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Square Enix reports that since its launch on March 4th, the Just Cause 2 playable demo has taken
the internet by storm, receiving well over 2 million downloads.
Pile Up is a simple, yet highly addictive game that puts you in control of a
traffic intersection. In this fast-paced, strategy game, your job is simple. Let the cars know
when it's safe to enter the intersection to get to their exit. Tell the cars to go at the wrong
time and it's game over!!
Incredibly simple, but amazingly engaging.
Beautiful styled graphics and animation.
Insanely addictive 'just one more go' gameplay.
Three uniquely challenging levels.
Think you have what it takes to get onto the leader board? Challenge yourself and your friends
to beat your best scores... Bring it on!!
REQUIREMENTSMac OS X 10.3.9 or later.
PRICE$4.97
DEVELOPERSector3
Games
DOWNLOADS12 DOWNLOAD NOW
(18.3 MB) More information
It is my pleasure to announce a new project to better the Ubuntu.com website experience,
specifically for users who prefer a language other than English. The new project, called Website Localization will put a short
(4-5 word) message on any www.Ubuntu.com web page directing users to more resources in their
preferred language.
This project has two main parts to it. The first part of the Website Localization project is the
technical aspect of the project. It is the goal of the project to create a script that will pull
out of a users web browser their preferred language. After obtaining this information, the script
will cross reference this language against a list of languages that have approved resources
offered, and then display a short link to their languages landing page.
The second part of this project is creating landing pages for as many resources as possible. This
part of the project will be done by LoCos and the i18n team. The landing pages will be on the
wiki, and will be ever changing to direct users to the best information that we can give them.
Currently, the goal is to have the project completed and implemented by the end of May. I would
also like to have a working demo of the project by April 19th so that we have plenty of time to
fix any problems that arise prior to the final implementation of this project.
I can’t do all of this myself, so I am going to need help from the Ubuntu community. At
this point, I need some assistance with the technical side of the project. I need a few people to
create the script that will detect the users preferred language, and then show them a link to the
landing page in their language. If you have the skills needed to help out with this Website
Localization project, please send me an email with your name, launchpad account, a little bit of
information about the experience you have and your general ability (time zone, and anything else
that may help me out). My goal is to get a group of a few people to work on the technical aspect
of this project and have a meeting in the next few weeks to discuss the project in a little more
detail, and determine the best way to make this happen.
Veescope Live 2.0Veescope Live provides real-time visual feed back on a live video
source connected to your Apple MacIntosh computer. Veescope displays real-time chroma key, and high
and low video level Zebra patterns. It uses the computer's graphics card, instead of the CPU
allowing for much better performance. Veescope Live works with any Quicktime video input source,
such as a DV firewire stream, or a high-definition video capture card. In addition, Veescope Live
can display a waveform or vector scope directly on top of the video. Veescope Live provides
industry standard scopes such as, Waveform and Vector. Veescope Live overlays any scope directly on
top of the video in order for you to locate problems with the video. The video underneath the scope
is changed to black and white, in order to make the scope more visible. Veescope Live has a real
time Chroma Key preview allowing you to make adjustments to key color, hue range, saturation range,
and luminance range. Best of all, the chroma keying is being performed on your graphics card
leaving your computer free to do other things.
WHAT'S NEWVersion 2.0:
Quicktime movie export..
Audio meters now display properly.
Send to Final Cut Pro.
Digital Photo import and export with Alpha Channel.
See all the video scopes at once in the Multi-scope window.
PHOTORECOVERY Mac 2010 4.5PhotoRecovery can recover images, movies, and sound files from all
types of Digital Media. PhotoRecovery is compatible with Memory Sticks, SmartMedia, CompactFlash,
Micro Drives, SD Cards, Multimedia Chips, Floppy Disks and most other forms of Digital Film.
WHAT'S NEWVersion 4.5:
We just spent
some quality time with the MIX10 build of Windows Phone 7 Series running on the same
prototype hardware sourced from Garmin-Asus that we saw at MWC -- and apart from a few Murphy's Law-style demo hiccups,
we loved what we saw. One thing that immediately caught our attention was the fact that lists of
items "compress" slightly once you've reached their end -- something we hadn't noticed before. In
general, it's pretty impressive how much attention Microsoft is paying to the finer aesthetic
points of the platform, from the slight "tilts" of items that you've pressed to the 3D effects you
encounter as you flip through photos. Another thing we've confirmed here is that the test units
do have accelerometers, refuting an earlier rumor that had been spreading out in Barcelona
-- we know this because the display auto-rotated while viewing a photo. Check out the full video --
along with a shot of the phone resting alongside its Zune HD cousin -- after the break.
After having to endure
concept
videos and shaky-cam
gameplay, we finally have some real, honest-to-goodness screens of Twisted Pixel's upcoming
Comic Jumper for you to rest your
weary eyes upon. They're all lifted from the first "comic" of the game, "The Adventures of Captain
Smiley," which Twisted Pixel has described jokingly as "kind of a crappy comic." Perhaps that
explains why the titular hero will be busting out?
If your thirst for funny book action still hasn't been slaked, we hear you'll be able to see a demo
of the game next week at PAX East.
After having to endure
concept
videos and shaky-cam
gameplay, we finally have some real, honest-to-goodness screens of Twisted Pixel's upcoming
Comic Jumper for you to rest your
weary eyes upon. They're all lifted from the first "comic" of the game, "The Adventures of Captain
Smiley," which Twisted Pixel has described jokingly as "kind of a crappy comic." Perhaps that
explains why the titular hero will be busting out?
If your thirst for funny book action still hasn't been slaked, we hear you'll be able to see a demo
of the game next week at PAX East.
In an
interview with Xconomy.com, the new head of E Ink talks about the company's plans to launch
color displays at the end of this year. T.H. Peng, executive vice president of E Ink's parent
company, Prime View International, admitted to Xconomy that in terms of quality color E Ink won't
be ready to go head-to-head with LCD anytime soon.
"Our color quality will not be as good as LCD, initially," Peng told Xconomy. "But we have
already received very encouraging signs from a few customers that they want to launch our color
e-paper product by the end of this year or the beginning of 2011."
Peng went on to insist that E Ink's color capabilities compare favorably with that of
newsprint—a bar that Peng himself admits is substantially lower than that of glossy
magazines.
I actually got a glimpse of a color E Ink prototype at this past CES, and I will admit that I
wasn't too impressed. Color saturation and contrast were very low, and it was fairly hard to tell
the different colors apart. But the Skiff spokesperson who had the demo mentioned that it
represented only one of a number of possible methods for bringing color to E Ink, and this fits
with what Peng says in the interview.
Right now, E Ink is staffing up in R&D and is exploring a range of options for bringing color
to E Ink screens. It's likely that the company will iterate through a number of approaches in the
coming years as it pursues its goal of getting E Ink closer to full-color printing.
While E Ink explores its color options, competing approaches aren't standing still. I didn't
care for the Mirasol demo that I saw at Qualcomm's CES booth, but the company claims that it
has a newer, much improved version of the MEMs-based technology that looks significantly better.
I was supposed to get a demo of the new Mirasol tech last week, but I wasn't able to go. We've
rescheduled, though, so look for a report next month.
In an
interview with Xconomy.com, the new head of E Ink talks about the company's plans to launch
color displays at the end of this year. T.H. Peng, executive vice president of E Ink's parent
company, Prime View International, admitted to Xconomy that in terms of quality color E Ink won't
be ready to go head-to-head with LCD anytime soon.
"Our color quality will not be as good as LCD, initially," Peng told Xconomy. "But we have
already received very encouraging signs from a few customers that they want to launch our color
e-paper product by the end of this year or the beginning of 2011."
Peng went on to insist that E Ink's color capabilities compare favorably with that of
newsprint—a bar that Peng himself admits is substantially lower than that of glossy
magazines.
I actually got a glimpse of a color E Ink prototype at this past CES, and I will admit that I
wasn't too impressed. Color saturation and contrast were very low, and it was fairly hard to tell
the different colors apart. But the Skiff spokesperson who had the demo mentioned that it
represented only one of a number of possible methods for bringing color to E Ink, and this fits
with what Peng says in the interview.
Right now, E Ink is staffing up in R&D and is exploring a range of options for bringing color
to E Ink screens. It's likely that the company will iterate through a number of approaches in the
coming years as it pursues its goal of getting E Ink closer to full-color printing.
While E Ink explores its color options, competing approaches aren't standing still. I didn't
care for the Mirasol demo that I saw at Qualcomm's CES booth, but the company claims that it
has a newer, much improved version of the MEMs-based technology that looks significantly better.
I was supposed to get a demo of the new Mirasol tech last week, but I wasn't able to go. We've
rescheduled, though, so look for a report next month.
IEEE's Erico Guizzo visited the lab of Masatoshi Ishikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo,
and videotaped this demo of his machine that scans the text and images of a book as you flip
through its pages. Ishikawa is well known in robotics circles for his Matrix bullet time-style
amazing demos -- like a robo-hand that can dribble a ball and catch objects in midair with
superhuman dexterity. How he does it? A Super Vision Chip (that's what he calls it) that can "see"
events too fast for the eye. Ishikawa and his colleagues are already working on several
applications -- including a microscope that can track individual bacteria and a video game
motion-capture system (similar to Microsoft's Project Natal) for gesture playing. Late last year
when I visited the lab, they showed me their latest creation: a superfast book scanner. The system,
developed by lab members Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe, lets you scan a book by rapidly
flipping its pages in front of a high-speed camera. They call this method book flipping scanning.
They told me they can digitize a 200-page book in one minute, and hope to make that even faster.
Superfast Scanner Lets You Digitize a Book By Rapidly Flipping Pages...
Commenteer 1.0.5Commenteer is a drop utility for managing file comments in batch.
You can use the program for
Erasing comments
Setting comments
Appending extensions to comments
Prepending prefixes to comments
Listing comments
of a group of files.
Commenteer is part of the Limit Point Software Utilities Bundle :
http://www.limit-point.com/Utilities.html. Purchase a Utilities password to activate all the
utilities, including Commenteer. Updates are always free, new products always included!
WHAT'S NEWVersion 1.0.5:
A new operation called "Set Comments From EXIF Date" is now available. This operation sets
the comment of an image file to its EXIF, if one can be found.
Panasonic
has never needed to wait for a new studio album before putting together another major tour, the latest of which it's dubbed Touch
the Future. Trading in the traveling truck exhibition for a more intimate indoor setting, the real
production Full HD 3D televisions are available and on display, along with glasses, Blu-ray players
plus a few other products for good measure. We took a look as soon as the doors opened in NYC (the
display runs through today at the Penn Plaza Pavilion and other locations in Chicago and Los
Angeles, check the schedule for 12 more cities on deck) and got an eye full of the same 50-inch
plasma 3DTVs
on sale at Best Buy stores around the country. One major new look for this demo was an
NVIDIA PC running the 3DTV Play solution, as you can see from the pics even New York's finest
enjoyed turning a lap or two of Need for Speed: Shift in 3D. The action was smooth and
easy compatibility with 3D gaming on the PC should provide plenty of content while we wait for more
true 3D games to hit consoles (which should ramp up after the PS3 update
this summer) while checking out Blu-ray demos on a 50-inch television proved every bit as engaging
this time as it did on the 152-inch
CES display.
CheckUp... With its use of the latest Mac OS X technologies, breakthrough
ease-of-use and innovation, all Mac users will find CheckUp extremely useful and even fun. It's
like the dashboard of your car!
CheckUp is first designed to monitor the usage of CPU, Memory, Disk Drives and Network Adapters.
You can display detailed information about all running processes and pause or terminate these at
any time. By adding rules that will be triggered when certain conditions are met for a specified
resource on the computer, you can receive visual notifications. For example, CheckUp can alert
you when a certain resource exceeds a certain value or when a hard drive seems to have hardware
failures, even when the application is not opened (thanks to an innovative background process and
the use of the S.M.A.R.T technology).
WHAT'S NEWVersion 2.6:
Detect common issues of Mac OS X at launch.
Improved alerts on disks or memory issues
Improved support of Macs with Intel Core i5 or Intel Core i7 processors
Improved support of Macs with Intel Xeon processors and hyper-threading
Kiwi 1.2.0Kiwi is a full-featured Twitter client that supports multiple
accounts, groups, searches and rules/filters. Kiwi also gives users the power to change the look,
or theme, to match their desktop.
Kiwi comes with nine built-in themes, with more available online. Plus, Kiwi is extensible with
an API for building themes from HTML and CSS. Powerful rules allow users to filter, mark, or
highlight desired content or tweets. Kiwi also supports picture posting, url shortening, and
keyboard shortcuts. Kiwi shows a user's home timeline, mentions, direct messages (both to and
from), and favorites for each account. Keyboard shortcuts allow you to easily switch among them.
Kiwi supports auto-updating to ensure users have the latest version.
Features of Kiwi include:
Themes - customize with nine themes included and more available online
Rules - find and highlight important content or hide unwanted tweets
Multiple twitter accounts - utilize multiple accounts or account groups, and switch quickly
among them
Saved searches - auto-refresh searches
Account groups - organize your timelines
Theme API - build themes with HTML and CSS
WHAT'S NEWVersion 1.2.0:
xAuth authentication, improved rate limits, and robust connections.
Retweets now show original author info and images.
A new timeline for displaying just the retweets you've sent and received.
Choose to show real names, user names, or both.
Drag and drop images into the post view.
Inline image support for Ember, Brizzley, and TwitrPix.
Client attribution shows you which client posted each tweet.
Improvements
No more truncated retweets.
Many perfomance enhancements.
Smoother animation.
Tons of other small tweaks and improvements
Theme API
%source% template for client attribution.
"retweet" class for API retweets.
%retweet-image% template for the image of the retweet-author.
"direct" class direct messages.
Favorite button and class allow adding favorites to any theme.
Plus lots more, see the API reference for more info.
Screenium 1.3.1Screenium - Make live movies of your Mac's screen, capture
everything happening on your Desktop, in application programs, including mouse pointer, selections
and movements - in real-time! Screenium even grabs live content streamed over the Internet. You can
actually capture movie-in-movie: Screenium records your screen just like it is - including ongoing
video playback in multiple windows.
With on-the-fly voice recordings, you can easily describe what you are doing on-screen. Simply
use the built-in microphone or any external audio source or input device connected to your Mac.
Screenium supports an unlimited number of audio sources, simultaneously, and in pristine sound
quality.
Capture your built-in iSight as Picture-in-Picture movie, with you commenting the scenes. Use any
QuickTime-compatible webcam tethered to your Mac too! Screenium 1.1 improves support for external
Cameras as well as it features fully redesigned and enhanced 'Mouse' function: configure mouse
action visualization, including the display of mouse button names.
We've now added more language localizations, making Screenium available in the following
languages:
English
French
Dutch
German
Italian
Spanish
& more languages to be added soon!
Feedback is always welcome!
Anything you miss in Screenium? Whenever you wish to contact us with suggestions, comments or
improvements, simply send an e-mail to screenium (at) synium.de.
WHAT'S NEWVersion 1.3.1:
Solved problem with rare cases of black border on right side of recorded video and video
split horizontally
Reference Tracker 1.6.2Reference Tracker is an indispensable tool for writers, researchers
or students. It creates documents that store all the citations and references your essays, research
projects or books. It automatically creates Harvard, APA, MLA or Chicago/Turabian formatted
reference lists to insert into your writing when needed.
WHAT'S NEWVersion 1.6.2:
Added support for FireFox version 3.6.
Fixed a bug that could cause BibTex file importing to fail under Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
We've been itching for Unigine Corp to publicly release the Unigine Heaven tech demo for Linux with
its advanced OpenGL renderer, since the DirectX 11 version launched last October with heavenly
graphics, but GPU driver bugs have held up the OpenGL Linux release...
CyberLink die Demo der Version 10 seiner
Heimkino-Software PowerDVD veröffentlicht. Neben zahlreichen Neuerungen greift das Programm
vor allem den 3D-Trend auf und bringt die dritte Dimension ins heimische Wohnzimmer.
Above you’ll find a demo that Wired magazine gave during SXSW 2010, showing off what they
figure their app will look like on portable tablets like the iPad and HP Slate. As you can see, it’s
more than just a color PDF reader, as they have video elements and animated images in the
magazine content, so they’ve actually taken the time to tailor the reading experience to
the device. Consider us subscribed once this is available.
Sure, we've been
pushing Microsoft hard for Windows Phone 7 Series details like copy and paste (no) and multitasking
(no), but we just realized that we've never actually seen a 7 Series device... make a phone call. A
little running around later and we've got two demo handsets calling each other. We're told that the
little white arrow on the call panel will eventually bring up options like conference calling,
speakerphone, and mute, but it's not working yet -- and one of the phones seems to think it's
running on Cingular, so either time travel is an unannounced feature of the OS or Microsoft still
has some work to do. Video after the break.
P.S. They're just demo SIMs, but we're sure the poor PR folks babysitting the devices would
appreciate it if you didn't call the numbers, okay? Be nice.
Silverlight'ın 4. versiyonunun
çıktığı ÅŸu günlerde
silverlight kullanan siteler yavaş yavaş artıyor, silverlight'ın flash ile rekabetinde geri
kaldığı konuların
başında da şimdilik kaynak yetersizliği
gösterilebilir.
Silverlight uygulamalarınızda kullanabileceÄŸiniz ücretsiz
yeni/eski ve kullanışlı kontrolleri
topladık. siz de eklemek istediklerinizi yorum olarak gönderirseniz güzel bir kaynak
oluÅŸmuÅŸ olur.
GOA WinForms GOA WinForms, Microsoft .NET kütüphanesinin standart
System.Windows.Form sınıfının
flash ve silverlight implementasyonudur.
Barındırdığı hazır
araçlar sayesinde Kısa sürede zengin web uygulamaları
geliÅŸtirebilirsiniz. web sitesi - demo - indir
AgDataGrid Suite Ücretsiz Silverlight Grid Kontrolü AgDataGrid,
sitelerde veri göstermek için sıklıkla
kullanılan grid (ızgara) sisteminin güzel bir silverlight
alternatifidir, veri gruplama, sıralama, düzenleme gibi vs. iÅŸlemleri
basitçe yapabilen zengin bir çözümdür.
MIX10 is going strong and this year, the Microsoft conference has been filled with big
announcements. Yesterday, we learned about
Windows Phone 7 Series development and today, we get a glimpse of what is coming in Internet
Explorer 9. The latest web browser from Microsoft stays competitive by supporting several HTML 5
specifications including CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XHTML parsing, and both embedded
H.264/MPEG4 video and MP3/AAC audio. Microsoft’s latest web browser also includes a new and
improved JavaScript engine that combined with its GPU-accelerated graphics promises to deliver a
rich browsing experience. You can test drive the latest browser via an online demo over at
Microsoft’s new IE9 website or, if you enjoy living life on the edge of a system collapse,
you can download and install the Internet Explorer 9 platform preview.
El grupo de rock Barajunda estrenamos web en barajunda.com con un regalo para todos vosotros y
todas vosotras: nuestra Demo del 2009 en descarga gratuita. Actualmente estamos preparando nuevo
disco del que si todo va bien, tendreis un adelanto pronto. Escuchas directas en
myspace.com/barajunda.
Lexmark has just recently unveiled their All-in-One (AIO)
inkjet printer at the Fifth Annual Small Business Summit with the Pinnacle Pro901.
This is probably a follow-up to all the AIO printers that were revealed last year around Fall, but
this one is designed for small to medium business and small and home office users. Like most
Lexmark printers it has the 4-in-1 capability of print, scan, copy, or fax, but I don’t
have any information if it will be wireless. Are we at the point where any printer these days has
to be wireless?
The big bragging right of the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901, is the cheap price of ink cartridges. They
are only $4.99, and are able to print 500 pages. Lexmark is glad to say that this is “a
penny a page”. The cartridges, as well as the SmarSolutions and an industry-leading 5-year
warranty, have earned the company the 2010 Hot Tech Demo Award.
The Pro901 has a 4.3 inch capacitive touchscreen, and it also has several one touch printer apps,
available for download from the Web. I have the X7675
Lexmark on my desk at home, and I have used the Interact before,
and as fun as the touchscreen is, buttons works just fine.
The Pro901 will be available in April for $299.99.
[Today's delay in Betanews bringing you Internet Explorer 9 news was brought to you as a
public service by the Cable Modem: Your Best Friend When It's Crunch Time. Remember, where
there's smoke, there's a Comcast cable modem. Smell one today.]
It is perhaps the unlikeliest scenario any technologist could imagine as recently as two years
ago: Microsoft evangelizing developers to embrace Web standards by helping it to build its Web
browser. Although one of the first browsers to be distributed for free, Internet Explorer has
never been open source. Historically, it's always been ready when it's ready; its value
proposition has been to the consumer who prefers convenience over adaptability; and when the fact
that it was dirt slow was pointed out, the response typically was, the consumer isn't going to
care.
Today, the value proposition started to take shape for IE9, the browser that in an earlier era
didn't need a value proposition. Microsoft's strategy, which premiered today at MIX 10, was to
seize control of tomorrow's key talking point, HTML 5 compliance and compatibility -- to make
HTML 5 identifiable with Internet Explorer. In fact, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch's
greeting sentence to MIX 10 attendees this morning wasn't without the term "HTML 5."
"When we started looking deeply at HTML 5, we saw that it enabled a whole new class of
applications," was Hachamovitch's second sentence. "These applications will stress the browser
runtime and hardware, as today's sites just don't. We quickly realized that doing HTML 5 right --
our intent -- was more about designing around what HTML 5 applications will need, rather than a
particular set of features. Done right, HTML 5 applications will feel more like real apps than
Web pages, and our approach to HTML 5 is to make standard Web patterns that developers already
know and use, just run faster and better by taking advantage of PC hardware through Windows."
Developers have always known that Microsoft has always had the capability to leverage its mastery
of Windows APIs to build smoother applications. But as other Microsoft applications have weaned
themselves off of the old Win32 dependencies, such as rendering using the old GDI and GDI+
libraries, Internet Explorer has fallen further and further behind. In fact, you could make the
case that Silverlight gives Web developers opportunities to use the modern rendering libraries
that IE should be using now natively.
Soliciting general developers' help in improving IE (some will say for the first time), Microsoft
today began distributing the bare-bones chassis of the IE9 Web browser -- no frills, no features,
not even bookmarks. Just a rendering engine in a window. With Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and
now even Opera having made effective cases for the Web being "the platform," Microsoft
desperately needs to resume defining the platform before someone else ends up defining it
instead.
But one element of Microsoft's IE message remains the same even today: Those areas where the
competitors say they have the advantage, may not be all that important to end users. Case in
point: just-in-time compilation, the factor that has catapulted Mozilla Firefox and WebKit-based
browsers such as Safari and Chrome into today's speed race.
For example, Hachamovitch did cite the IE9 chassis' speed improvement on the widely accepted
SunSpider performance test, created by the originators of the open source WebKit engine. On
Microsoft's chart, Opera is the fastest performer on the SunSpider, followed by a Chrome 5 dev
build, a Chrome 4 stable build, and the latest Safari 4.0.5, released late last week by Apple
(apologies for the fuzzy screenshot of Microsoft's chart). So yes, IE9 comes in fifth, rather
than dead last. But the difference isn't that much of a difference, he said:
"It's interesting to note that the gap between IE9 and some of the other browsers to its right is
about an eye-blink -- it's about 300 ms. And it took 70 seconds to identify that 300 ms
difference."
When it comes to HTML 5, Microsoft wants to be perceived now as leading that standard.
But with respect to standards at large, the company's position remains unchanged from
last year: As long as Web standards are up in the air, compliance is a foggy term anyway. Today,
Hachamovitch implied that if the goal of standards bodies were the same as Microsoft's goal of
one language, the fog would be lifted:
"Developers want to use the same HTML, the same script, and the same markup across browsers.
That's the goal of standards and interoperability. No need for different code paths for different
browsers. That's a key goal for HTML 5. We love HTML 5 so much, we want it to actually work. In
IE9, it will. We want the same HTML, the same script, the same markup to just work across
browsers. So in IE9, we'll do for the rest of the Web platform what we did for CSS 2.1 in IE8.
Now, at the same time, we want to be responsible about the standards that are still emerging, the
standards that are in committee, and the standards that are partially implemented, often in
different ways across browsers. So to make decisions on this front, we started from data."
As an Acid3 test runs in the background (it's not done yet), Dean Hachamovitch demonstrates
how 'standards' support varies between even Firefox and Chrome (lower right) for the same
markup.
The IE9 team leader went on to describe an internal tool that measured the script activity on
7,000 active Web sites. The telemetry that it received showed, for instance, that the #1 method
in use was indexOf(), on 94% of sites measured. Number 17 on the list, used by 65% of sites, was
addEventListener, a method that's key to W3C's advanced event registration model, but not yet supported in IE8.
"Because we started from data, what developers like you really use was our starting point for
what to support." As a result, the IE9 chassis passed 578 out of 578 in the CSS3.info selectors
test, putting it now on a par with Firefox. That's important, Hachamovitch noted, because
developers want that one language -- one CSS, one HTML -- to work with for all browsers
across the board.
Meanwhile, the IE9
preview posts a 55% score on the Acid3
standards compliance test -- up from 20% for IE8, and 12% for IE7. The latest stable Firefox,
by comparison, scores 94% on this test; and Safari, Chrome, and Opera all score 100%. Could the
CSS3.info test be fair, and the Acid3 test unfair?
"Some people use Acid3 as shorthand for standards support. Acid3 is kind of interesting, it
exercises about a hundred details of a dozen different technologies. Some of them are under
construction, others less so," Hachamovitch said. He added a promise that Acid3 scores will
continue to improve "as we make more of the markup that developers actually use, work."
Next: Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU...Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU
The architectural development that helped Firefox and others vault from banana-like bars such as
those on the left of Microsoft's SunSpider chart, to peanut-like bars like those on the right,
was the implementation of just-in-time compilation (JIT) -- a concept first implemented in Java
and .NET, re-engineered for JavaScript. Today, Hachamovitch's tactic was to characterize JIT
compilers as "JIT-ters," complete with the wimpy sound and unstable connotations, similar to how
AMD characterized Intel's introduction of "hyperthreading" five years ago.
"In the beginning, the Web had lots and lots of HTML, and little pieces of script here and there.
And an interpreter was good enough for that. Over the years, different browsers have added
JIT-ters and different kinds of JIT-ters, many different kinds of JIT-ters. The problem with JIT
today is that so much time and energy goes into managing the time and scope that the JIT-ter
operates in. Users have to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too much, because the JIT-ter is sitting
there compiling the code, and you don't get to run it. And the user has to wait if the JIT-ter
JITs too little, because then the JIT-ter did a little bit, and the user is stuck running a
slower interpreter."
Something vaguely similar to the phenomenon Hachamovitch described is what we at Betanews have
seen in a recent round of high-level browser testing, on IE and other platforms, in preparation
for today's release of the IE9 tech preview. JavaScript interepreters, by today's design, are
single-threaded. Their ability to run JavaScript very fast depends, to a great extent, on the
relative complexity or simplicity of the instructions. JIT compilers produce much simpler machine
code, but only in situations where the JavaScript instructions are relatively simple to parse,
and not entangled in competing loops with unsightly timeouts. Long stretches of uniform code --
100,000, one million, even ten million iterations -- are like butter candy to browsers like
Chrome, smooth, silky, and easy to digest. But break up those instructions with interruptions
(for instance, updates of an on-screen timer at one-second intervals), and what once seemed like
butter now processes like rock-filled concrete. And sequences that Chrome could execute in under
30 seconds, all of a sudden, could take (by my estimate) days to execute if left
unattended. It's in situations like this where the JIT-ter is jittering, to borrow Dean's
phrasing. But about the only place you're going to find someone trying to do 10 million
iterations of an algorithm in succession, is at Betanews, where the guy doing the testing is on
his sixth cup of coffee and is jittery anyway.
Still, in anticipation of the types of advances Dean described today, we've been working to
create a new class of tests that would enable IE9 to shine if it truly does what Dean
says it does. Today, he described how IE9 moves the JavaScript interpreter to a background
process:
"Compiling in the background puts hardware to use here without having to re-code the site. And
the key here is to bring the best technology to the most important language you use, JavaScript."
HTML 5 in large
print, SVG in small print
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a W3C standard since 1999, has never been actively supported by
Internet Explorer even to this day. During today's demonstration of what he called, on the
surface, "HTML 5 applications," Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch was joined onstage by Windows
Division President Steven Sinofsky to jointly demonstrate the IE9 technical preview's new
GPU-assisted graphics rendering support, with Sinofsky on the new browser and Hachamovitch
playing catch-up with Chrome.
Tucked away in the background of that clever little duel was the fact that IE9 was, for the first
time, directly and openly supporting SVG.
It's difficult to see from the screenshot of Microsoft's presentation above, but Sinofsky's IE9
browser at the upper left is rendering 100 simultaneous 3D extrapolations of 2D logos from
various browsers, at 64 frames per second. Hachamovitch's Google Chrome, meanwhile, is rendering
about 36 simultaneous logos at about 8 fps.
HTML 5 may have had little or nothing to do with this result. The real takeaway from this demo is
the following: For years, Web developers have relied on Adobe Flash for vector graphics that are
scalable, mainly since it's the only platform that can be plugged into all the major browsers and
that can run uniformly within all of them. The reason for that is IE's reluctance to embrace SVG.
Well, now that embracing SVG is necessary in order for Microsoft to demonstrate its graphics
processing prowess, this could change the ballgame for Web developers, who may soon have at their
disposal, at long last, a single open standard for animating Web sites.
Who better to celebrate that news with than the lovable Clippy character we all adored
from Office XP? In a demonstration not only of processing prowess but of standards compliance,
the two executives enlisted Clippy as the hero in a 3D game of Asteroids, where the targets were
multi-colored circles of translucent plastic. Rendered properly, Clippy could hold his own; but
stuck in Google Chrome, which doesn't appear to apply relative opacity properly, it looks like
Clippy may be in trouble. And it looks like he's writing a letter of distress.
Microsoft has posted links to the tests Sinofsky and Hachamovitch demonstrated on stage, on its
special site devoted to
the IE9 developers' preview. There you're also likely to find the stunning IE9 video
carousel, which HTML 5 has everything to do with. Here, four HD videos of underwater
scenes are rendered on translucent screens, that simultaneously travel along an invisible
carousel-like path. Of course, you may always have known this kind of rendering power existed in
your GPU, but you might never have seen your Web browser go this far to exploit that power.
The IE team has always been careful to say that the advances that matter are the ones that users
see and feel. Last year, the company advanced the argument that millisecond differences were
imperceptible. Which they are, unless they become fruitful and multiply -- and in a Web
applications environment, that will happen. The news from Las Vegas today is this: Microsoft is
building a Web applications platform. Finally.
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We just spent
some quality time with the 
After having to endure
CyberLink die Demo der Version 10 seiner
Heimkino-Software PowerDVD veröffentlicht. Neben zahlreichen Neuerungen greift das Programm
vor allem den 3D-Trend auf und bringt die dritte Dimension ins heimische Wohnzimmer.
Lexmark has just recently unveiled their All-in-One (AIO)
inkjet printer at the Fifth Annual Small Business Summit with the Pinnacle Pro901.
Meanwhile, the IE9
preview posts a 55% score on 
HTML 5 in large
print, SVG in small print
Recommandations
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and reject those that you are not interested in
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