46 +0000

I didn’t read my Rss feeds for a day and missed most of the Digg fiasco. Digg as you you is a social news site where use users control the news that is shown on it. Digg has been in a few controversies before but never has it been at this big a scale with its own users revolting. It started off with a user posting the hexadecimal keys to decrypt HD-DVD discs in Linux. Digg was served with a cease and desist letter for violation of intellectual property and the moderators started removing these posts, in fact some users have even been banned from digg for submitting the decryption keys. You can see screenshots of Digg’s homepage during the the whole fiasco on Pronet and Mashable

As labnol points out One of the most Ironic thing about this whole thing is that this is not the first time, that stories regarding hacking and cracking software have appeared on the frontpage of digg. As usual Tony Hung has a well written and insightful post.

Social News has its advantages and disadvantages nothing is perfect. Kevin Rose was forced to admit that Digg is run and controlled by the users and if they feel threaten they would take matters into their own hands.

While Digg aims to have a democratic environment the truth is far from it. One of the main drawbacks is that there is no way to see who is digging down stories. Most of the front page stories are controlled by the top 20% of Digg users. Pete Cashmore has a humorous post on why we might need to start a donation campaign in case Digg gets sued.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: General, Web, Windows Tags: General, Web 2.0

Flock The Web 2.0 Social Browser To Be Forever In Beta?

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 11:00:45 +0000

I decided to take a look at the Browser called Flock again after a year.

Flock is a browser based on the Firefox / Mozilla Code base that was launched with a lot of Hype and internet Buzz around this time last year. I was particularly intrigued since I loved the look and feel and it felt like a refreshed Firefox running on Steroids it was labeled as a Web 2.0 The Social browser. Though even after the release of Firefox 2.0 they have not yet update the code base.

It is being developed by some Ex-Firefox Promoters.
Based on the Mozilla code base hence it is Multi platform and Open Source.
Great Eye-Candy Interface.
Inbuilt tools and support for Web 2.0 Services and blogging Platforms

Interestingly when Flock was released the Founder decrem said (He left Flock a while back).

Flock is not interested in forking the Mozilla code-base”.”Further, we don’t want to break anyone’s Firefox experience, or have our browser break, due to updates either way that have not been fully tested propagated. In the short term, that means that fewer people will play with our stuff, but over the long term we believe it’s the right way to go for us.

To the question “Why not an extensions?” He goes on to say

We want to be able to offer our users a complete end-to-end user experience, including a single browser download, an update service, technical support. the works.

So how does a open source product such as Flock profit. For one they have tied up with Yahoo with their search engine as the default for Flock also the Flock Start up page features a custom search Page using Yahoo. Similarly Photobucket has tied up Flock to release a special version of Flock where Photobucket users can upload and browser through their photos and pictures.

The initial releases for flock suffered from major memory leaks and bugs. Though the current versions are pretty stable. Flock has a lot of potential but it looks like the enthusiasm with which it was launched has slowed down or run dry, since its release I have hardly seen any new, major features. Most of their releases till this point have been only bug fixes. The features from Flock that I found most appealing were the Blog Editor which was similar to ScribeFire(previously called performancing extension) and the nifty Flickr top bar, though now I prefer ScribeFire to flock’s Blog Editor since it doesn’t load in a external window.

The Rss feed reader in flock needs a lot of work since I found it extremely slow and a huge memory hogger. The Rss feed Reader is fine for People with a few feed in the range of 20-50 but anything more than that can ruin your browsing experience I have more that 300 plus feeds .

I checked up the traffic to Flock’s website using Alexa and results are not very positive. The traffic seems to be steadily declining over the past few months, when it should be increasing considering that its a open source product.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Open Source, Software, Windows Tags: Blogging, FireFox, Open Source, Photos, Web, Web 2.0

WikiMapia The User Driven Google Maps Mashup

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 10:00:23 +0000

I have always been impressed with Google maps. The amazing use of Ajax with real-time zooming of maps and places. Though I been a bit envious of the US because they get detailed maps with names of places, roads etc marked out and shown on it. Unfortunately for people like me living in India and other countries this Information is not available we have to do with the Satellite images.

This is where WikiMapia created by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev can help, its a mashup which uses the Google maps API . In the case of wikimapia it combines both the service of a User Driven Content like a Wiki and Google maps. Though it won’t be 100% accurate it is still pretty reliable, an example of user driven content is the Wikipedia itself. This Web Service is a great hit especially in India though people have taken it to the extent of marking out their homes. If you can’t find your house or place on the map you can add the place freely, it get immediately updated on the website. I was simply wowed by how detailed the number of places were. The more I zoomed in the more places popuped up. In fact I found that my house was already marked out.

You can even Embed the Maps on your webpages if you want. Pretty useful if you want to show someone else the way to a certain place.

How to add Maps to your blog or Webpage.

1) Go anywhere on the WikiMapia.org site and find the part or area on the map that you would like to show.
2) Click WikiMapia at the top right corner and choose map on your page link.
3) Move and resize frame you see to desired view, adjust view setting if needed and copy the given html code to your page or blog.

Example Show below of Taj Mahal

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Windows Tags: Google, Maps, Mashup, Web, Web 2.0