Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

We recently purchased two HP Touchsmart PCs for the Arts Learning centre. Our goal is to encourage our faculty members to experiment with new touch based user interface which would allow us to observe and develop new applications to enhance their teaching experiences. HP TouchSmart is an all-in-one computer, similar to an iMac. It has a touch-sensitive screen, allowing users to control the navigation using their fingers. With the built-in HP navigation software, users can scroll through menus and files using their hands very much like using an iPhone.

My colleagues and I got excited and opened up one to play around during our weekly staff meeting. We soon found some pros and cons about this new PC:
PROs:
- Relative accurate touch panel allows us to perform simple image manipulations and video editing easily using standard Windows software such as Photoshop and Premiere
- A very bright and large screen makes the viewing experience pleasant
- To many less-technical learners, touching the screen is much more comfortable and intuitive when learning new web applications and image databases
- Very straight forward to set up, took less than 10 minutes to initialize the PC, my grandma can do it without hassling me
- The built in microphone and camera makes it to be very convenient for video conferencing
- No wires other than the power cord, makes it essential to mount on the wall, saves desktop spaces. The wireless keyboard and mouse works instantly and pretty far ranged

CONs:
- No Ethernet connection, only wifi, this requires the users to have a decent speed wireless connection when using the SmartTouch
- No multi-touch function, it would be cool if one can manipulate images like using an iPhone, but can not do with this PC, don’t know if it’s the hardware limitation or the software limitation
- The unit is very heavy, my grandma won’t be able to move it
- The HP navigation platform is rather slow when it comes to high resolution images or video

We will present this to the general Arts faculty members, will see how they would react to the new UI and input method.

Remember how Tom Cruise navigated the "special computer interface" which would tell him the future crimes? Well, the future telling machine is not yet invented, but the hand/glove based navigation system is out. Mouse was the key to the computer revolution in the past century. However, more and more researchers are experimenting with finger navigation systems which turns the users' hands into a complex input device. G-Speak seems to be one of the pioneers in the field. John Underkoffler is the chief scientist behind the G-Speak OS development. Using special Input/Output bulbs, the computer may detect the movement from the specially made gloves hence execute certain command in the computer. I think this is going to emerge with the 3D virtual world project in the near future. Because once a new input device being widely adopted, new user interfaces will be followed. The current 2D based web simply won't cut it.

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine at UBC and I successfully finished a grant application using Google Doc. It was my first time using a collaborative word processor and the experience was great. We finished the 6 pages proposal within a few days while each of us were in different locations, the only communication needed was a few phone calls. This really got me interested in the collaborative desktop publishing environments. I then did some digging and surprisingly found out there are quite a few products out there (or coming on the horizon) to accommodate the collaborative desktop publishing needs. Google Doc is obviously the first tool in the genre. Microsoft has been chasing the “Microsoft Office Live” idea since 2005, and the beta was launched just two weeks ago.

There seems to be some critical issues with the current collaborative desktop publishing tools:
- Sharing the existing documents directly from the hard drives. How can we securely share the hundreds and thousands documents from the past without uploading, converting and grant permissions?
- Offline publishing. Although internet connections are becoming more standard in our modern life styles, but there are still a huge crowd enjoys writing offline. How would the collaborative desktop publishing tool accommodate that?
- Synchronizing changes by different authors when simultaneous editing occurs is still a little flicky to me. There were several times when I see the message of my colleague is editing the document, I was reluctant to make changes at the same time. This is mainly due to I don’t see the changes he is making at the time. I would be nice to be able to see which section of the documents he is working on in real time.

Recently hyped up in the media, a new desktop publishing tool is in the launching phase. It’s called “Live Documents”, created by Sabeer Bhatia whom sold Hotmail to Microsoft back in 1997. In order to receive a beta testing account of Live Documents, you need to give them your email address and hope to “get invited”, similar to the GMail launching process. There are two reasons that I am looking into this platform:
- It is done using Flash and Flex which means the UI should be well designed and word processing transactions should be seamless.
- It offers solutions to the 3 issues listed above.
- It offers real time communication tools like chat while publishing.

Beside Live Documents, there are a few other collaborative desktop publishing platforms out there:

Zoho, an application based on the Google Gears open source platform, has been launched earlier this year. It offers offline editing. There is rumors that Yahoo is looking at Zoho and possibly looking for opportunities to acquiring this Silicon Valley and India based company.

Another one is Buzzword which is being backed up by Adobe at the moment. It was created by the Boston-based company called Virtual Ubiquity. It is currently in open beta.

There are also few other web based word processors that have the potential to compete in the "web-top applications" race: Glide Write, ajaxWrite and ThinkFree. As stated in the title, the collaborative desktop publishing era is already here, it’s time to find your right tool and give it a try.

Yep, I am on Facebook now... I have tried to resist it all that time but I registered today. The reason made me to do this is there have been increasing number of faculty members here at UBC are mentioning Facebook to me and ask me why not tag along. They were mainly driven to the platform by their students or their own kids. But the amazing thing is most of them are enjoying the experience. I was just curious to see if there are opportunities to build educational applications out of the Facebook API.

Anyway, I am quite amazed how many people can Facebook dig up based on my hotmail address book. From high school to University friends that have gone missing for ages. Every few hours I log in, there are some new friends waiting for me! It is a really impressive experience. But I am still quite skeptical in regard to the privacy issues behind the accounts. With my co-worker Sung's help, I was able to tighten up the privacy settings. Of course Sung has been telling me that I am paranoid. Oh well, I will see where does this rabbit hole take me...

UPDATE: It's 2:00AM and I am still POKING around on Facebook... Not a good sign...

Soon after Adobe released Apollo - a tool that brings Flash contents a step closer to the client side desktop, Microsoft reveals it's counter strike tool – Silverlight, formerly code-named "WPF/E" . Microsoft's description of this new program is,

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

In my understanding, Silverlight is a new Scalable Vector Graphics tool built on Microsoft's .NET technology with a focus of media components integration. Another word, Silverlight is a new Flash player where combines vector graphics, raster graphics, sound files, video files, and human interaction elements. There have been many discussion on Microsoft Silverlight Vs Adobe Flash. Grant Skinner has a pretty good summary on this topic. In general, I believe the only way for Microsoft to succeed with Silverlight technology is:

1.Focus on the market, dump tons (I mean TONS) of cash towards the promotion of this new software. This one I am almost certain is the least to worry for Microsoft.

2.Understand the usesrs' and content creators' need. Design a good user interface for the Sliverlight content authoring. I see the true value of Flash as it provided a bridge between the logically creative developers and the artistically creative designers. The geeky coders were excited by Flash's simple to use interface and yet powerful scripting engine. The visual designers appreciate the simplicity of the scripting aspect of Flash.

3.Microsoft MUST think cross platform. If Microsoft can not provide both a good user interface and a flawless client side compiler (player), Silverlight is aimed to fail. It's dead simple, most of the telanted designers I know are using Mac... Not to mention I had some "funny" bugs when I installed Silverlight to my Firefox in Windows XP. I had to restart a few times to see the installed plugin.

4.Break the "search engine black box theory" on rich media content. It's just fatal that standard search engines can not pick up Flash contents. It's like you putting content into a black box. My limited understanding of Silverlight is much contents are in well organized XML format where indexing it by the searching engines are feasible.

5.More power. You can't just "duplicate" the existing power of Flash player, Microsoft needs to invent some well differentiated new features like 3D Open GL support...

6.Microsoft needs to see they are not just competing with 1 of Adobe's product, they need to consider taking on the entire Adobe's product line. At the least be prepared for it. Because after the merge between Adobe and Macromedia, applications like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Acrobat PDF and Premiere are working together closer than ever. Adobe is creating a true harmony among their web/media publishing tools.

I may add more points to this post later. In conclusion, a majority of designers/developers doing RIA (Rich Internet Applicaitons) and Online content publishing are using Adobe applications. As much as I want to see other alternative technology to take on Flash, I still think Silverlight has a long way to go...

VS

Saw this youtube video clip today at a Chinese web site. I think it is a combination of advertisement of Intel from various of sources. But still, it is well put together. The article say we may be there in 10 years, I say in 3-5 years. Some of the technology is already existing, but the video gives them a nice twist:

- Watch based communication device;
- Voice control home appliances;
- Home entertainment system links up to home office system;
- 3D GPS navigation system;
- Risk band communication system with online community functionality built-in...

It's amazing how fast the technology inventions are taking place now days... Check it out, really cool!

According to sina.com, a research team lead by the University of Tokyo created a new record of the Internet speed. The record was actually created back in December 31st, 2006 where the Internet speed reached 9.08 Gbps which could be the fastest practical speed of Internet 2. The theoratical speed limit of Internet is 10Gbps. (The practical speed require a 10 percent improvement for recognition) The test was conducted by transmitting data over a 20 thousands miles path using the newer Internet addressing system – IPv6.

According to this speed, transmitting a high resolution movie could only take 30 seconds. The report says a cpacity of 100 Gbps network is under constructiong by the Internet 2 consortium. What are we going to do with all that speed?!

The first flash player on hand-held devices that support Actionscript 2.0 and XML Socket and Web Service/SOAP API officially released - Flash Player 7.0 for Pocket PC.

Flash Lite 2.0 and Flash Player 7.0 for PPC will push mobile based rich internet application into a new dimension!

Google Finance uses both Flash and AJAX to generate their dynamic pages and stock charts. Google Finance uses a Flash based live ticker which allows users to zoom on the chart dynamically. It is a little slow to manipulate though. What I like Google Finance the most is the Blog section at the bottom where you can find the newest blog postings on the symbol you are looking at. Soon or later, I think Google is going to reveal their gigantic blue-print which include all of the smart services they have been beta testing.

There is a new commercial searching service launched by Google China - Google Local. http://bendi.google.com You enter 2 search term, the first one can be a product you are looking for, or the genre of business you are looking for, such as: Pizza, Hot Pot, Noodle. The second search term would be a geographical range like Beijing, 2nd Ring Road East. Then you will receive a list of business names and their phone numbers with precise address. On the right hand side, you get the city map and direction to the business. Commercial businesses can add their names to it for free at: http://www.google.com/local/add/ I am not aware there is an English version of this exist...

Sony announced there will be an official Flash Player intergrated into PSP in the coming month. The player should be Flash Player 5 or later. I just hope it has XML parsing functions. Can't wait to intergrate the learning tools into PSP! Oh, forgot to mention, Sony is also releasing the Chinese Font Set, how is the idea of learning some Chinese while you are playing PSP?

Two students in MIT invented a pair of water glass for valentines. They used General Packet Radio Service to synchronize the LED built into the glass so that when one of the glass is used, the other one will glow at a distance. This way the two lovers can share the moment of drinking from remote locations. The technology can also be used by nurses in hospitals to monitor patients.

Microsoft Office 2007, code-name Office “12” has an impressive user interface. The Microsoft Office UI development team is so proud of the design they say it is “the most significant update to the Microsoft Office user interface in more than a decade.” The team has updated the official preview page, go check it out!

The development team has smartly used several TAB systems to replace the traditional system of menus, toolbars, task panes, and dialog boxes. They focused on a “result-oriented” approach which enables the users to use the advanced features easier and faster.

Tabs are being used across Microsoft Office 2007. The Command Tabs reminds me very much of the property panels in Dreamweaver. One of the benefit using panels like this is the users can easily categorize and familiarize different features and tasks. It essentially makes Microsoft Office 2007 easier to learn compare the past versions.

Office 2007 also used the object property panel (Contextual Command Tabs) idea where you click on “instances” (e.g. chart), the properties and modification tools associated to the type of instance (e.g. chart editing functions) will appear. This makes more sense compare to the old versions where you constantly “search” for the editing functions.

The overall Office 2007 interface is well done and it would be a good direction to complete with the Google’s “Web Based Word Processor” (Writely).

Ever after Lee Kaifu switched to Google, the war between Microsoft and Google is no longer behind the curtain. Started this month, Microsoft high up officials constantly make noises on the new MSN Search Engine will beat Google's Search Engine. It looks like Microsoft is no longer fooling around but is ready to take on a direct competition against Google's bread and butter service - web search. How confident is Microsoft?

What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the US market place than Google. - Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa

My immediate impression was, "Man, Microsoft is gonna bundle this new service with VISTA". The answer is not...

Should we add a Google-like search engine but twice as good, hard-core into Windows? Guess what. If we did that, I don't think a company called Google would be very happy. - Neil Holloway

Then how is MSN Search planning on beating Google?

Integrating search into those other applications... makes it very seamless for people." - Neil Holloway

The applications Neil meant here I believe are MSN Messenger and Hotmail etc. I have to say the MSN Messenger has a pretty concrete IM market and Google Talk just started a little too late. Gmail gave a pretty powerful shot to start but there have been mixed feed backs on people are not feeling comfortable with how Google can "spy through" their emails to deliver accurate advertisements.

However, since we are talking about search engines here, how can Microsoft's new search engine be better? Well, this is not really a secret any more, is to go beyond finding URLs and instead focus in on the specific information sought by Internet users:

Generally these days what you get back is URLs, and based upon research, 50 per cent of the time you do a search you don't get the URL you're looking for. - Neil Holloway

This means:

potential home buyers might find a group of houses in the price range and with the precise amenities they're seeking. Or web surfers might find a restaurant with the kind of menu they want in a particular geographic area. - Neil Holloway

The new service will be launched in 6 months period first in North America and UK and then different countries (languages) after every three months. Who will win the supreme? Let's wait and see.

Remember the sushi USB storate devices? The same manufacturer, Solidalliance has recently revealed their newest product, iDisk Diamond - The World Smallest USB Storage Device. It only weights 1 gram and comes in an dimension of 27x12x1.9mm. iDisk Diamond supports USB 2.0 but there is only 1 version of it-128MB. Careful, DON'T LOSE IT!

As a powerful response to the recent OpenOffice.Org 2.0 release, some Microsoft insiders have revealed the up-coming MS office being hosted as a server/client product. Bill Gates has mentioned about shifting the paradigm from licensed software to software access licenses over the last few years. By charging an annual renewals to the license, users can use Microsoft CRM, ERP and SharePoint products. This will obviously change the paradigm of the software delivery process. Is this a good way to "compete" with the open source products? Or it may open a can of worms which may cause a negative effects from the end users?

Now you can apply a flash interface over the existing Google Map and yet preserves all functionalities of Google Map!

This demo is built based on VGMap. VGMap is a new library created by Eyebeam that allows designers, developers, and mapping geeks to overlay data on top of Google Maps in a richer way than is possible using their standard system. Flash provides for vector drawing, as well as a interactive and animation functionality. This VGMap library is simply the glue between GMap and Flash, as well as a handful of Flash ActionScript libraries and sample code to simplify the process of drawing over the map correctly.

This new technology simply opens a new dimension to the future Google GPS development. Will give it a try to see how this works...

Sun Microsystems Inc donated its StarOffice code to the open source development community five years ago and that's when OpenOffice.org project was initiated. There have been over 50 million downloads since the project started. The development team just announced the release of version 2.0 which has been considered as a "significant milestone for the productivity software market".

There is an increasing intention of using open source products in government and educational facilities. The State of Massachusetts has chosen to move to the OpenDocument format as the standard for all office documents by January 2007. Government of India has released over 7 million OpenOffice source CDs in different native languages. Local government of Auvegne, France has passed 64 thousands of OpenOffice CDs to the students of the region.

Here at art Faculty of Arts, UBC, we have installed Open Office (Star Office) on all lab terminals (over 120 computers) for several years. Download a copy today to compare it against Microsoft Office Suite yourself, if the result is satisfying, why pay hundreds of dollars to type your daily document?

You can also use BitTorrent to download or order a CD from the website.

I have been planning to migrate some of our learning tools and Pachyderm templates onto mobile devices over the last few months. But Flash Lite 1.0 is just not powerful enough. Flash Lite 2.0 is coming in 2006 according to the web speculations. There has been information indicating this player is being built based on the Flash 7 engine. This means it should support ActionScript 2.0. I am expecting it should support object targeting, audio/video support, external file fetching (images, media files), and most importantly, XML parsing. In the meanwhile, I believe Flash Lite 2.0 will have a higher adoptions over the mobile phone industry.

A Japanese manufacturer of wireless communications equipment (Maspro), has developed a transmission system that can send Wi-Fi signals as far as five kilometers. The client needs a pair of special antennas to receive the signals from the transmitter from 5 km away. Using one of the two antennas can receive the signals within 2 km. The product is reasonably priced: the 5-km version costs around $5,000. This technology can be used in surveillance systems. Having a spy camera hooked up and receive the signal within 5 km radius that cost only 5 K is quite amazing.

viewing full length movie on your MP3 player is just around the corner. According to website Apple Insider, Apple has begun production of the new iPod Video which could be in stores by as early as the 18th of October 2005 (That's one week away!) Although PSP already has the capability of playing video files but the battery has always been a challenge for the hand held video devices. Hope Apple can make a break through on this new player. What I am really interested is whether this new player will support Macromedia Flash or Flash Lite standards.

Eric Schmidt, Google Chief Executive said yesterday at the Association of National Advertisers annual conference in Phoenix that It would take 300 years to index all the world's information!

"We did a math exercise and the answer was 300 years," Schmidt said in response to an audience question asking for a projection of how long the company's mission will take. "The answer is it's going to be a very long time."

This means approximately 5 million terabytes of data, right now, Google has indexed approximately 170 terabytes. Schmidt also revealed some impressive values on Google's mainstream profit, online advertisements:

Of the estimated $283 billion spent on advertising in the United States, $11.3 billion is spent on the Internet, with Google taking in about 1 percent of that, Schmidt said.

Steven Sinofsky recently revealed that the newest Office product from Microsoft - Office 12 will have the capability of saving a document into Adobe PDF format. However, Sinofsky did not indicate whether this feature is an add on or if it requires the users to pay extra. My guess is not, since people can easy buy the add-on from Adobe directly. Office suite is one of the two lifelines of Microsoft (the other lifeline is Windows of course). Each year, MS can make around 33 billion US dollars off Office alone. Adobe PDF has become the most popular document viewing format on the web. Inserting this "Save to PDF" feature" will certainly help Microsoft to make more sales on Office 12. I am curious what will Adobe get out of this?

video.google is using Flash for the video previews. Very slick and fast. Great quality. Macromedia uses Sorenson Compression to handle all the video compressions in Flash. All you need is an up-to-date Flash Player to view Flash video. It is a more popular standard compare to Real Media, Quick Time or Microsoft ASF. Flash does have a limitation on maximum number of frames in one SWF file - 16000 frames. This is some what limiting video presentations when the file is exceeding the limit. However, Macromedia has introduced a new file time - *.flv which is fully supported by standard Flash players and dedicated for video delivery. Flash 8 has built-in FLV player component makes the authoring experience as easy as drag and drop.

Microsoft announced the "new weapon" in dot net based application creation - Sparkle. It is a Microsoft product for building Avalon user interfaces. It is aimed towards non-programmers using this tool to design media rich web or OS (Microsoft Windows series of course) based applications. Or looking at it from another angle, it can be used by "geeky" programmers to easily create applications with "cool" interfaces. Although this philosophy was first introduced by Macromedia products - Director and Flash, Sparkle still has many unique strength to compete (if they will compete) with the existing products. After watching the hourly long video on Sparkle, my first impression is it is still too early to compare Sparkle to Flash. However, what's worth to mention about Sparkle is it's easy data-binding and round trip XAML makes the final product more "searchable" by standard search engine. Flash contents not being indexable is the long known "fatal" problem and Sparkle may have a solution to this. However, in the short run (2-3) years, good luck to the Sparkle team to market this product. I simple can't see those hard core Flash developers will easily convert to this new application and not to mention, many of them are hard core Mac users too!

Using the hotel's business center or a public computer without the IM application and you have no right to install it? Sign in the a web interface and keep chatting with your buddies! Check out MEEBO.com and e-messenger.net, quite interesting web applications.

From GMail to GTalk? Lead by Georges Harik, Google recently launched the new product - Google Talk! What is it targeting? Instance Messaging market of course! When Google announced the 1G mail box, nobody expected the global Gmail registration fever. Now they are squeezing themselves into the crowded IM industry. According to the recent statistics, among the IM providers, AOL has 41.6 million members, Yahoo Messenger has 19.1 million and MSN has 14.1 users. However, there are constantly new IM products and service providers being established constantly. One of the well known is Skype. We have used the tool in our collaborated Pachyderm project developments many times and the quality was great. Skype is taking the market by its unique digital voice compression and IP to Phone features. Google Talk is certainly seeing this as a good idea to compete with the existing IM giants. The program is less than 1M and you can download it at: http://www.google.com/talk/. Since it is from Google, I'd say give it a try!

I wanted to write about BitFlux several months ago. I first heard this tool from a New Zealand friend - Brent Simpson. BitFlux is a browser (currently mozilla only) based WYSIWYG XML Editor. I know I know, there are lots of WYSIWYG editors out there. But what's worth to mention about BitFlux is that it allows editors to instantly edit any web pages at its EXACT look and feel. It is the really "What You See Is What You Get" editor. Here is how it works: you goto a website using a FireFox, and press "F7" to invoke BitFlux editor, then you will see all of the texts, links and images being outlined by dashed boxes. You can simply click on the boxes and change edit the components (type new text, change images, edit the links etc...).

The application is written in JavaScript and uses XML, XSLT, and CSS for rendering. It is usable with any XML document and features tables, lists, images, special chars, clipboard, undo/redo, and easy customization. I strongly recommend you try it out yourself and I guarantee you will be amazed of its functionality!

http://bitfluxeditor.org/

BitFlux Screen Capture